Reviewed by Karen Steffen Chung, National Taiwan University

In this dissertation-based study, Benczes asks and attempts to answer questions like how we can, in the right context, understand that land fishing means ‘metal detecting’, and has nothing to do with what we normally understand as fishing. The answer, B claims, lies in our extensive use of metaphor and metonymy when we create new noun compounds. This also explains why such compounds have often been considered exceptional or idiosyncratic in many previous analyses. B’s main thesis is that compounds like these are not exceptional but are in fact as analyzable as other compound types. Their main distinguishing feature is not a lack of transparency, but rather creativity, especially when compared to straightforward endocentric compounds such as apple tree. According to B, ‘creativity’ involves the use of novel figures of speech, particularly, in the case of noun-noun compounds, metaphor and metonymy, in contrast to the generativist definition of ‘creativity’ as a simple stringing together of the components of a sentence (7).

B compiled her database of seventy-eight novel noun-noun compounds from works such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the online dictionary of neologisms, Word Spy. B says that speakers do not coin new noun-noun compounds to enlarge the existing vocabulary of their language, but to fill a specific communication need in an effective and economical way (30). Through this work the reader will experience the sheer joy and fun people have with their language when they coin a new compound. A representative example is bar-code hairstyle (110), which came into English from the Japanese; it refers to a comb-over on a balding man.

B surveys the views of a number of different writers on exactly what is meant by ‘exocentric’ compounds. Leonard Bloomfield includes metonymic (e.g. phone neck ‘a sore neck resulting from too much time on the phone’) and combined metaphorical-metonymic ones (e.g. bell-bottoms), but not purely metaphorical ones like beanpole. Because B includes purely metaphorical compounds, she rejects the term ‘exocentric’ altogether (183), feeling it comprises too inclusive a continuum of noun-noun compound types, and thus becomes difficult to define precisely. In my view, however, exocentric compounds can be unambiguously defined morphosyntactically: they are noun compounds in which the nominal head does not appear, for example, pickpocket ‘one who picks pockets’, and a carrot top ‘one who has red hair’. Beanpole, by contrast, identifies a person directly with a beanpole, and it does have a head, namely pole, although the compound as a whole uses a symbol to stand in for the referent, in this case, ‘a very thin person’.

There are a few dozen minor errata in the text, but otherwise the English is clear and flows well. B’s study is valuable both for its fresh approach and findings, and also for the contribution it makes to stimulating further research interest in morphology and compounding.