The use of compounds in the adventure tourism lexicon

Abstract

This chapter explores the relevance of English compounding processes in the lexical repertoire of adventure tourism. The focus will be on compound nouns, specifically those with a morphologically complex head noun ending in -ing, such as mountain biking, typically used to designate different adventure activities. By using corpus data, the different compound patterns referring to adventure tourism activities and their relative productivity will be identified. First, compounds will be classified syntactically, and then they will be analysed in terms of the denotation of the first word, the head noun, and the internal association between them, that is, thematic relations. It will be shown that compounding is a significant morphological process for the formation of new words in the realm of this tourism segment. In addition, it will be argued that adverbial-type roles (e.g., PATH, PLACE, SOURCE) become central in meaning relations expressed by noun compounds with a verb-derived head within the specific area of adventure tourism.