The nature of fixed language in the subtitling of a documentary film

Table 2. Examples of lexical compounds (Bosque & Demonte 2000: 4763). 
carta bomba: 
a.
cartas bomba 
b.
* cartas bombas 
c.
?? carta con-bomba 
mujer objeto: 
a.
* mujer objeto digno de estudio 
b.
mujer objeto digna de estudio 

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The other ones 
– syntagmatic compounds – are defined by their syntactic 
frozenness, which can be easily understood by the examples fin de semana (
‘weekend’ 
in English), which is different from fin de essa semana 
(‘the end of the week’ in 
English). In these constructions, the frozenness that defines them does not change their 
stress nor their syntactic structure. Syntactic frozenness implies that the inflection of the 
phrase be dependent on its nucleus, that it does not allow for the addition of modifiers to 
the prepositional phrase or of adverbs to the adjective and that it be impossible to 
partially commute its constituents without altering the nature of the phrase. Thus, the 
frozenness of the syntactic properties is a sine qua non condition for the existence of 
this type of compounds. (Bosque & Demonte 2000: 4763-4764) 
As other authors have done it (for instance, Zgusta 1971 or Fonseca 1981), 
Bosque & Demonte (2000: 4764) put forth a number of tests that enable to say whether 
a certain compound has reached such a level of frozenness as to be considered a 
syntagmatic compound or to be regarded only as a lexical compound. 
Table 3. Examples of syntagmatic compounds (Bosque & Demonte 2000: 4764).
fin de semana: 
a.
fines de semana 
b.
*fines de semanas 
c.
*fin de semana de vacaciones 
d.
*fin de esa semana 
e.
*término de semana 
el orden del día: 
a.
los órdenes del día 
b.
*los órdenes de los días 
c.
*el orden de un día 
d.
*el orden del día del fiesta 
e.
*el orden diario 
After analyzing these examples, it is possible to conclude that syntagmatic 
compounds comprehend a range of different constructions, which can do without a 
verb, are fixed syntactic structures, encompass whole concepts, break the compositional 
principle and the greater resistance to cohesion they offer, the higher their motivation or 
their semantic transparence turns out to be. Each constituent of these compounds does 
not possess syntactic autonomy, because they are part of a unitary whole. 
When dealing with phrases, it is also of the highly significant to determine their 
nucleus, since it is in the nucleus that the possibilities of distribution for these 
constructions are based, influencing their morphological and syntactic category. As a 
result, we can have exocentric or endocentric compounds. 
On the one hand, exocentric constructions have an idiomatic sense that presents 
a high degree of compositional opacity 
– they are demotivated constructions and are 

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33 
similar to metaphors, the lower their compositionality, the higher the cohesion among 
their elements. On the other, endocentric constructions possess a nucleus and present a 
morphological structure that reflects the semantic relations established among their