Binominals denoting instruments: a contrastive perspective

P. 277–302.

Naccarato C., Huang S.

This chapter presents a contrastive analysis of complex nominals denoting instruments within the semantic field of cooking in four languages: Italian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese. The study takes an onomasiological perspective to word formation with an aim to detect the morphosyntactic strategies adopted by the four languages to express the same concepts. Based on data from a corpus of cooking recipes created ad hoc for this investigation, we classify complex nominals denoting instruments by employing the analytical tools of the onomasiological theory of word formation. The results of our analysis show that there is a correlation between onomasiological type and type of cooking instrument. The onomasiological type to which binominals belong is most frequently associated with instruments for serving food, in which the semantic relation between the two constituents is one of purpose. As for the morphosyntactic strategies employed, we found that Italian and Russian binominals are the result of derivation and adjectival or prepositional constructions, whereas Mandarin Chinese and Japanese use noun-noun compounding. Japanese frequently employs loanwords, which sometimes compete with compounds based on native or hybrid material.

Keywords: word formation, language typology, Binominal lexemes, Complex lexemes, Instrument nouns

Publication based on the results of: Systematic language convergence in a typological perspective (2023)

In book

Binominal Lexemes in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Towards a Typology of Complex Lexemes

Issue 62: Binominal Lexemes in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Towards a Typology of Complex Lexemes. , Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2023.