Sammensætninger i et børnesprogsmateriale

This article discusses compounds in a corpus collected among native and multilingual children in schools in Aarhus, Denmark. The corpus consists of interviews with individual children and recordings of groups of children playing; the compounds were collected from the interviews only. Focus is on different semantic types of compounds. A large body of the corpus consists of simple lexicalized compounds where the compound is the only relevant alternative if you want to express yourself idiomatically. Occasionally we found interesting unconventional compounding used to replace lexical gaps with the children, among the native speakers as well as among the multilingual children. In some cases, very special types of compounds came up, especially in the attempts of the children to cope with specific challenges in some of the tasks in the interviews.