This book presents a typological survey and analysis of co-compounds (also known as dvandva, coordinating compounds, and pair words). Co-compounds are compounds whose meaning is the result of coordinating the meaning of its components, as when in some varieties of Indian English father-mother denotes ‘parents’. Like other tight patterns of coordination, such as bare binomials (e.g., bow and arrows), co-compounds typically express natural coordination, which implies that a close lexico-semantic relationship exists between the coordinands. The theoretical topics discussed in the book include the ... More

This book presents a typological survey and analysis of co-compounds (also known as dvandva, coordinating compounds, and pair words). Co-compounds are compounds whose meaning is the result of coordinating the meaning of its components, as when in some varieties of Indian English father-mother denotes ‘parents’. Like other tight patterns of coordination, such as bare binomials (e.g., bow and arrows), co-compounds typically express natural coordination, which implies that a close lexico-semantic relationship exists between the coordinands. The theoretical topics discussed in the book include the notion of word, markedness, the syntax and semantics of coordination, grammaticalization, lexical semantics, the distinction between compounding and phrase formation, and the constructional meanings language can deploy. Co-compounds in most languages are intermediate between words and phrases, which is why they are not considered to be only objects of morphology but are rather viewed as lexical classes, which, like grammatical classes, are language-specific functional-formal classes characterized by typical functional and formal properties. The specific cross-linguistically recurrent semantic types of co-compounds are described. Particular care is given to describing the contexts in which non-lexicalized co-compounds typically occur in original texts. In an areal-typological study based on parallel and original texts, it is shown that the frequency co-compounds in the languages of Eurasia is distributed in a highly structured way. Co-compounds are thus evidence for a great degree of areality among Eurasian languages.