Compound Adjectives in English

Compound adjectives - despite representing a dynamic and far from marginal phenomenon in the English compositional system - have been often devoted little attention in morphological studies compared to the much-debated and widely investigated class of nominal compounds. Both the scanty quantity of studies on the subject and the high morphological vitality of certain combinatory patterns encouraged a deeper analysis, which resulted in a text proposing an exhaustive description and classification of this multifaceted phenomenon in a morphological and semantic perspective. In such context, the book aims at investigating more general issues emerging from the analysis, such as compoundhood in relation to the concept of headedness, productivity and restriction on productivity. The work also addresses the functional notions of adjectivehood, prototipicality and lexicalization, as essential to better understand the nature and behaviour of these formations, as well as to determine criteria for their classification. The book can be viewed as an overview of an interesting linguistic phenomenon lending itself to further insights, ranging from the textual to the phonological dimension.