Compound Nouns in Specialised Language : A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective on English and Bulgarian Tourism Terms

Compounds have logically attracted the unfailing interest of linguists because they are forms that combine two or more parts into a semantic whole without any grammatical indication as to their relation or the manner in which it has occurred. The dynamic nature of frames and their elements makes them particularly suitable for the description of the intriguing semantics of compounds and related structures. In this book, the meaning construction of English and Bulgarian compound nouns in the language of tourism and hospitality is explored from the perspective of frame semantics and the theories of constructions, schemas, semantic niches, metaphor and metonymy. A new model of analysis is proposed: a model of inter-frame interaction, with two sub-models, of vertical and horizontal interaction. The effect of the type and scope of reference of the compound components is discussed and illustrated both with frames and with relation-thing clines where compounds are arranged depending on the predominant relational or object-specific characteristics in their semantics. The division of the compounds into onomasiological categories facilitates their comparative analysis and highlights the salient contiguity relations that give rise to the members of each category. The patterns of their formation are generalised under schemas of different degrees of abstraction. The frequency of instantiation of these schemas leads to conclusions about the predominant elements in the semantics of the constructions and the productivity of particular patterns.