How Do We Stack Up Our Nouns? Compound Nouns

How do we put words together to build more complex noun phrases? What do the structures of sentences and noun phrases have in common? In this week's episode, we talk about compound nouns: what they look and sound like, how big we can make them, and how they can let us delve into some deeper questions about syntax.
This is Topic #76!
This week's tag language: Polish!
Related episodes:
Goldilocks and the Three Nouns: Theta Roles - • Theta Roles
Some Assembly Required: Derivational and Inflectional Morphology - • What Kinds of Pieces D...
Last episode:
Topic of Focus: Information Structure - • How Do We Signal What'...
Other of our morphosyntax videos:
Up, Up, and Away: the Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis - • Where Do Subjects Star...
Desert Island Words: Syntactic Islands - • What Questions Can't W...
Organizing Meanings: Morphological Typology - • Systems of Morphemes
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Sources:
Most of the information for this episode came from Mark Baker and Jonathan Bobaljik's textbook on morphology.
See you all in two weeks!

[@KJYKJY1985]

Roof pizza? Chicken brothers? Walter's problem management? Someone's a _Breaking Bad_ fan.

[@thelingspace]

Yep, not gonna argue with that. ^_^

[@Visranda]

Cool!

[@Mountainssk]

Lovely stuff, may I suggest a video on corpus linguistics and what comes with it: collocation, chunks, etc. Please!

[@thelingspace]

Yep, that is a good suggestion! I will add it to our topic list. Thanks! ^_^

[@InshruTripathi]

So.. Rosemary's Baby= has Ms. Rose as an agent? And what was theta role again?

[@GordonHugenay]

has this Shane Turner composed the outro-music by him/herself? I really like it.

[@thelingspace]

Yep, he put it together! I'll pass this along to him. Thanks for the comment! ^_^

[@sugarfrosted2005]

So that explains in part why German orthography writes all compound nouns as compound nouns. (The stress, I mean)

[@Pakanahymni]

The audio was right channel heavy until around 2:30 when the balance somehow got fixed... or am I imagining?

[@thelingspace]

Hmmm! Now that you mention it, I am going back and looking at the waveforms, and it does seem to be the case that it is a bit unbalanced, although we didn't change anything about the mic placement or sound processing at any point in the filming, so it is odd that that happened. I'll keep an eye on this for the future.

[@Pakanahymni]

The Ling Space Ha! I knew I could trust my ears.

[@cholten99]

It would be fascinating to know whether knowing these kind of rules for different languages helps with machine translation.

[@JayFolipurba]

From the future here. The answer is, I think so? Computers have gotten really good at guessing what comes next when constructing a sentence. So good in fact it works in reverse, changing earlier words to make them fit with what the computer wants to say later.

[@robert_wigh]

Greenlandic! A very interesting language indeed. Moti, I have a question for you: which is the longest compound word in the world?

[@florsafatle]

A German one for sure :p

[@frankharr9466]

8:09, so it's OV?

[@nex]

That was veryinsightful and mucheducational. Btw., my dictionary tells me that the 'fahrt' in 'dampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft' (actually 'dampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft' in contemporary orthography, of course) is more 'voyage' than 'driving'. A proper translation should take into account that the necessity of steering the vessels is only incidental to the actual purpose of the organisation: getting people to places.

[@JayFolipurba]

wait really? we dropped the triple F?

[@nex]

​@JayFolipurba I meant 'contemporay' as in: back in the day when the Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft was an actual thing. I guess the idea was that adding the third F does nothing, so why not skip it. (The exception was that when hyphenating for a line break, it became Schiff-fahrt again.) In modern orthography, it's Schifffahrt with three Fs, as one would expect. Therefore I spelled it that way, but then wanted to explain why it's spelled differently in the video :)

[@JayFolipurba]

Alter 7 Jahre einfach her@@nex

[@NiallOhArailt]

An-Swagáil e sin. That's pretty Swaggin.

[@Slevana5]

Roof pizza? Is that a reference to Breaking Bad I see :P

[@77dreimaldie0]

Just as the Chicken Brothers

[@earlwashburn1002]

Breaking bad references!

[@sugarfrosted2005]

What do the classical elements have to do with breaking bad? I mean to be fair Ling Space is the breaking bad of linguistic educational videos on youtube.

[@Im_Just_A_Dreamer]

Instead of "bathtub leak", I would simply say "tub leak". It's simpler, more elegant and more natural-sounding.

[@thelingspace]

And it's still a compound! But yeah, there are a lot of potential variations there. It's interesting lexical variation, though - I don't think I'd say just "tub", really. But it works either way!

[@atomnous]

TheLegendaryDreamer2 Or tubby leak. XD

[@wilfredhather]

Interesting episode. I think it would be good if you compared between languages in each episode, instead of focusing on English.

[@thelingspace]

Yeah, we do try to use examples from other languages, as well! The next couple of episodes, we'll definitely have a bunch of examples from other languages, too. But we'll try to fit in more more regularly, too. Thanks! ^_^

[@wilfredhather]

The Ling Space Cool! Its interesting to see how languages can do things completely differently.

[@soywaz6645]

I don't like English and its compound nouns. They don't sound like they make sense. "Roof pizza"

[@thelingspace]

Admittedly, that one is a bit weirder, but I think it's important to put these out there, because it's so productive. Even if it's not immediately apparent what it is, it's usually not that hard to work out. And while I think it's definitely fair to knock English for this, compounding is really common across a wide variety of languages - it's a basic word-building tool. And so you can find similarly weird compounds in typologically different languages. Japanese can be just as productive on this point as English is. ^_^

[@elderscrollsswimmer4833]

Roof pizza... someone eats this particular type of pizza on s roof or in celebration of putting up the roof in some building; the pizza looks like a roof; it has roof tiles as filling...