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IS A Condition

MORPHOLOGY: a condition proposed by Allen (1978) to express two salient facts about compounds: (a) the syntactic category of a compound is determined by its rightmost member, (b) the meaning of a compound is contained in the meaning of its rightmost member. EXAMPLE: the English compound houseboat is a noun as is boat, and a houseboat is a kind of boat. The Is A Condition is the predecessor of Williams' (1981a) Righthand Head Rule.
LIT. Allen, M.R. (1978)
Williams, E. (1981a)