Conceptual Combination

Types of Combinations

Cognitive psychologists and linguists have studied how people interpret noun-noun combinations. Although there are a great many ways that people interpret noun-noun combinations, there is consensus among researchers that there are three general types of interpretations: relation, property, and hybrid. A relation interpretation involves a relation between two nouns. For example, a person might interpret robin hawk as a “hawk that preys on robins.” In this case, the robin and hawk play different roles in the relation. The hawk plays the role of a predator and the robin plays the role of the prey. A property interpretation involves attributing a property of the modifier to the head noun. For example, a “frog squirrel” could be interpreted as “a squirrel that hops” (inheriting the property of hopping from frog). A hybrid interpretation refers to a mixture of the modifier and the head noun, as in “cow horse” or a cross between cow and a horse.

Interpreting Combinations

Three types of combinations have been identified. But how does a person determine a plausible meaning? One strategy is to interpret the combination based on context. For example, an author of a magazine might refer to a “scorpion fly” and describe its meaning as a “fly that has a tail similar to a scorpion.” In this case, the author is describing [Page 180]a property interpretation. A person familiar with a scorpion then can easily interpret the meaning of scorpion fly. However, unpublished research in Ed Wisniewski's laboratory suggests that often there is not much explicit context provided for the reader. Instead, a person often must determine the meaning or the interpretation of the combination from the two nouns. According to Greg Murphy, people, in many cases, rely on their background knowledge to interpret meanings of combinations. For example, a reporter for a newspaper might refer to a novel combination such as “lima bean casserole” without describing its meaning. However, even if a person may have never heard of lima bean casserole, most people are likely to interpret the combination as “a casserole made of lima beans” (a relation interpretation). For example, most people know that lima beans are food, that casseroles are baked, and so on. They use their background knowledge of the words to determine the meaning of the combination.

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