Variation between endocentric and exocentric word structures

This paper reports on the discovery of a new type of exocentric word structure in Japanese which consists of two “dependent” (rather than “head”) elements and whose category is determined by the collaboration of the category features of the two dependents in conjunction with their internal semantic relationship. A representative example is huto-ppara lit. ‘fat stomach/big heart’, which semantically denotes the subjectʹs property of being big-hearted or generous rather than the physical entity ‘stomach, heart’, and which bears the lexical category of Adjectival Noun [AN], corresponding neither to the Adjective category of huto- ‘fat, big’ nor to the Noun category of -ppara [variant of hara] ‘stomach, heart’. This is entirely distinct from the familiar types of metaphor- and metonymy-based exocentric compounds like redhead and pickpocket, which are always nouns. In analyzing the novel type of Japanese compound, a mechanism called “bilateral category projection” is proposed, which fuses together the category features of the two dependent constituents by invoking their semantic structure. The assignment of a category to the new type of exocentric compound thus requires simultaneous reference to both morphological and semantic structure. This analysis lends support to the “parallel-representation” model of grammar in which form and meaning are represented separately but work in tandem with each other to determine the grammaticality of a given expression (Jackendoff, 2002; Kageyama, 1996; Ackema and Neeleman, 2004).