Noun compounds

I. Subject + action : вода спадає – водоспадhis type is represented by the following ways of combining of structural components:

1. noun (subject) + deverbal noun e.g.

English: sunrise, rainfall, headache, bee-sting, frostbite, daybreak, heartbeat, rainfall

Ukrainian: небосхил, серцебиття, зорепад, сонцестояння, снігопад

This type is rather productive in both contrasted languages.

2. deverbal noun + noun (subject)

In English we refer to this type those compounds where the first component is a verbal noun in –ing, e.g, flying machine, firing squad, investigating committee and it is very productive. In Ukrainian examples are few: падолист (арх.), трясогузка.

3. verb + noun (subject)

This type can be found only in English: watchdog, playboy.

II. Object + action: вказує дорогу – дороговказ

1. noun (object) + deverbal noun

This is a moderately productive type in English but very common in Ukrainian, e.g.

English: birth-control, handshake. Ukrainian:душогуб, сінокіс, гречкосій, родовід.

In English we can single out a subtype noun (object) + verbal noun in – ing: book-keeping, town-planning. In Ukrainian compounds of that subtype correspond to compounds in –ння: сироваріння, містобудування.

2. noun (object) + agent noun

In English this is a very productive type and designates concrete (usually human) agents: mathmaker, stockholder, hairsplitter. Note, however, dishwasher, lawn-mover. All compounds of this type in English are nouns with –er suffix. As in Ukrainian there is a wide range of suffixes forming agent nouns, so examples of compounds reflect this diversity: м’ясорубка, законодавець, користолюбець,квартиронаймач, містобудівник.

3. verb + noun (object)

English: call-girl, push-button, drawbridge. In Ukrainian the first component of these compounds is a verb in imperative: голиборода, крутивус, пройдисвіт, дурисвіт.This type is often encountered in plant-names as дерипліт, ломикамінь, ломиніс and for poetic characterization of people as Вернигора, Перетанцюйбіс, Непийвода. This structural typу of compounds belongs to the ancient layer of Ukrainian vocabulary, for example, the God of Sun in ancient Ukrainian religion was named Дажбог : imperative form of the verb dadjú – дай and noun bogú – щастя, добробут.

III. Action + adverbial: ходить пішки – пішохід.

In English this type of noun compounds has the following subtypes:

1. verbal noun in – ing + noun (adverbial component which can be transformed into prepositional phrase), e.g. writing-desk (write at a desk), hiding place (hide in a place), walking stick (walk with a stick).

2. noun (adverbial component) + agent noun,e.g. city-dweller (dwell in the city), baby sitter (sit with the baby),

3. noun (adverbial component ) + verbal noun in –ing, sunbathing (bathe in the sun), handwriting (write by hand),

4. noun (adverbial component) + noun (converted from verb), homework (work at home), gunfight (fight with a gun).

In English the 2)nd and the 4)th subtypes can actually be combined and this combined type can be encountered in Ukrainian: місцеперебування, працездатність, світогляд. Basides, In Ukrainian there exists arather productive type of compounds formation: adverb (adverbial component) + deverbal noun, e.g. скоропис, марнослів’я, пішохід.

Till now we have been discussing compound types that include the component ‘action’: subject + action, object + action, action + adverbial. We should also mention ‘verbless’ compounds like:

1. silkworm, молокозавод (noun₂ produces noun₁),

2. doorknob, лісостеп, глинозем (noun₁ has noun₂),

3. raindrop, скловата (noun₁ is of, consists of noun_2),

4. ashtray, птахоферма, зерносховище ( noun₂ is for noun₁),

5. girlfriend, лісосмуга (noun₂ is noun₁),

6. security officer (noun₂ controls/works in connection with noun₁)

Verbless compounds: Type “subject and object”

[A] windmill: noun₁ + noun₂ (noun₁ powers/operates noun₂ “the wind powers the mill”). e.g.: air-brake, steam engine, gas cooker.

[B] toy factory : noun₁ + noun₂ (noun₂ produces/yields noun₁, “the factory produces toys”). e.g.: honey-bee, silkworm, gold mine

Ukrainian: шовкопряд, нафтопромисел

[C] bloodstain: noun₁ + noun₂ (noun₁ produces/yields noun₂, “the blood produces stains”). e.g.: hay fever, tortoise-shell, whalebone, food poisoning.

[D] doorknob: noun ₁ + noun₂ (noun₁ has noun₂ “the door has a knob”). This is a very productive type. Noun is inanimate. With animate nouns we use a noncompound genitive phrase: compare the table leg with the boy’s leg. e.g.: window-pane, cartwheel, bedpost.

