IS A Condition

IS A Condition is a condition proposed by Allen (1978) to express two salient facts about compounds: (a) the syntactic category of a compound is determined by its rightmost member, (b) the meaning of a compound is contained in the meaning of its rightmost member.

Example

the English compound houseboat is a noun as is boat, and a houseboat is a kind of boat. The Is A Condition is the predecessor of Williams' (1981a) Righthand Head Rule.

Link

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

References

• Allen, M.R. 1978. Morphological Investigations, PhD diss. Univ. of Connecticut.
• Williams, E. 1981a. On the notions 'Lexically Related' and 'Head of a Word', Linguistic Inquiry 12, pp. 245-274