Modes of Compounding in Bantu, Romance and Chinese

This article presents a cross-linguistic survey of endocentric root NN and exocentric VN compounds in a set of typologically and historically unrelated languages, with a special focus on Bemba (Bantu), Italian (Romance) and Mandarin Chinese. The aim of the paper is twofold. From an empirical viewpoint, we intend to offer a contrastive analysis of comparable phenomena in a word-formation domain which has been neglected, especially in Bemba and to a lesser extent in Romance. Our study uncovers striking similarities between Bantu and Romance, hence reinforcing a connection independently established in other morpho-syntactic domains. Conversely, Mandarin strongly contrasts with Bantu and Romance and has more affinities with Germanic languages, in particular in the formation of NN compounds. From a theoretical perspective, the overall picture of compounding emerging from our descriptive account strongly challenges a ?protolinguistic? (or syntax-free) view of these phenomena (contra Jackendoff and Progovac). Our cross-linguistic study reveals a number of empirical facts pointing to an underlying ?syntax? of compounding both in the domain of NN and VN compounds, and shows that such underlying morpho-syntactic principles can be held responsible for the range of variation attested among these languages.