There are several different theories about relative prominence assignment in noun-noun (henceforth, NN) compounds, such as the structural theory (Bloomfield, 1933;Marchand, 1969;Heinz, 2004), the analogical theory (Schmerling, 1971;Olsen, 2000), the semantic theory (Fudge, 1984;Liberman and Sproat, 1992) and the informativeness theory (Bolinger, 1972;Ladd, 1984).
1 in most studies, the different theories are examined and applied in isolation, thus making it difficult to compare them directly.