[E] security officer: noun₁ + noun₂ (noun₂ controls/works in connection with noun₁ “The officer looks after security”). e.g.: chairperson, fireman, deckhand. This is a very productive type, with the second constituent always a human agent. Indeed, so commonly has man been thus used (in its unmarked gender role, “human adult”) that in some compounds it has a reduced vowel, /mn/. This item and its gender-free alternative person might in fact be viewed as a suffix. In Ukrainian terminology some final elements of compounds are called suffixoids : -грiйка, думець, -лов. e.g.: тiлогрiйка, однодумець, птахолов.

Combining-form compounds

PSYCHO -ANALYSIS: noun₁ (in its combining form)+ noun₂ (= noun₂ in respect of noun₁) “the analysis of the psyche”. This is a highly productive type both in Ukrainian and in English. Various relations can be involved. Typically the first constituent is neo-classical and does not occur as a separate noun stem, but the model has been widely imitated with common stems, with an infix (usually -o- but often -i-) as alink between the two parts: cryptography, insecticide, etc. Stress patterns are various and the primary stress often falls on the link vowel of the combining form. Among common second constituents are -meter,-graph(y), -gram, -logy. In Ukrainian: -метр(iя), -граф(iя), -лог(iя), -ман(iя). The formations are espacially in the fields of science and learning. In consequence, many are in international currency, adopted or adapted in numerous languages.

“Bahuvrihi”compounds”

The term “bahuvrihi” refers not to the pattern of formation but to the relation such compounds have with their referents. Neither constituent refers to the entity named but, the whole refers to a separate entity (usually a person) that is claimed to be characterized by the compound, in its literal or figurative meaning. Thus,

a highbrow means ‘an intellectual’, on the basis of the facetious claim that people of intellectual interest and cultivated tastes are likely to have a lofty expanse of forehead. Many bahuvrihi compounds are somewhat disparaging (зневажливий) in tone and are used chiefly in informal style. They are formed on one or other of the patterns already described. e.g: birdbrain, egghead, hardback, loudmouth, blockhead, butterfingers, featherweight.

Ukrainian: твердолобий, криворукий.

Speaking about compounding we should also mention that a particularly productive type of back-formation relates to the noun compounds in -ing and -er. For example, the verbs: sleep-walk, house-keep, dry-clean, sight-see.

Reduplicatives

Some compounds have two or more constituents which are either identical or only slightly different,e.g. goody-goody (a self-consciously virtuous person, informal). The difference between the two constituents may be in the intial consonants, as in walkie-talkie, or in the medial vowels, e.g. criss-cross. Most of the reduplicatives are highly informal or familiar, and many belong to the sphere of child-parent talk, e.g. din-din (dinner). The most common uses of reduplicatives (sometimes called ‘jingles’) are:

[i] to imitate sounds, e.g. rat-a-tat [knocking on door], tick-tock [of clock],

ha-ha [of laughter], bow-wow [of dog].

[ii] to suggest alternating movements, e.g. seesaw, flip-flop,

ping- pong.

[iii] to disparage by suggesting instability, nonsense, insincerity,

vacillation(вагання) etc.: higgledy-piggledy, hocus-pocus,

wishy-washy, dilly-dally, shilly-shally.

[iv] to intensify, e.g. teeny-weeny, tip-top.

In connection with reduplication (Uk.: тихо-тихо, ледь-ледь, думав-думав) Ukrainian linguists single out such compounds as:

1. synonymic unities, e.g. пане-брате, стежки-доріжки, часто-густо;

2. semantic unities, e.g. батько-мати, руки-ноги, хліб-сіль, діди-прадіди;

appositional unities, e.g. машина-амфібія, дівчина-смуглянка

Lecture 5

Semantic Structure of English and Ukrainian Words

Long before linguistics existed as a discipline, thinkers were speculating about the nature of meaning. For thousands of years, this question has been considered central to philosophy. More recently it has come to be important in psychology as well. Contributions to the studies of meaning have come from a diverse group of scholars, ranging from Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece to Bertrand Russell in the twentieth century. In linguistics the branch of the study concerned with the meaning of words is called semantics.¹

This term is widely accepted by a lot of linguists and we consider it possible to use it for:

• the branch of linguistics which specializes in the study of meaning;

• the expressive aspect of language in general;

• the meaning of one particular word in all its varied aspects and nuances.

