Bracketing paradox
This project investigates German noun phrases which exhibit seemingly non-compositional behavior.
German nominal compounds which are modified by an adjective can have an iconic (1) or an anti-iconic reading (2). Both constructions have the same syntactic bracketing (3), but differ in their semantic bracketing (4), which goes against Frege's Principle of Compositionality. The anti-iconic reading in (2) is refered to as a bracketing paradox.
- königliche Hochzeitsfeier
- königliche Hochzeitsfeier
- [adjective [noun noun]]
-
- Iconic reading: [adjective [noun noun]]
- Anti-iconic reading: [[adjective noun] noun]
In constructions composed of an adjective and a two-part nominal compound, the adjective is typically an attribute of the second noun:
- Leckeres Hundefutter → Futter
- Schneller Sportwagen → Wagen
There are many examples in the literature and a few in corpora in which the adjective is an attribute of the first noun:
- Vierstöckiger Hausbesitzer → Haus
- Namentliche Meldepflicht → Meldung
- Deutsche Sprachwissenschaft → Sprache
- psychologische Datenverarbeitung → Daten
Other cases are ambiguous:
- Evangelisches Pfarrerhaus
- Freie Handzeichnung
- saure Gurkenzeit
In addition to modeling the factors contributing to the bracketing paradox interpretation, the goal of this project is to create a database of bracketing paradox constructions.