Bracketing paradox

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This project investigates German noun phrases which exhibit seemingly non-compositional behavior.

German nominal compounds which are modified by an adjective can have an iconic (1) or an anti-iconic reading (2). Both constructions have the same syntactic bracketing (3), but differ in their semantic bracketing (4), which goes against Frege's Principle of Compositionality. The anti-iconic reading in (2) is refered to as a bracketing paradox.

  1. königliche Hochzeitsfeier
  2. königliche Hochzeitsfeier
  3. [adjective [noun noun]]
    1. Iconic reading: [adjective [noun noun]]
    2. Anti-iconic reading: [[adjective noun] noun]

In constructions composed of an adjective and a two-part nominal compound, the adjective is typically an attribute of the second noun:

  1. Leckeres Hundefutter > Futter
  2. Schneller Sportwagen > Wagen

There are many examples in the literature and a few in corpora in which the adjective is an attribute of the first noun:

  1. Vierstöckiger Hausbesitzer > Haus
  2. Namentliche Meldepflicht > Meldung
  3. Deutsche Sprachwissenschaft > Sprache
  4. psychologische Datenverarbeitung > Daten

Other cases are ambiguous:

  1. Evangelisches Pfarrerhaus
  2. Freie Handzeichnung
  3. saure Gurkenzeit

In addition to modeling the factors contributing to the bracketing paradox interpretation, the goal of this project is to create a database of bracketing paradox constructions.