The Missing Text Phenomenon, Again: the case of Compound Nominals

Note: The literature on ‘compound nominals’ is immense, and you will find the same phenomenon (which we will describe shortly) discussed under the label ‘compound nominals’ or ‘nominal compounds’. To decide which one to use here I consulted Google. The phrase ‘nominal compounds’ resulted in 21,900,000 results while the phrase ‘compound nominals’ resulted in 44,200,000 results (almost exactly double) — so, I will stick with ‘nominal compounds’.

What are Nominal Compounds and why they Matter?

In simple words, a nominal compound (henceforth, NC) is 0 or more adjectives followed by 1 or more nouns. You can think of it as some subject or topic of discussion (semantically, an entity) that can fill some ‘slot’ in a larger discourse (subject, agent, location, theme, etc.) So while I can discuss a certain ‘system’ I can also discuss a ‘computer system’ and I can further discuss a ‘distributed computer system’, and even an ‘advanced distributed computer system’, etc. So I can always qualify the head noun by using other nouns and adjectives. (I’m not sure if there’s any psycholinguistic research that did some experiments on our tolerance regarding the length of the nominal compound; personally, 4 is my limit and so something as long as ‘antique home furniture store’ is just about all I…