Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Reduced registers – search queries, print and TV ads, and navy messages – are characterized by an unusually high number of novel compounds. Results of a production study reported here reveal combinatorial patterns not attested in the standard language and allow us to establish the range of possibilities. We argue that productivity and creative use of compounds in reduced registers is not coincidental but follows directly from the grammar that generates expressions in these registers. We adopt an analysis couched in the Parallel Architecture framework (Jackendoff, 1997; Jackendoff & Audring, 2016) and demonstrate how productivity and idiosyncrasy of compounds in reduced registers can be explained.