In semantic analysis, there is always an attempt to focus on what the words ______________________

1. The terms semasiology and semantics are often used indiscriminately as if synonymous. In fact they are synonymous. In case of semantics, however, there are several more meanings, e.g. the term ‘pure semantics’ refers to a branch of symbolic or mathematical logic originated by R.Carnap. It is a part of semiotics - the study of signs and languages in general, including all sorts of codes, such as military signals, traffic signals, etc. Unlike linguistic semantics which deals with real languages, pure semantics has as its subject formalized languages. According to prof.J.R.Firth, a prominent English linguist, the term semasiology was used to denote the historical study of change of meaning, until in 1900 Breal’s book Essai de s`emantique was published in English under the title of Semantics.

conventionally mean rather than on what a speaker might want the words to mean on a particular occasion. This technical approach to meaning emphasizes the objective and the general. It avoids the subjective and the local. Linguistic

semantics deals with the conventional meaning conveyed by the use of words and sentences of a language.

The definition of lexical meaning has been attempted more than once in accordance with the main principles of different linguistic schools. However, at present there is no universally accepted definition of meaning or rather a definition reflecting all the basic characteristic features of meaning and being at the same time operational. Thus, meaning is considered to be one of the most ambiguous and controversial terms in the linguistic theory. This complex phenomenon has been studied by many outstanding linguists [ ]. The suggested approaches can be grouped as follows:

• Analytical or referential definition of meaning,

• Functional or contextual definition of meaning,

• Operational or information-oriented definition of meaning.

The followers of Ferdinand de Saussure consider meaning to be the relation between the object or notion named, and the name itself ( referential approach). Descriptive linguistics of the Bloomfieldian trend defines the meaning as the situation in which the word is uttered ( functional approach). Some of Bloomfield’s successors went so far as to exclude semantics from linguistics on the ground that meaning could not be studied objectively, and was not part of language but an aspect of the use to which language is put. This point of view was never generally accepted.

The essential feature of the referential approach to meaning is that it distinguishes between three components:

1) the sound form,

2) the concept,

3) the actual referent (the part or aspect of reality).

The best known referential model of meaning is the so called basic triangle. This triangle with some variations underlies the semantic system of this school:

Concept

Sound form Referent

By “sound form” here is meant the word and the dotted line suggests that there is no immediate relation between the word and the referent: it is established only through the concept.

Some advocates of the referential approach point out that the meaning of the linguistic sign is the concept underlying it and thus substitute meaning for concept. Others identify meaning with the referent. Suggestions have also been made about meaning as the interrelation of the sound-form, concept and referent, but not as an objectively existing part of the objective sign. With this approach to word-meaning the analysis will inevitably operate with subjective mental processes and will not be able to bring scientific order in semantic analysis.

It is therefore most important to be clear about the distinction between meaning and referent, i.e. the thing denoted by the linguistic sign.

The meaning of the word is closely connected with the underlying concept but not identical with it. Concept is a category of human cognition. Our concepts reflect the most common and typical features of the different objects and phenomena of the world. Words expressing identical concepts may have different semantic structures in different languages.

e.g. house - дiм (implies house and home)

Ukrainian linguists agree in one basic principle: they all point out that lexical meaning is the realization of the notion by means of a definite language system. „The meaning of the word is a certain reflection of the object, phenomenon or relation in the mind of language users which creates the internal part of the word structure and in reference to this structure the sound form is the material shell of the word which is necessary not only for reflecting the meaning and sending the message to other members of the society but for creating of the word itself, its formation, existence and development.” [Iвченко 1965, с. 34).

It has also been repeatedly stated that the plane of content in speech reflects the whole of human consciousness, which comprises not only mental activity but emotions as well.

The notional content of the words is expressed by the denotative meaning (also called referential or extensional ). To denote is to serve as linguistic expression for a notion or as a name for an actually existing object referred to by a word. The term denotatum (Lat. denotatum, pl. denotata - означуване) is used in different meanings. When we speak about denotative meaning we consider it to be the notional nucleus of meaning (понятийное ядро значения) i.e. “objective” (“nominative”, внешнеситуационный”, “cognitive”, “representative”, “factual”, диктальный”, “предметно-реляционный”) component of meaning abstracted from stylistic, pragmatic, modal, emotional, subjective, communicative and other shades. Quite often the terms denotatum and referent are being used as synonyms.

The emotional content of the word i.e. its capacity to evoke or directly express emotions is rendered by connotative component of meaning (also called emotive charge or intentional connotations). Connotation (Lat. connotation from connoto - маю додаткове значення) is an emotional , evaluative or stylistic component of a linguistic unit of regular (узуальный, закрепленный в сиcтеме языка) or occasional character.

