Headedness and Exocentric Compounding 1 Vitor A. Nóbrega Federal University of Santa Catarina Phoevos Panagiotidis University of Cyprus Abstract: Semantic headedness typically serves as the primary criterion for compound endocentricity, i.e. whether a compound has a head. The semantic head is often defined as the hyperonym from which the denotation of the compound is derived, with exocentric compounds being those whose denotation is not a subclass of that of their head element. Headedness, so defined, leads us to analyze every non-compositional compound as exocentric. We explore the boundaries between semantic exocentricity and non-compositionality using established diagnostics in order to decide whether a semantic characterization of headedness is valid, and to determine whether exocentricity and non-compositionality coincide. Assuming a syntactic model of morphological combinatorics we show that exocentricity must be defined configurationally, occurring when the structure of a compound modifies an external entity, frequently instantiated by an empty noun. Hence exocentricity is not the absence of a head, but the realization of the compound’s head outside its internal structure. Non-compositionality, in turn, derives from how the root of each constituent member of a compound is compositionally or idiosyncratically interpreted. Finally, we put forth a new typological distribution of exocentric compounds, discriminating real exocentric compounds (bahuvrihi and dvandva) from compounds that are commonly, but wrongly, defined as exocentric (e.g. deverbal and de-prepositional compounds). Keywords: compounding; exocentricity; bahuvrihi compounds; deverbal compounds; Distributed Morphology. 1. The interplay between exocentricity and non-compositionality It is generally argued that compounds may comprise an endocentric (i.e. headed) structure. For instance, at a pre-theoretical level, in a compound like blueberry we interpret berry as the head of the compound, along the lines of both ‘a blueberry being a kind of berry’, and of the noun berry giving its category (i.e. nominal) to the whole blueberry formation. Exocentric compounds, on the other hand, are understood to be the opposite, as they are traditionally 1 This manuscript has been accepted for publication by EUP in the journal Word Structure 13.2 (2020): 211– 249. (https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/word).