Экзаменационный билет № 17

1. Sources of compounds

The actual process of building compound words may take different forms: 1) Com­pound words as a rule are built spontaneously according to pro­ductive distributional formulas of the given period. Formulas productive at one time may lose their productivity at another period. Thus at one time the process of building verbs by compounding adverbial and verbal stems was productive, and numerous compound verbs like, e.g. out­grow, offset, inlay (adv + v), were formed. The structure ceased to be productive and today practically no verbs are built in this way.

2) Compounds may be the result of a gradual process of semantic isolation and structural fusion of free word-groups. Such compounds as forget-me-not; bull's-eye—'the centre of a target; a kind of hard, globular can­dy'; mainland—'a continent' all go back to free phrases which became semantically and structurally isolated in the course of time. The words that once made up these phrases have lost their integrity, within these particular for­mations, the whole phrase has become isolated in form, "specialized in meaning and thus turned into an inseparable unit—a word having acquired semantic and morphological unity. Most of the syntactic compound nouns of the (a+n) structure, e.g. bluebell, blackboard, mad-doctor, are the result of such semantic and structural isolation of free word-groups; to give but one more example, highway was once actually a high way for it was raised above the surrounding countryside for better drainage and ease of travel. Now we use highway without any idea of the original sense of the first element.

2. Lexical differences of territorial variants of English

All lexical units may be divided into general English (common to all the variants) and locally-marked (specific to present-day usage in one of the variants and not found in the others). Different variants of English use different words for the same objects (BE vs. AE: flat/apartment, underground/subway, pavement/sidewalk, post/mail).

Speaking about lexical differences between the two variants of the English language, the following cases are of importance:

1. Cases where there are no equivalent words in one of the variant! (British English has no equivalent to the American word drive-in ('a cinema or restaurant that one can visit without leaving one's car')).

2. Cases where different words are used for the same denotatum, e.g. sweets (BrE) — candy (AmE); reception clerk (BrE) — desk clerk (AmE).

3. Cases where some words are used in both variants but are much commoner in one of them. For example, shop and store are used in both variants, but the former is frequent in British English and the latter in American English.

4. Cases where one (or more) lexico-semantic variant(s) is (are) specific to either British English or American English (e.g. faculty, denoting 'all the teachers and other professional workers of a university or college' is used only in American English; analogous opposition in British English or Standard English - teaching staff).

5. Cases where one and the same word in one of its lexico-semantic variants is used oftener in British English than in American English (brew - 'a cup of tea' (BrE), ‘a beer or coffee drink’ (AmE).

Cases where the same words have different semantic structure in British English and American English (homely - 'home-loving, domesticated, house-proud' (BrE), 'unattractive in appearance' (AmE); politician ‘a person who is professionally involved in politics’, neutral, (BrE), 'a person who acts in a manipulative and devious way, typically to gain advancement within an organisation' (AmE).

Besides, British English and American English have their own deri­vational peculiarities (some of the affixes more frequently used in American English are: -ее (draftee — 'a young man about to be enlisted'), -ster (roadster — 'motor-car for long journeys by road'), super- (super-market — ‘a very large shop that sells food and other products for the home’); AmE favours morphologically more complex words (transportation), BrE uses clipped forms (transport); AmE prefers to form words by means of affixes (burglarize), BrE uses back-formation (burgle from burglar).