When linguists investigate the meaning of words in a language, they are normally interested in characterizing the referential meaning and less con­cerned with the associative or stylistic meaning of words. Referential mean­ing covers those basic, essential components of meaning which are conveyed by the literal use of a word. Some of the basic components of a word like needle in English might include “thin, sharp, steel, instrument”. These components would be part of the conceptual meaning of needle. However, you may have “associations”, or “connotations”, attached to a word like needle which lead you to think of' “painful” whenever you encounter the word. This “association” is not treated as part of the conceptual meaning of needle. In a similar way you may associate the expression low-calorie, when used to describe a product, with “good for you”, but we would not want to include this association within the basic conceptual meaning of the expres­sion. Poets and advertisers are of course, very interested in using terms in such a way that their associative meanings are evoked, and some linguists do investigate this aspect of language use. However, in this chapter we shall be more interested in characterizing what constitutes the conceptual meaning of words. But as in a broad sense connotation is any component which adds to the denotative meaning we may discover some differences in connotative meanings of English and Ukrainian words.

The complexity of the word-meaning is manifold. Apart from the lexical meaning including denotative and connotative meaning it is always combined with the grammatical meaning. The grammatical meaning is defined as an expression in speech of relationship between words based on contrastive features of arrangements in which they occur. This meaning provides the ability of the word ‘to enter into different relations to other words in accordance with the grammar of the given language” [Жовтобрюх 1972, с.184]. Lexical and grammatical meanings are inseparable. V.V.Vinogradov indicates that the character of their interrelation gives a possibility to differentiate between different structural-semantic types of words [Виноградов 1972, с.30].

If we try to define the lexical meaning of the word only as a certain conceptual reference of a sound complex, it does not permit to solve all the problems of words’ meanings. Modern linguistics tends to discuss not the lexical meaning of the word but its semantic or componental structure. Semantic components are revealed and organized in the process of componental analysis.

which is used for:

a) a detailed comparison of meaning whether within a single language or between languages;

b) providing a more adequate basis for translational equivalences;

c) treating semantic transpositions of words, figurative extension in particular.

d) the judging of the semantic compatibility as an important feature of style;

So, how would a semantic approach help us to understand something about the nature of contrasted languages? One way it might be helpful would be as a means of accounting for the “oddness” we experience when we read English sentences such as the following:

The hamburger ate the man

My cat studied linguistics

A table was listening to some music

Notice that the oddness of these sentences does not derive from their syn­tactic structure. According to some basic syntactic rules for forming English sentences we have well-structured sentences:

The hamburger ate the man

NP V NP

This sentence is syntactically good. but semantically odd. Since the sentence The man ate the hamburger is perfectly acceptable, what is the source of the oddness we experience? One answer may relate to the components of the conceptual meaning of the noun hamburger which differ significantly from those of the noun man , especially when those nouns are used as subjects of the verb ate. The kinds of nouns which can be subjects of the verb ate must denote entities which are capable of “eating”. The noun hamburger does not have this properly (and man does), hence the oddness of the first sentence above.

We can, in fact, make this observation more generally applicable by try­ing to determine the crucial component of meaning which a noun must have in order to be used as the subject of the verb ate. Such a component may be as general as “animate being”. We can then take this component and use it to describe part of the meaning of words as either plus (+) or minus (-). So the feature becomes +animate (= denotes an animate being) or -animate (= does not denote an animate being).

This procedure is a way of analyzing meaning in terms of semantic features. Features such as +animate, -animate; +human, -human; + -male, - male, for example, can be treated as the basic features involved in differentiating the meanings of each word in the language from every other word If you were asked to give the crucial distinguishing features of the meanings of this set of English words (table, cow, girl. woman, boy, man), you could do so by means of the following diagram:

table cow girl woman boy man

animate - + + + + +

human - - + + + +

male - - - - + +

adult - + - + - +

From a feature analysis like this, you can say that at least part of the basic meaning of the word boy in English involves the components (+human +male, -adult). You can also characterize that feature which is crucially required in a noun in order for it to appear as the subject of a verb, supple­menting the syntactic analysis with semantic features:

The_......_is reading a book.

N(+human)

This approach then gives us the ability to predict what nouns would make the above sentence semantically odd. Examples would be table, or tree, or dog, because they all have the feature (-human).

The approach which has just been outlined is not without problems. For many words in a language it may not be so easy to come up with neat compo­nents of meaning. If you try to think of which components or features you would use to distinguish the nouns advice, threat and warning, for example, you will have some idea of the scope of the problem. Part of the problem seems to be that the approach involves a view of words in a language as some sort of “containers”, carrying meaning-components.

Lecture 6