13. Word composition.

WC is combination of 2 or more existing words to create a new word; is one of the most productive type of process of word-building in modern English. Word composition plays a central role in word formation in many languages. Compound as a result of WC is a unit of vocabulary

Properties of compounds

Compounds in English are written sometimes as one word (sunglasses), sometimes as two hyphenated words (life-threatening), and sometimes as two separate words (football stadium).English is not consisted in representing compounds. There is an important generalization to be made. In particular adj noun compounds are characterized by a more prominent stress on the first component. « A compound word greenhouse as a single word means a glass in closed garden. An expression green house means a house pointed green.»

"A second distinguishing feature of compounds in English is that tense and plural markers cannot typically be attached to the first element, although they can be added to the compound as a whole. (There are some exceptions, however, such as passers-by and parks supervisor.)"

Compound words possible subdivide them according to the characteristics. E.g. semantically into motivated and idiomatic compounds.

From the point of view of the means by which the components are pointed together compounds may be classified into:

1. Nutral words formed by nearly placing one constituent after another in a definite order E.g. time-table, heart-ache.

2. The second morphological compounds.. They those compounds are joined together with a linking element .it may be vowel or consonant. Compounds of this type can be noun and adj present small group of words considerably restricted by the nature of their component.

3. Syntactical compounds. The first component contains a bound group. This group is generally limited to the names of nationalities and scientific terms. And there is an also very small group of words restricted by the second component which is as a rule one of the three stems: man, women, all people. For example: sportsman. Syntactical, whether components are joined by means of form word stems (prepositions, articles, adverbs) it is a feature of specifically word structure. “Lily of the valley”, “Mother-in-law”.

Compound words are also classified according to the different ways of compounding. There are 2 types of composition: 1) Compounds proper are formed by joining together stems of words already existing in the language with or without the help of special linking element (doorstep, babysitter). Compound proper constitute to the balk of English compounds in all parts of speech. 2) Compound derivatives (long-legged, long-lived). These compounds don’t fit the definition as words consisting of more than one free stem, because the second element is not free. Derivational compound differ from proper in the nature of their components and the pattern is words are built on. While both components of compound proper are stems of words already existing in the language, where each stem is independent word. In derivational compound on “long-legged” type, the first component (free-cornered). Three corners is not the stem of any word, existing in modern English, but a free word group, whose member words are brought together by composition, so that they lose their grammatical independence and are reduced to a single component of the word a derivat. stem. A derivative suffix –ed converts the phrase into a single word. Derivative compounds subdivided into 2 groups according to deriv. means used as the nature of the first component.