I'm looking for English or other standard European language co-compounds, and for other common examples.
I came across "bittersweet" but I'm not sure if it's really a co-compound. It has a superordinate concept and denotes a scaler-like concept, but I'm not sure. It could be similar to the Asian "short-long" for denoting size.
I myself have never heard of "co-compounds" before but here's what I've been able to find.
At first, a note on terminology. There is a coordinate compound and there's also a co-compound. These are two different things.
A coordinate compound (sometimes called coordinative compound) is usually understood as compound with two heads (e.g Fabb 2001: 67, Scalise and Bisetto 2009: 46). Under this analysis, "bittersweet" is an endocentric coordinate compound (with mixture interpretation, Lieber 2009).
A co-compound is a "natural word-like unit consisting of two or more parts which express natural coordination" (Wälchli 2005: 1). In other words, those coordinated items are closely related in meaning, they are expected to co-occur, they form a conceptual unit, and the whole meaning is more general than the meaning of its parts (Wälchli 2005: 1, 5).
English examples:
husband and wife, eat and drink, hands and feet etc.
That is why the following are not co-compounds, although they are coordinate compounds:
southwest, blue-green (no coordination)
poet-doctor (no close relationship)
Austria-Hungary (fusion)
twenty-two (different hierarchy)
OED defines bittersweet as "sweet with an admixture or aftertaste of bitterness. fig. agreeable or pleasant with an alloy of pain or unpleasantness." As you can see from this definition, the parts, bitter and sweet, are on different hierarchical levels; thus, "bittersweet" is not a co-compound.
For further discussion of co-compounds, see Wälchli 2005.
Of course, there are many other classifications of compounds; e.g. under Haspelmath's classification, bittersweet is an appositional compound and not coordinative (Haspelmath and Sims 2010: 141)/copulative (Booij 2007: 80) etc. Next time you ask a question, please define the terms you use.
Bittersweet is what would be called a Dvandva compound in Sanskrit.
I'm not sure, though, what you mean by "co-compound"; it sounds like the kind of term that one linguist or one group of linguists might use with a special meaning, deriving from some theory or other. This sort of stuff happens all the time in linguistics, because there are so many theories and so many varieties of terminology; that's why linguists always give examples, to illustrate what they mean by any particular term they employ.
According to R. Huddleston & L. Bauer in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language ,bitter-sweet is a coordinative compound, where the component bases are of equal status. In, for example, the noun secretary-treasurer, the adjective bitter-sweet, or the verb cook-chill, neither component is dependent on, subordinate to, the other. Coordinative compounds can normally be glossed with and:
a secretary-treasurer is someone who is both secretary and treasurer, not (or not just) a kind of treasurer.
Examples such as Alsace-Lorraine, Austria-Hungaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rank-Xerox are called dvandva compounds, a term taken from Sanskrit grammar. Dvandva compound nouns in English are mainly proper nouns referring to the combination or union of the referents of the component parts- territories, businesses. The coordinative compounds differ from the dvandvas in that the components apply individually as well as jointly. She is a secretary-treasurer of the society entails She is secretary of the society and she is the treasurer of the society, but She was born in Alsace-Lorraine does not entail She was born in Alsace and she was born in Lorraine- on the contrary, she can't have been born in each of them separately. Similarly with the business names: I bought it from Hewlett-Packard does not entail I bought it from Hewlett and I bought it from Packard. (R. Huddleston & L. Bauer)
