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Compounding

Compounding is handled in a very similar way to derivation. The rightmost word class is always the resulting one. If it contains some derivation as well then the result is the word class that the derivation determines.

Examples:

  1. Hungarian is similar to German but we have a competence limit: we do not put together more then 2 nouns. These two words might be compounds as well but they must be lexicalized forms. So e.g.: rendo"regyenruha (police uniform) is valid since it is put together from rendo"r (police) and egyenruha (uniform) where rendo"r=rend (order) + o"r (guard) and egyenruha=egyen (uni) + ruha (clothes).

  2. Of course the situation is more complicated since nouns can be derived from verbs, adjectives or other nouns, and these derivations can be parts of compoundns: e.g. auto'buszmega'llo' (bus stop) where meg+a'll+o' is derived from the verb a'll (stand). Whereas mega'llo' is lexicalized so dictionaries might contain it, the morphological rule is productive so compounding works well for constructions like tandi'jbefizete's (paying the tution fee)= tan(tution)+ di'j(fee)+ be(in) +fizet(pay) +e's(ment).

  3. Compounding, such as derivation, will not be mirrorred in the MULTEXT format morphological analysis* a converter will produce an acceptable segmentation in the corpus. The word class (POS) for these compounds will be the word class of the resulting compounding (e.g. tandi'jbefizete's/N).



Tomaz Erjavec
Wed Oct 16 12:08:36 MDT 1996