Severe Storm Warnings for Four-Story Homeowners: Towards a Processing Model of Bracketing Paradoxes

Some German adjective-compound-noun constructions (‘severe storm.warning’) exhibit a bracketing paradox where an adjective semantically modifies the first noun N1 instead of the grammatically required last noun N2 thus violating compositionality. We present two experiments that examined the interpretation of nominal compounds and bracketing paradoxes. Experiment 1 showed that the semantic match of N1 and the adjective has a significant impact on the acceptability of Adj-N1N2 constructions. Experiment 2 probed the participants’ adjective attachment choices as well as the relationship between and attachment and acceptability: While N2 attachments were most common, many constructions received mixed and some consistently bracketing paradox interpretations. High ratings for Adj-N2 were predictive of N2 attachment, but high Adj-N1 ratings led to bracketing paradox interpretations. These results are partially against grammatical expectations and suggest competition between the nouns for modification, likely due to semantic and/or pragmatic factors.