Compounding

COMPOUNDING

Prezentation by: Šulc M., Chudada O., treti jmeno ktery nvm..

What is compounding?• In linguistics, the process of combining two

or more words (free morphemes) to create a new word (commonly a noun, verb, or adjective).

Example: black+board=blackboard.

• Compounds are written as: • one word (sunglasses)• two hyphenated words (life-

threatening)• two separate words (football stadium).

What is compounding?• Compounding is a process by which a

compound lexeme is derived from two or more simpler lexemes.

• Blackbird ->

Black + Bird = Blackbird [X]a + [Y]n = [X+Y]n

• Compounding is a lexical process deriving lexemes from lexemes (BLACK + BIRD = BLACKBIRD)

•In syntax, compound words behave like simple words:

There is a dead bird on the doorstep.->There is a dead blackbird on the doorstep.

IDIOSYNCRATIC MEANING – Some of the derived compounds tend to have idiosyncratic meaning.

GENERATION (GENERATE) DIRECTION (DIRECT)

Blackbird is not every black bird, it is a bird of one particular species. Also, females are brown. Same aplies to compound greyhound which doesnt literally mean grey hound.

Compounds in syntax

• In a synthetic language, the relationship between the elements of a compound may be marked with a case or other morpheme.

– For example, the German compound Kapitänspatent consists of the lexemes Kapitän (sea captain) and Patent (license) joined by an -s-(originally a genitive case suffix)

• The latter pattern is common throughout the Semitic languages, though in some it is combined with an explicit genitive case, so that both parts of the compound are marked.

– in the Hebrew language compound, the word ס;פ9ר bet ב?;יתsefer (school), it is the head that is modified: the compound literally means "house-of book", with יתD?ב bayit (house) having entered the construct state to become ב?;ית bet (house-of).

FORMATION OF COMPOUNDS

• Agglutinative languages tend to create very long words with derivational morphemes. (The longest compounds in the world may be found in the Finnic and Germanic languages.)

– In German, extremely extendable compound words can be found in the language of chemical compounds, where in the cases of biochemistry and polymers, they can be practically unlimited in length.

– German examples : Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze 

(Danube steamboat shipping company Captain's hat).

• In Finnish there is no theoretical limit to the length of compound words, but in practice words consisting of more than three components are rare

– Internet folklore sometimes suggests that lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas (Airplane jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student) would be the longest word in Finnish, but evidence of it actually being used is scant and anecdotic at best.

They can be identified by:

1) Meaning:• Sometimes with a meaning that is simply the sum of the parts.

– light switch• Sometimes with some sort of figurative new sense.

– Moonshine

• The semantic relationships of the parts can be of all kinds: a window cleaner cleans windows, but a vacuum cleaner does not clean vacuums.

• We can be sure we have a compound when the primary stress moves forward; normally a modifier will be less heavily stressed than the word it modifies, but in compounds the first element is always more heavily stressed.

IDENTIFICATION OF COMPOUND WORDS.

• We can be sure we have a compound when the primary stress moves forward; normally a modifier will be less heavily stressed than the word it modifies, but in compounds the first element is always more heavily stressed.

– Example: STONE Age, HOT dog

• This changes with Phrasel verbs, where the verb is tressed.

– Example: come IN, go ON

2) Stress:

Semantic classification:

SUBCLASSES OF COMPOUND WORDS.

Type Description Examples

endocentric A+B denotes a special kind of B

darkroom, smalltalk

exocentric

A+B denotes a special kind of an unexpressed semantic head

skinhead, paleface (head: 'person')

copulativeA+B denotes 'the sum' of what A and B denote

bittersweet, sleepwalk

appositional

A and B provide different descriptions for the same referent

actor-director, maidservant

A and B each being a word within the compound.

• An endocentric compound consists of:– a head.– the categorical part that contains the basic

meaning of the whole compound.– modifiers which restrict it‘s meaning.

• For example: Doghouse– where house is the head and dog is the

modifier, is understood as a house intended for a dog.

• Endocentric compounds tend to be of the same part of speech (word class) as their head, as in the case of doghouse.

• Exocentric compounds are hyponyms of some unexpressed semantic head (e.g. a person, a plant, an animal...), and their meaning often cannot be transparently guessed from its constituent parts.

– For example, the English compound white-collar is neither a kind of collar nor a white thing.

• In an exocentric compound, the word class is determined lexically, disregarding the class of the constituents.

– For example, a must-have is not a verb but a noun. The meaning of this type of compound can be glossed as "(one) whose B is A", where B is the second element of the compound and A the first.

• A bahuvrihi compound is one whose nature is expressed by neither of the words: thus a white-collar person is neither white nor a collar (the collar's colour is a metaphor for socioeconomic status).

– Other examples include firefly and openminded.

• Copulative compounds are compounds which have two semantic heads.

Can be recognize by possibility of adding "and" between the two heads.

– Examples: bittersweet, sleepwalk.

• Appositional compounds refer to lexemes that have two (contrary) attributes which classify the compound.

– Example: Player-coach (someone who is a player as well as a coach)

Two or more nouns combined to form a single noun.

• Compound nouns are written as:– separate words (grapefruit juice)– linked by a hyphen (sister-in-law)– one word (schoolteacher)

• A compounded noun whose form no longer clearly reveals its origin (such as bonfire or marshall) is sometimes called an amalgamated compound. – Many place names (or toponyms) are amalgamated

compounds: e.g., Norwich (north + village) and Sussex (south + Saxons).

