Definition

In order to define what an adjectival compound is, it is important to understand first compounding as a linguistic phenomenon. Compounding is a word-formation process, which as Bauer puts it involves "the formation of a new lexeme by adjoining two or more lexemes." Having this straightforward definition in mind, the definition of adjectival compounds can be easily derived. Adjectival compounds are made up of a combination of two or more lexical items that form a new lexeme, which as a whole has a modifying function. In some languages, however, like Bulgarian, the constituent elements of the compound may not always be free-standing words but rather roots or stems. Here are two instances of ACs in English and Bulgarian:
red-brick
[[red]A[brick]N]A; red-brickfunctions as one word and modifies the noun house
house and
висококачествен
'of high quality'; [[висок]A[качество]N-[ен]suffix]A the whole compound висококачествен modifies the noun product
продукт
'product'
.

Status of ACs in linguistics

Adjectival compounds have been widely neglected as a subclass of compounds and many aspects such as their internal structure and features have been left unanalysed. This is probably motivated by the fact that adjectival compounds have
diverse internal structural patterns
N+V-ing, N+A, A+A, A+V-ed, A+N, Adv.+A, etc.
, which can sometimes be confused with free combination of lexemes. Another motivation could be the fact that it is not clear whether ACs should be analysed from a transformational or purely lexical perspective. Lees(1960), one of the greatest contributors to transformational grammar and compounding, argues that the structure of compounds is related to a structure of an underlying sentence which has undergone a number of transformations. In support to Lees' transformational method, Meys(1975:80) claims that: "No surface structure classification of compound adjectives is possible without a preceding (implicit or explicit ) analysis which is based on their underlying structure" and provides a tree-based representation of the deep structure transformations. There are cases, however, in which the deep structure can be restored only if other content words are added like in
ten-floor building
'a building which has ten floors'; the verb is not preserved in the surface structure
. In opposition to Lees' transformational method, scholars like Allen and Levi suggest that the transformational theory truly describes the relationships between the constituent elements. Yet, these transformations remove content elements that cannot be recovered(Lieber & Stekauer 2009: 73). For this reason, the compound constituents should be classified according to their lexical classes on the surface structure rather than on the deep structure. This lexical approach, however, seems to be problematic when it comes to English ACs in which the second constituent is a derived adjective. For example, the word 'lion-hearted' is not made up of noun + adjective constituents (N+A) because 'hearted' neither exists as a stand-alone adjective, nor can the word be analysed as a derivational compound (lion heart + ed) given that 'lion heart' is not a compound.
This research unit makes use of both methods by analysing the lexical classes that constitute the ACs in English and Bulgarian and by examining the syntactic relations existing between the compound constituents in an attempt to find structure similarities between the target languages.