Phrasal compounds in Japanese

Although Japanese does not have phrasal compounds analogous to English an
over the fence gossip or a who’s the boss wink, it does have phrasal compounds
like kireena mati-dukuri, literally ‘clean city-making,’ meaning construction of a
clean city. This example illustrates one of several types of phrasal compounds in
Japanese. The criteria that classify phrasal compounds in Japanese are (i) whether
the head of the compound is a predicate, (ii) if a predicate, whether the head is of
Sino-Japanese or of native origin, (iii) if not a predicate, whether the compound
involves coordination or cliticization.
One source of phrasal compounding is noun incorporation. When an argument
incorporates into a Sino-Japanese verbal noun predicate, we get what Shibatani
& Kageyama (1988) refer to as post-syntactic compounds, which have phrasal ac-
cent. In contrast, when an argument incorporates into a verbal noun predicate of
native origin, we get a phrasal compound with word accent. The phrasal nature
is evidenced by modifier stranding, and there are some conditions (e.g., pragmatic
factors like cliché) on modifier stranding. There are three other sources of phrasal
compounding which do not involve noun incorporation: natural coordination, en-
clitics, and proclitics. The first two have word accent and the last has phrasal ac-
cent. Whether a compound has word accent or phrasal accent is predicted by its
structure: right branching compounds have phrasal accent (Kubozono 1995; 2005).
Kageyama’s (1993; 2001; 2009) notion of Word Plus is reconsidered and reclassified
into three distinct classes: right-branching compounds, constructions involving
proclitics, and phrases involving genitive deletion.