bahuvrihi

A bahuvrīhí (बहुव्रीहि), or bahuvrihi compound is a type of nominal compound that refers to something that is not specified by the compound's parts. It is common in compounds referring to a possessor of a specified object: a bahuvrihi compound XY tends to mean someone or something which has a Y, and that Y has the characteristic X. For instance, a sabretooth (smil-odon) is neither a sabre nor a tooth: it is an extinct feline with sabre-like fangs. In linguistic terms, a bahuvrihi is headless or exocentric: its core semantic value is implicit rather than explicit, so that the compound is not a hyponym of the head.

English bahuvrihis often describe people using synecdoche: flatfoot, half-wit, highbrow, lowlife, redhead, tenderfoot, longlegs, and white-collar.

The term bahuvrihi was first used by Sanskrit grammarians, and is a specific Sanskrit example: a compound consisting of bahu (much) and vrihi (rice); the compound denotes a rich man, one who has "much rice".

The last constituent in a Sanskrit bahuvrihi is a noun, more strictly: a nominal stem. The whole compound is an adjective and agrees in gender and number with the head. The accent is regularly on the first member (tatpurusha rāja-pútra "a king's son", but bahuvrihi rājá-putra "having kings as sons" (viz rājá-putra- (m.) "father of kings", rājá-putrā- (f.) "mother of kings"), with the exception of a number of non-nominal prefixes such as the privative a; the word "bahuvrīhí" is itself likewise an exception to this rule.

A related concept is an exocentric compound.

See also

• Sanskrit compounds
• Tatpurusha
• Dvigu
• Dvandva
• Compound (linguistics)

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