Synthetic compounding: a syntactic or morphological processing? A corpus-based study

The present article studies the structure of synthetic compounding to discover the process or processes participating in making this productive category. Synthetic compounding composed of incorporation of argument, adjunct, adjective or syntactic phrases into verb stem and syntactic head of this structure derived from verb. Comparing the synthetic compounding data of this article amounting of 8481 with the root compounding data of Khabbaz (1385) with 3974 cases, both have been elicited from Soxan dictionary of Anvari (1386), shows that this category is two times more productive than root compounding. The investigating of syntactic and morphological properties of synthetic compounding indicates that it cannot be merely syntactic or morphological process. Studying synthetic compound words according to morphological and syntactic criteria (non-pronominal reference, word formation process, irregularity, recursiveness, constituent structure, constituents’ relations, coordination and gaping, wh-word, productivity, aspect, morphological and syntactic integration, constituent expandability and non-expandability, semantic opacity and transparency) demonstrates that synthetic compounding is a morpho-syntactic process in Persian which possesses more syntactic characteristics. Moreover, inflectional morphemes can be attached to the whole compounds or the first constituents, transparent, opaque, expandable and nonexpendable compounds prove that this category behaves the same as both morphological and syntactic structures simultaneously.