Pseudo-Synthetic Compounds in Korean Sign Language

A type of compound words known as the synthetic compound are often found in languages that have derivational affixes. In this paper, we report that Korean Sign Language (KSL), even though it does not have a derivational affix like -er, has compound words that can be considered “synthetic”, such as TRUCK DRIVE PERSON which corresponds to truck driver in English. We claim that these compound words are in fact KSL equivalents to synthetic compounds because they not only have a word-like status but also show the essential properties typically exhibited by synthetic compounds in a language like English. We then propose an analysis of the KSL equivalents to the synthetic compound, claiming that their derivation involves pseudo-incorporation in the sense of Chung and Ladusaw (2004) as well as a specific type of Voice head adapted from Baker and Vinokurova (2009) which nominalizes a verb phrase. We show that the proposed analysis successfully accounts for the essential properties of the KSL equivalents to the synthetic compound, which may well be extended to the synthetic compound in other languages.