Abstract

People interpret novel compounds by blending the constituent concepts into new, complex concepts. This process is called ‘conceptual combination’. What is its role in identifying the geographical entities designated by compound nouns and toponyms? For tatōkai 多島海, a Japanese word for ‘many-island sea’, ‘archipelago’ and the Aegean Sea, conceptual combination is straightforward and its output clear, for the term is composed of a string of three characters meaning ‘many’, ‘island’ and ‘sea’. The resulting meaning, though, is too vague to be truly informative and to link the encoded description to the term’s referent(s) effectively.

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