Synthetic compounds in Polish. Formal analysis

The present monograph discusses synthetic compound nouns in Polish. The term synthetic is used to refer to a morphological construct being a com-bination of two roots subjected to derivation (suffixation) or paradigmatic conversion, such as linoskoczek (N-V-Af), gryzipiórek (V-N-Af), sprośnomówca (Adv-V-Af), drzewołaz (N-V-Ø), łamistrajk (V-N-Ø), and darmozjad (Adv-V-Ø). The aim of the study is to describe the linear and hierarchical morphological structure of Polish synthetic compounds, the mechanism of morphosyntactic feature assignment and the process of argument structure encoding.
Chapter I focuses on the relationship of the theory of compounding and the issue of the morphology-syntax interface. We build up a detailed morpho-logical profile of a synthetic compound noun, accentuating its left-branching structure. Chapter II elaborates upon the problem of the morphology-syntax interface in the domain of word-formation and argues against the right-branching interpretation of the morphological structure of Polish deverbal compounds. In addition, it lays out the principles for the mechanics of the morphosyntactic feature percolation and argument assignment. Chapter III presents a morphosemantic study of synthetic deverbal compound nouns in Polish. Our goal was to design a unified morphosemantic representation which would show the process of morphosyntactic feature percolation as well as the assignment of the argument structure operating in a left-branching structure of a synthetic compound.
In our analysis, we draw on a revised version of LIH, i.e. Lieber and Scalise’s (2007) Firewall Theory, which belongs to the current of the so-called mixed models of word-formation advanced in the recent years by, for instance, Ackema and Neeleman (2004), Lieber and Scalise (2007), and Pafel (2017) which allows for a limited intermodular interaction of morphological and syntactic domains.