Compounds and Identity: A Cross-Linguistic Study of SELF-compounds

Abstract

The study concentrates on the positions of self, in which it fulfils the function of a reflexive marker, and primarily on compounds that have a ‘reflexive’ interpretation (self-control in English, Eigenlob/Selbstlob ‘self-praise’ in German, autodérision ‘self-derision’ in French, or önbecsülés ‘self-esteem’ in Hungarian). It examines reflexivization in English, Slovak, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Romanian, focusing on the role of the morpheme self- and its counterparts in these languages. As has been exemplified, the morpheme self- primarily attaches to nouns but to adjectives and verbs as well, and it indicates a reflexive interpretation for these forms. The thesis concentrates on the morphosyntactic properties of SELF-compounds in the above mentioned languages and aims to find out whether it is possible to identify similar or identical strategies of reflexivization on the lexical level as on the syntactic one. The dissertation approaches these compounds from various aspects, and examines the observations that have been stated in former studies (König 2011, Di Sciullo (1996), Artemis Alexiadou (2014)) about the English reflexive nominal compounds in six further languages. Taking into consideration these observations seven hypotheses have been stated and verified within the analysis. This study combines, in essence, two methods, while both of them concentrate on language comparison. Contrastive linguistics and linguistic typology represent similar approaches towards languages, and the work uses elements from both.