摘要：This paper proposes that compounds, whether root, deverbal or dvandva, have a unifying property. They all include an internal functional projection, i.e. an F-tree. The head of this projection may legible at the phonetic interface, whereas it is necessarily legible at the semantic interface. Empirical arguments are presented to motivate the F-tree hypothesis, which occurrence in compounds follows from the basic asymmetry of the relations generated by the grammar. Variation between languages with respect to the ordering of the constituents of compounds is proposed to be a function of whether the derivation of these constructs takes place in the morphological or in the syntactic plane of the computational space.
