9

LECTURE 4

COMPOUNDING

1. General Principles of Compounding Specific Features of Eng­lish Compounds.

2. Classification of Compounds

3. Derivational compounds.

4. Reduplicative Compounds. Ablaut combinations Pseudo-compounds.

Rhyme combinations

5. The Historical Development of English Compounds

General principals of compounding in different languages are somewhat similar, but it should be apparent that certain details and es­pecially the restrictions vary in different languages.

Compounding in English has some specific features different from practice in other languages. The first to be mentioned is that the imme­diate constituents of an English compound are free forms, i.e. they can be used as independent words with a distinct meaning of their own.

The predominant type in English is a juxtapositional compound made up of a determining and a determined part ( also called determi­nant determinatum).

In the system of languages to which English belongs, the determinant generally precedes the determinatum.

The types which do not conform to this principle are represented chiefly by formations with prepositions and conjunctions or by loan- compounds with "inner form" of a non-English language, e.g. brother-in-law, passer-by, pepper-and-salt, governor- general.

The difference between a compound and a phrase must be deter­mined separately for each language.

English compounds differ from phrases in the phonemic modifica­tion of their components, in the kind of juncture between them, in the stress pattern, or in the combination of these features. Thus, the com­pound black-bird differs from the phrase black bird only in stress, the compound altogether differs from the phrase all together in both stress and juncture.

Another feature in which compounds often differ from phrases is their indivisibility. The constituent words of phrase may be separated by the insertion of other words:

A black or bluish-black bird, a gentle man-a gentle old man.

To describe the construction of a compound we must identify not only the class (part of speech, etc.) to which it belongs but also the class of each component member. We must see how these are put together by stating the order in which they are uttered, the features of juncture and accent which characterize them and the phonemic modifications, if any, to which the component words are subjected in the process of compounding.

By way of illustration: steamship, a noun, composed of the two nouns steam and ship in open juncture with bound stress on the first member and reduced loud on the second. Gentleman a noun composed of the adjective gentle and the noun man in close juncture with loud stress on the first member and weak on the second.

The simplest form of compounds is welding of two words that al­ready exist in the language: water-mill, water-way.

Compounding occurs in all word classes. There are compound nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions. The largest group is that of nouns. Next come compound adjectives, then verbs.

There is a well-known tendency in English to give compounds a heavy stress on the first element, which is primary in importance to dis­tinguish between a compound word and a phrase.

English compounds stressed on this pattern are known to be fair common. Further familiar examples are: 'black-berry - 'black 'berry; 'blackbird- 'black 'bird;

'greenhouse- 'green 'house (in all compounds of this type the de­terminant has a heavy stress, the determinatum has a middle stress).

Compound adjectives are commonly double- stressed, e.g. 'easy-'going, 'new-'blown, etc.

Compound adjectives of emphatic comparison have heavy stress on the first element, e.g. dog-cheap, ice-cold, snow-blind, etc.

In certain types of words the stress helps to differentiate the mean­ing of compounds. A few examples for illustration are given below:

1. book'case - a piece of furniture with shelves for books;

2. 'bookcase - a paper cover for books;

3. man 'kind- the human race;

4. 'mankind - men, as distinguished from women.

One more specific feature of English compounding is that often elements of a phrase united by their attributive function become further united phonemically by stress and graphically by hyphen, or even solid spelling. Cf Common sense and common-sense advice; old age and old-age prisoner; the records are out of date and out-of-date records.

Classification of compounds. The great variety of compound types brings about a great variety of classifications Compound words may be classified according to the type of composition and the linking element; according to the part of speech to which the compound be­longs; and within each part of speech according to the structural pattern. It is also possible to subdivide compounds according to other character­istics, i.e. semantically, into motivated and idiomatic compounds (in the motivated ones the meaning of the constituents can be either direct or figurative). Structurally, compounds are distinguished as endocentric and exocentric, with the subgroup of bahuvrihi and syntactic and asyn-tactic combinations.