The morphological origins and semantic diversity of English compound verbs

Abstract

English compound verbs are said to result predominantly from a morphological operation of conversion or desuffixation or, more rarely and ‘directly’, from an operation of compounding. In order to confirm the existence of ‘direct’ compound verbs in contemporary English and assess their relative weight among all compound verbs, a sample set of 250 units was obtained by automatically extracting recent verbal units containing a hyphen from the Oxford English Dictionary. Their dates of first attestation were then compared with those of similar nominal units, and those verbal units that were not clearly preceded by nominal occurrences were considered likely ‘direct’ compounds. They appear to constitute a sizable minority of the sample (almost one-fifth of all units). In a second step, in order to gain insight into the variety and quantitative distribution of the semantic relations attested in the sample, the internal semantic relation of each unit was established, applying, where possible, Pepper’s (2023) list of relations originally developed for binominal units. This showed that the verbal nature of the compounds leads to the presence of two additional, specific relations, MANNER and ATTRIBUTION, and that the morphological origin of the compound verb has an influence on the dominant categories of internal relations.