An outline of the main compositional categories in Mycenaean lexicon

Composition is the tool to create new words with which some ancient Indo-European languages are particularly endowed, and much has been written, for example, about Greek, Sanskrit or Latin. This paper concentrates on the 2nd millennium Greek (Mycenaean Greek), highlighting how all the main compositional categories are recognisable in comparison with the 1st millennium Greek. Through an analysis (with appropriate examples) that briefly reviews all the compositional categories (possessive and endocentric compounds, prepositional and verbal governing compounds), we will try to demonstrate how nominal composition shows an important development despite the bureaucratic-administrative nature of the lexicon of Mycenaean archives.