Morphological structure and semantic classification of Noun + Noun compounds

Abstract

Few studies have been conducted on compounds in Tshivenḓda and in the field of African languages of South Africa. This is partly because of the absence of significant methodological guidelines underlying such research. The objective of this article is to establish a quantitative database to formularize an acceptable structure for the Tshivenḓda compound noun, such as the one formed by Noun + Noun, in particular the compound formed by two non-derived nouns. The structure that will be represented for this type of compound will be defended with various arguments, which will take the typical structure of nouns into account. The analysis is based on Selkirk's (1982) theory of context-free morphology and Di Sciullo and Williams' (1987) Left Hand Head Rule theory, as well as the X-Bar and Theta theories. Attention is also given to a semantic classification of the compound nouns.