Linguistic templates and frame semantics for the study of noun compounds

The noun compounds are productive constructions in a variety of languages, but the study of this linguistic phenomenon is still a challenge, since these constructions are idiosyncratic. In this paper, we present a study of the semantics of noun compounds in English. We selected compounds formed by two nouns, noun-noun (NN) compounds, from a corpus of ten editions of the National Geographic magazine. The starting point for the analysis was the qualia structure from Pustejovsky (1995), since the roles such as constitutive, telic and agentive could be used to explain the relations between the nouns of a compound structure. In search of an approach with more possibilities of analysis, we got in contact with two cognitive studies, the linguistic templates by Ryder (1994) and the frame semantics by Fillmore (2006). The National Geographic magazine was chosen because it was also possible to find the same editions in Portuguese. Through the compilation of a parallel corpus, it was possible to identify the translation correspondent of each compound, which contributed to the analysis. Some of the most frequent semantic relations identified in the corpus are: SERVES TO, IS LOCATED IN, HAS, COMES FROM and OCCURS IN – TIME.