Composita solvantur: Compounds as lexical units or morphological objects?

Which criteria can be invoked to identify compounds? This paper suggests a quadripartite approach which carefully distinguishes between compounds and phrases, by treating the properties of being a lexical unit and being the output of a morphological operation as independent. Elaborating on Bauer’s (2001) idea of formal isolation as a basic criterion for compoundhood, we emphasize the relevance of morphological activation. This is intended as the set of explicit properties which characterize compounds in morphological terms and are independent of their lexical status. Our quadripartite approach is able to show an intriguing convergence as for the morphological status of certain constructs, which cannot always be considered lexicalized, in three typologically and genetically different languages like Italian, Chinese and Modern Hebrew.