A Construction Morphology Analysis of Old English Genuine and Pseudo Synthetic Nominal Compounds: Schema Unification and Motivation

The main goal of this study is twofold. The first goal is to provide a Construction Morphology (CxM) analysis of OE [N N] Synthetic Nominal Compounds ([N V SF/-Ø]N SNCs), which may exhibit two internal structures ([[N V]V SF]N vs. [N [V SF]N]N) similar to the SNCs in Present-day English (PDE). Within the theoretical framework of ‘Word-based’ CxM (Booij 2010, Booij and Audring 2018), this study claims that OE [N V SF/-Ø]N SNCs can be seen as constructions consisting of two schemas for [N V]V verbal compounds (VCs) and [V SF/-Ø]N deverbal nouns (DNs), and tha t the forma tion o f OE SNCs ca n be better understood by assuming that the two schemas can be unified into one abstract schema for OE SNCs ([[Ni Vj]Vk SF/-Ø]Nm ↔ [Entity/Action/Resultant with ARGUMENT relation to SEMk]m). The second goal is to propose that the four types of OE [[N V]V SF/-Ø]N SNCs classified in this study receive full motivation from the unified abstract schema for OE [[N V]V SF/-Ø]N SNCs, and that the four type SNCs receive partial and multiple motivation from the three schemas for DNs, VCs, and base verbs, with which the four type SNCs are paradigmatically and systematically connected. A CxM analysis of OE SNCs has two important advantages that the possibility of making a generalization of OE SNCs, and that the unnecessariness of determining one ‘correct’ internal structure between two plausible ones.