Compounding at the interfaces

In this paper, we concentrate on compounds formed with two nouns (NN compounds, or, in the English morphological tradition, root compounds) and we argue that, against what has been generally claimed in the morphological studies, their properties are fully reducible to syntax and can be explained by the need to satisfy general conditions defined within the computational system and clearly related to Kayne’s LCA. Our study compares NN compounds in Germanic and Romance languages in order to show (i) that compounding corresponds to a specific mode of syntactic computation (Compound Phase), whereby the two constituents that undergo ‘Merge’ are too ‘parallel’ for one of them to be able to project its label and (ii) that the differences between these two families of languages, and, within each language, the differences between compounds and prototypical syntactic constructions, follow from the syntax of compound phases plus independent properties of the lexical items involved in the computation (the compound members)