Are reduced compounds compounds? Morphological and prosodic properties of reduced compounds in Russian and Mandarin Chinese

Blends and, more generally, reduced compounds are often considered as marginal phenomena in the grammars of languages, as opposed, for instance, to "canonical"compounding. In this paper, we propose to distinguish two types of compounding in the world's languages, one which is the reflection of a general, and possibly universal, human cognitive ability to connect two words by simply juxtaposing them, and one which corresponds to morphological patterns that are codified (conventionalized) in the grammar of a language. The production and interpretation of the first, we claim, are determined by cross-linguistic constraints, while those of the latter are determined by language-specific factors. In this paper, we consider reduced compounds in two genetically unrelated and typologically distinct languages, Russian and Mandarin Chinese, in order to show that the degree of conventionalization of the process has a direct impact on the formal and semantic properties of this type of construction.