Word-composition

The composition of the combination 2 or more existing words to create a new words is one of the most common and important word-building process in English.

The type of WF in which new words are produced by combining 2 or more stems (stem is a part of word consisting of root and affix) place a central role in WF in many languages.

A compound is a unit of vocabulary that consists of more than one lexical stem. Ex: bluebird (adjective+noun); …-in-law (preposition+noun); evi-doer (noun+noun); jumpsuit (verb+noun).

With very few exceptions the resulting compound word is a noun, a verb or an adjective.

In most compound the rightmost morpheme determents the category of entire word. Ex: Green house – is a noun, because its rightmost component is a noun.

The morpheme, that determents the category of the whole word, is called the head.

Properties of compound. Compounds are used to express a wide range of meaning relationships in English. In most cases a compound denotes a subtype of the concept denoted by its head. Thus “catfood” is a type of food, “skyblue” is a type of blue. Such compounds are called endocentric. (ex: airplane, steamboat).

In a smaller number of cases the meaning of compound does not follow from the meaning of its parts in this way. Thus a “redneck” is a person and not a type of neck. Such compounds are set to be exocentric.

Compounds may be described from different points of view and may be classified according to different principals:

1) of the part of speech compound words represent: verb (to honeymoon), noun (waterfall), adj. (hardworking), adverb (downstairs), prepositions (onto, into), numerals (37).

2) of the means of the composition, used to link the 2 or more immediate constituents together: - neutral compounds formed by joining 2 stems without connected elements (goldfish); - morphological compounds – the components are joined by a linking element vowel “o,y” or the consonant “s” (sportsman, videophone); - syntactical compounds - the components are joined by form word stems (man-of-war).

3) of their structure: -compounds proper are formed by joining together 2 stems (film-star, earthquake); -compounds derived words (stem+affixes) (ex. broadminded); - compound shortened words (A-bomb); - compounds were at list one of the constituent (waste-paperbasket)

4) degree of semantic independence of components^

subordinate cs (one compound is the semantic senter, another is subordinative. Relations could be: comparative (snow-white), relations of purpose (bookshell), functional relations (textbook) etc

coordinate where both components are semantically equally important and they fall into 3 groups: reduplicative cs- repetition of the same base (g0-go), compounds formed with the help of rhythmic stems (boogie-woogie), addictive compounds are built of stems independently functioning words secretary-stenographer).

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