5.4.3. Compound adjectives

Compound Adjs regularly correspond to free phrases. The type threadbare consists of a N-stem & an Adj-stem – ‘bare to the thread’: airtight, bloodthirsty, carefree, heartfree, media-shy, noteworthy, pennywise, poundfoolish, seasick.

The type has a variant: snow-white ‘as white as snow’, emphatic comparison: dog-tired, dirt-cheap, stone-deaf). Examples are mostly connected with colours: blood-red, sky-blue, pitch-black; with dimensions & scale: knee-deep, breast-high, nationwide, life-long, world-wide.

The red-hot type: 2 Adj-stems, the 1^st expresses the degree / nuance of the 2^nd: white-hot, light-blue, reddish-brown.

The same formula – additive CWs of the bitter-sweet type correlated with free phrases Adj₁ & Adj₂ (bitter & sweet) numerous in technical & scholarly vocabulary: social-economic.

The peace-loving type consisting of a N-stem & a participle stem, is very productive: breath-taking, freedom-loving, soul-stirring. Temporal & local relations: sea-going, picture-going, summer-flowering. The type is now literary & sometimes lofty; in the 1920s it was very common in upper-class slang: sick-making ‘sickening’.

A similar type with the PrN-stem self- as the 1^st component (self-adjusting, self-propelling) is used in cultivated & technical speech only.

The hard-working type, an Adj-stem & a participle stem: good-looking, sweet-smelling, far-reaching. Looking, smelling, reaching do not exist as separate Adjs. Neither is it clear whether the 1^st element corresponds to an Adj / Adv. They receive some definite character only in CWs.

There is a considerable group of CWs characterised by the type W man-made, Participle II with a N-stem for a determinant. The semantic relations are remarkable for great variety: man-made ‘made by man’ (agent & action); home-made ‘made at home’ (the notion of place); safety-tested ‘tested for safety’ (purpose); moss-grown ‘covered with moss’ (instrumental notion); the figurative CW heart-broken ‘having a broken heart’. Most CWs of this type have a passive meaning; exceptions: well-read, well-spoken, well-behaved.

5.4.4. Compound verbs

It is not clear whether verbal compositions exist in ME, though outgrow, overflow, stand up, black-list, stage-manage, whitewash are often called compound Vs.

H. Marchand: outgrow, overflow – unquestionable CW, the type is not productive & locative particles are near to prefixes. “The Concise Oxford Dictionary”: out-, over- – prefixes used both for Vs & Ns; outgrow, overflow – derivatives.

The stand-up type was regarded as a phrase, a CW & a derivative.

Blackmail & stage-manage belong to 2 different groups ← different correlations with the rest of the vocabulary.

blackmail v ₌ honeymoon v ₌ nickname v

blackmail n honeymoon n nickname n

These Vs are cases of conversion from endocentric nominal CWs. The type stage-manage may be referred to back-formation. The correlation is as follows:

stage-manage v ₌ proof-read v ₌ housekeep v

stage-manager n proof-reader n housekeeper n

The 2^nd element in the 1^st group is a N-stem; in the 2^nd group it is always verbal.

Examples of the 1^st group: safeguard, nickname, shipwreck, whitewash, tiptoe, outline, honeymoon, blackmail, hero-worship (exist for a long time). The 20^th century: week-end, double-cross ‘betray’, stream-line, soft-pedal, spotlight. The type is especially productive in colloquial speech & slang, particularly in AmE.

The 2^nd group is less numerous but highly productive in the 20^th century. The earliest coinages: backbite (1300); browbeat (1603), later ill-treat, house-keep. The 20^th century: hitch-hike, proof-read, mass-produce, tape-record, vacuum-clean. The most recent is hijack from the slang W hijacker – ‘a highwayman / a robber & blackmailer of bootleggers’ (the Chambers’s Dictionary).

H. Marchand: pseudo-CWs, created as Vs by conversion & back-formation. His classification is convincing, if the vocabulary is treated diachronically. Vacuum-clean is not a CW genetically. But if we are concerned with the present-day structure & follow consistently the definition of a CW, we see that it is a W containing 2 free stems. It functions in the sentence as a separate lexical unit. It seems logical to consider such Ws as CWs by their structural pattern.