Propane Stoves and Gas Lamps: How the Concept Hierarchy Influences the Interpretation of Noun-Noun Compounds

When people understand noun-noun compounds such as kitchen mirror they generate a relationship between the two constituent nouns, combining them together in a new concept. How do people determine or construct the correct relational link between the constituents? In our first experiment, we present evidence against one approach to noun-noun compounds, namely that of specifying the meaning of a compound with a single relation from a small taxonomy of general semantic relations. We found that people often select not one but several relations in the taxonomy for each compound meaning; for example, people classify coffee stain (meaning “a stain caused by the spilling of coffee”) as stain MADE OF coffee, coffee MAKES stain, stain BY coffee, coffee CAUSES stain and stain DERIVED FROM coffee. We also found that compounds which had similar constituent concepts tended to be classified into similar relations. Our second experiment examines the role of the constituent concepts in determining the correct relation directly: again similar constituent concepts give rise to similar interpretations. Also, the results show that the constituent concepts’ position in the conceptual hierarchy tends to influence interpretation: for example the compounds propane stove and gas lamp, which have conceptually similar constituents, tend to be interpreted in very similar ways.