Categorization of Hyphenated Noun-Adjective and Adjective-Adjective Compounds in English: A Semantic Study of Word Complexing
Jianning Wang, Yasir Azam, Hicham Lahlou · Forum for Linguistic Studies · 2025
Despite their prevalence, internal semantic relations within English compound adjectives remain a relatively underexplored area in compounding research. This research aims to enhance our understanding of hyphenated Noun-Adjective compounds (hereinafter referred to as “HNAC”) and hyphenated Adjective-Adjective compounds (hereinafter referred to as “HAAC”) by revealing the patterns of internal semantic relations between the constituents of compounds. The HNAC and HAAC types of compound adjectives share common structural and semantic features. The existing categorizations of compound adjectives often rely on concepts such as subordinative, attributive, coordinative and copulative. Similarly, analyses of sense relations within compound adjectives frequently employ these same notions. This study integrates empirical data with systemic functional theories to elucidate the semantics of HNAC and HAAC, offering a complementary perspective. The dataset, comprising 716 HNACs and HAACs sourced from the online Oxford English Dictionary, is treated as a collection of word complexes. Drawing on the ideational metafunction and the model of taxis and logico-semantic relation of expansion within Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study investigates the internal semantic relations between the constituents of HNAC and HAAC. Data analysis results in the categorization of HNAC and HAAC into five prototypical types: hypotactic-elaborating compound, hypotactic-enhancing compound, paratactic-elaborating compound, paratactic-extending compound, and paratactic-enhancing compound. Furthermore, fourteen common patterns of internal semantic relations between the constituents of HNAC and HAAC are generalized using the theories of taxis and expansion. The findings demonstrate that the systemic functional theories provide a valuable framework for describing the morphological and semantic features of HNAC and HAAC.