The role of second order schemas in the construction of complex words

Morphology is the study of the systematic relationship between the form and meaning of complex words. Therefore, it is a central task of morphology to provide a proper account of how the meanings of complex words are computed. One straightforward approach would be to assume that the computation of complex words is ruled by Fregean compositionality. The latter, however, has been claimed to be too narrow, since both syntactic and morphological constructions may exhibit specific holistic semantic properties that cannot be derived from their constituents or from general patterns of combination (Booij 2010; Goldberg 1995, 2006; Jackendoff 2013). In the article we address a related problem, i.e. the fact that the meaning of a complex word may derive from that of another linguistic construct (be it a word or a phrase) that is not a building block of that complex word. We illustrate this point by providing data from different languages and we claim that this type of violation of Fregean compositionality can be accounted for by means of “second order schemas”, i.e. sets of two or more paradigmatically related constructional schemas