31. Word-composition as a type of word formation. Features of compound-words. Classifications of compound-words.

Composition -the way of word building when a word is formed by joining two or more stems to form one word.

As English compounds consist of free forms, it is difficult to distinguish them from phrases.

Criteria of distinguishing compound words:

1) graphic (solid or hyphenated spelling), e.g. phrase-book, Sunday.

2) phonetic (based on the position of stress). There is a tendency to put heavy stress on the 1-st element ('blackboard, 'ice-cream). But this rule does not hold in some cases: with adjectives (new-'born, easy-'going) etc.

3) semantic (a compound is a combination forming a unit that expresses a single idea and that is not identical in meaning to the sum of the meanings of its components in a free phrase).

4) the unity of morphological and syntactical functioning. Compounds are used in a sentence as one part of it and only one component changes grammatically, e.g. These girls are chatter-boxes. «Chatter-boxes» is a predicative in the sentence and only the second component changes grammatically.

Borderline cases (present the greatest difficulty in determining their status as compounds): String compounds (sit-on-the-fence-attitude, once-in-a-time-opportunity); "Stone Wall" constructions. Bound stems/semi-affixes (seaman, homophobia).

Characteristic features of English compounds:

***Both components in an English compound are free stems: they can be used as words with a distinctive meaning of their own. The sound pattern will be the same except for the stresses, e.g. a green-house and a green house.

***English compounds have a two-stem pattern, with the exception of compound words which have form-word stems in their structure, e.g. middle-of-the-road, off-the-record, up-and-doing etc.

Compounds may be classified according to:

1. The way components are joined together:

a) neutral (by joining together two stems without any joining morpheme), e.g. ball-point, to windowshop,

b) morphological (components are joined by a linking element: vowels «o» or «i» or the consonant «s»), e.g. handicraft, sportsman,

c) syntactical (components are joined by means of form-word stems), e.g. here-and-now, free-for-all.

Compounds may be classified according to:

2. Their structure: compound proper (formed by joining two stems), e.g. to job-hunt, train-sick, compound-derived compounds (besides the stems they have affixes), e.g. ear-minded, hydro-skimmer compound-shortened words, e.g. Eurodollar, H-bomb.

Compounds may be classified according to

3. Semantic relations:

1) non-idiomatic (the meaning of the whole is the sum total of the meanings of the components), e.g. music-lover, flower-bed2) idiomatic, e.g. hotdog, wet-blanket

32. Secondary types of word-formation: lexicalization, sound-imitation, reduplication, back-formation (reversion), sound and stress interchange.

Secondary types of word-formation: lexicalization, sound-imitation, reduplication, back-formation, sound and stress interchange,shortening (abbreviation, acronymy, blends, clipping).

Besides major types of word-formation (affixation, composition and conversion) in English, there are some other types, which are less important for replenishment of vocabulary.

Some of them, like sound-interchange, stress shift and back-formation, were acting in the past and are more important for diachronic research of vocabulary.

Such types as clipping, blending, and acronymy are very common in modern English.

Lexicalization: the process, when due to some semantic and syntactic reasons, the grammatical flexion in some word forms, e.g. the plural of nouns like arms, colours, loses its grammatical meaning and becomes isolated from the paradigm of the words arm and colours.

As the result these word forms (arms, colours) develop a different lexical meaning (arms = weapons and colours = flag) and become independent words.

Sound-imitation: the way of word-building when a word is formed by imitating different sounds.

E.g. to whisper, to sneeze, to whistle, to buzz, to bark, to bubble.

Reduplication: the way of word-formation within which new words are formed by doubling a stem, either without any phonetic changes or with a variation of the root-vowel or consonant.

E.g. bye-bye, gee- gee, hush-hush, ping-pong, dilly-dally.

Back-formation: the creation of new words by losing a final morpheme (baby-sitter to baby-sit, editor to edit, beggar to beg).

It is opposite to suffixation, that is why it is called back-formation.

Sound-interchange is the creation of new words by changing the root-vowel (to breathe – breath, food – feed)

Stress-shift: the process of forming new words by replacement of stress from one syllable to another ('import – to im'port, 'record – to re'cord).