Exocentric compound words and their usage in Southern African Newspapers

Abstract

This research contributes to an understanding of exocentricity phenomenon by using a constituent-entity approach to illuminate relations that hold between compound constituents and compound entities. Despite the growing literature in compounding research, there has been relatively little discussion of exocentric compounding in media context. Past research has focussed almost on endocentric compound words in literary works and/or morphological databases. This study addresses this gap by examining usage of exocentric compound words in Southern African newspapers. More specifically, it provides insights into various relations between compound constituents and entities of exocentric compound words in which such constituents appear. By considering exocentric constituents and media context, the study speaks to calls to account for insufficient framework for analysis of exocentric compound words. Such calls emerge from the views that exocentric compound words are considered out-centred and idiomatic and could be analysed by employing metaphor, metonymy analytical tools. This study argues that interpretation of exocentric compound words depend on the features of individual compound constituents, a situation that ascertains direct relationship between an exocentric compound word and the entity that it is used to refer to. Data for this study were collected from four quality English newspapers published in Lesotho and South Africa and circulated in Lesotho after 1993, a year that brought with it freedom of expression and freedom of media (Matjama (1997). The primary contribution of this study to the literature on exocentric compounding is a WordNet Similarity framework. This framework offers an exhaustive picture of constituent-entity relations. It displays how and why other senses of compound entities are chosen over others to form the compound words. 15 The study contributes to the literature by identifying 43 constituent-entity relations, various structures of exocentric compound neologisms and their different patterns. It also demonstrates contribution of context in analysing absolute categorical exocentric compound words. Importantly, the findings presented in this thesis demonstrate productiveness of constituent-context analysis approach in exocentric compounding.