Endocentric compounds are semantically compositional, which allows predicting the meaning of the compound from its components. Thus, endocentric compounds are semantically predictable compounds.
Endocentric compounds are not necessarily lexicalized. This implies that, first, the same constituents of an endocentric sequential compound can be signed the other way around, as the following examples in (a) and (b) illustrate; and, second, the same concept may be signed with different lexical constituents, as illustrated in (c) and (d).
a) text^information (‘report’)
(extracted from the corpus created in Villaécija, 2019)
b) information^text (‘report’)
(extracted from the corpus created in Villaécija, 2019)
c) house^sell (‘shop’)
(based on DOMAD, 2002a)
d) building^sell (‘shop’)
The compounds in (a), (b), (c) and (d) are semantically predictable, as it is possible to link the constituents with the resulting meaning. The word ‘information’ and ‘text’ combine to give the meaning ‘report’, and the words ‘house’ or ‘building’ with ‘sell’ combine to give the meaning ‘shop’. Also, all the examples show that endocentric compounds are not fully lexicalized. The compounds in (a) and (b) above illustrate that the same compound may be signed in different order, as it is possible to find two possible configurations as in (a) text^information or (b) information^text without implying any semantic change. The compounds in (c) and (d) show that the same meaning can be produced with different signs, like ‘house’ or ‘building’, which attached to ‘sell’ create the meaning ‘shop’.
Note that in LSC compounding is a very frequent strategy to create neology.