摘要：Italian has two different types of compounds that may be described as trinominal: (a) the type exemplified as direzione ufficio acquisti and the type exemplified as relazione governo-sindacati.In both cases, the N2-N3 component modifies the head noun (N1), but the difference lies in the fact that in the former type, the relation between N2 and N3 is subordinate, while it is coordinate in the latter type.The aim of this paper is to collect representative data concerning the latter type of compounds and to analyze their internal structure.Our analysis is based on the hypothesis that the internal structure of these compounds is governed by the head noun N1: thus, corpus data were used to identify several key properties of the head noun that determine the internal structure and the interpretation of trinominal compounds.
