Slang compounds as one case of morphological complexity

The phenomenon of compounding offers an interesting case study for the interaction of the lexicon with semantics and morphology. More precisely, compounding in English slang is thought to be a highly relevant phenomenon for an illustration of both morphosemantic complexity (i.e. semantic non-compositionality of the constituent parts) and morphotactic complexity (i.e. morphological non-constituency, or difficulty in identifying these constituent parts at all). In the present paper an attempt is made to apply the notion of language complexity, as developed by Merlini Barbaresi (this volume), to be intended here in terms of non-transparency, which implies greater effort in processing and decoding the linguistic sign. In this paper, the parameter of morphological transparency will be used to explore how English slang compounds, as a rule, sacrifice morphological transparency in favour of multilevel opacity. First, a few interpretations of prototypical compounds will be provided in order to obtain some definitional criteria for the very phenomenon of composition. Secondly, a set of representative candidates – namely, compounds taken from slang dictionaries (either on-line or paper dictionaries) – will be selected as predictable cases of morphological complexity. Thirdly, these candidates will be examined from the perspective of their morpho-semantic and -tactic non-transparency, in a broad sense, difficulty of perception, or otherwise opacifying obstruction to recognition. Last but not least, a subset of these candidates will be reconsidered from the perspective of their productivity, viz. their attested regularity and potential for becoming accepted models in the creation of novel slang compounds. Interestingly, this subclass of compounds will turn out to be the most complicated case of classification within the framework of morphological complexity