Towards a constructionist analysis of deverbal adjectival compounds in OE

Abstract

Our main aim in this paper is to put forward a comprehensive syntactico-semantic analysisof deverbal adjectival compounds in OE. Building upon work by Domínguez Barragán &Novo Urraca (2016), and drawing on data from the ParCorOEv2 parallel corpus (Martín Aristaet al. 2021), we will explore in some detail the main different types of semantic relationsbetween determinant and determinatum in the following two patterns: Noun/Adjective +Present participle and Noun/Adjective + Past participle. In (1) and (2) we illustrate some of thedifferent semantic types that each pattern comprises (see Kastovsky, 1992, pp. 373–374):(1) hunigflōwende ‘flowing with honey’; ealodrincende ‘beer-drinking’; bencsittende ‘sitting on abench’; lindwīgende ‘fighting with a shield’; rihtfremmende ‘acting rightly’.(2) ceorlboren ‘low-born’; bēaghroden ‘adorned with rings’; ǣhtboren ‘born in bondage’;ǣwumboren ‘legally born’; healfbrocen ‘half-broken’.In Construction Morphology (CM), where “abstract schemas and individual schemasof those instances coexist” (Booij, 2009, p. 206), the schema in (3) generalizes over the classof right-headed compounds in Germanic languages (Booij, 2010, p. 95):(3) [Xi Yj]Yk ↔ [SEMj with some relation R to SEMi]kThe NOUN/ADJECTIVE PRESENT PARTICIPLE COMPOUND construction and theNOUN/ADJECTIVE PAST PARTICIPLE COMPOUND construction illustrated in (1) and (2)would instantiate two different subpatterns of this general schema (see Hilpert, 2014, p. 93).At a lower level of abstraction, the specific meaning of the subclass of compounds with theform [[XN] [boren]PastP]A (as in ceorlboren, pegnboren or cifesboren) can be represented by thetemplate in (4), a constructional idiom whose head is lexically specified:(4) [[XN] [boren]pp]A – ‘born with the legal status of an X’Adopting Booij’s (2009, 2010) constructionist model will enable us to specify thesemantic relations existing between the two parts of these adjectival “verbal-nexuscombinations” (Marchand, 1969, p. 17) at different levels of abstraction, thus refining andenriching previous classifications of OE adjectival compounds in the literature.