NOUN COMPOUNDING

The compound noun structure is extremely varied in the types of meaning relations it can indicate. • It can be used to indicate:

– what someone does (language teacher)

– what something is for (waste-paper basket, grindstone)

– what the qualities of something are (whiteboard)

– how something works (immersion heater)

– when something happens (night frost) – where something is (doormat)

– what something is made of (woodpile)

Two or more words that act as a single idea to modify a noun. 

– part-time:  part-time employee– high-speed:  high-speed chase

• As a general rule, the words in a compound adjective are hyphenated when they come before a noun (a well-known actor) but not when they come after (The actor is well known).

• Also, compound adjectives formed with an adverbending in -ly (such asrapidly changing) are usually not hyphenated.

• Adverbs that do not end in -ly may take the hyphen to form a compound adjective. The reason is obvious. A fast-moving script suggests a roller coaster plot while a fast moving script might have pace but it is emotionally charged (i.e., emotionally moving) at the same time.

ADJECTIVE COMPOUND

• Two or more words combined to form a single verb. Conventionally, verb compounds are written as either one word ("to housesit") or two hyphenated words ("to water-proof").

– Example:

"I pretended to windowshop, pausing in front of a little store jammed with racks of costume jewelry."(Sophie Littlefield, Unforsaken. Delacorte Press, 2011)

VERB COMPOUND

The process of compounding verbs can be distinguished into 3 methods.

• A unit,such as a phrasal verb or a prepositional verb, that behaves either lexically or syntactically as a single verb. In such cases, a verb and its particle may be separated by other words. Now more commonly known as a multi-word verb.

– Example: "drop the essay off„ or...

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty."(President John Kennedy)

• A lexical verb plus its auxiliaries: in traditional grammar.

– "And then I was playing over and under and through all of this, and the pianist and bass were playing somewhere else."(Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography, with Quincy Troupe. Simon & Schuster, 1989)

• A compound word that contains rhyming elements, such as:

– blackjack, fuddy duddy, pooper-scooper, and voodoo.

• Most commonly found in songs, baby talk and nursery rhymes.

– Examples: kissy wissy, piggy wiggy.

• Characteristics: melodic, easy to remember and pronunce.

RHYMING COMPOUND

• A set of compound nouns or compound adjectives in which an element common to all members is not repeated.

• A hyphen and a space follow the first element of a suspended compound. (A hyphen with a space after it is called a hanging hyphen.)

• Examples: The difference between the pre- and post-test scores is the so-called learning gain.More injuries are caused by falls from a three- or four-foot height than by falls from tall extension ladders.

SUSPENDED COMPOUND

• As observed earlier, compounds are not limited to two words:– Examples: bathroom towel-rack, community center

finance committee.

• The process of compounding seems unlimited in English: starting with a word like:– sailboat– which we can easily expand to the compound sailboat

rigging– sailboat rigging design– sailboat rigging design training– sailboat rigging design training institute, and so on...

EXAMPLES AND OBSERVATIONS

• In most compounds the rightmost morpheme determines the category of the entire word.

– Thus, greenhouse is a noun because its rightmost component is a noun.

– Spoonfeed is a verb because feed also belongs to this category.

– Nationwide is an adjective just as wide is. . . . 

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES OF COMPOUNDS

• In terms of pronunciation there is an important generalization to be made: – adjective-noun compounds are characterized by a

more prominent stress on their first component. . . .

• 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.

OTHER FEATURES OF COMPOUND WORDS.

Compounds generally follow the regular rule by adding the regular -s inflection to their last element. . . .

• The following two compounds are exceptional in taking the inflection on the first element:– passer-by/passers-by– listener-in/listeners-in

• A few compounds ending in -ful usually take the plural inflection on the last element, but have a less common plural with the inflection on the first element:– mouthful/mouthfuls or mouthsful– spoonful/spoonfuls or spoonsful

• Compounds ending in -in- law allow the plural either on the first element or (informally) on the last element:– sister-in-law/sisters-in-law or sister-in-laws"

Plurals of Compounds

• Although there is no universally agreed-upon guideline regarding the use of compound words in the English language, in recent decades written English has displayed a noticeable trend towards increased use of compounds.

– Syllabic abbreviation: made by taking syllables of words and compounding them, such as pixel (picture element) and bit (binary digit).

• The German spelling reform of 1996 introduced the option of hyphenating compound nouns when it enhances comprehensibility and readability.

– This is done mostly with very long compound words by separating them into two or more smaller compounds, like Eisenbahn-Unterführung (railway underpass) or Kraftfahrzeugs-Betriebsanleitung (car manual).

RECENT TRENDS

• The definition of what counts as a single dictionary entry is fluid, thus hard to keep track of.– Many compound words have unique entries in the

dictionary.

• Any attempt at further precision is impossible because of the unlimited potential for compounding and derivation. – The OED [Oxford English Dictionary] policy on compounds

and derivatives is indicative of how blurred the line between a 'headword' and a compound or a derivative can be.

• “Clearly, the size of the dictionary records exceeds by far the vocabulary of an individual speaker."(Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell, "English Words." The Handbook of English Linguistics, ed. by Bas Aarts and April McMahon. Blackwell, 2006)

COMPOUNDS IN THE DICTIONARY

• Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy, Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge University Press, 2006

• Francis Katamba, English Words: Structure, History, Usage, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2005

• Bruce Grundy, So You Want to be a Journalist? Cambridge University Press, 2007

• Adrian Akmajian et al., Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication. MIT Press, 2001

• Sidney Greenbaum, Oxford English Grammar. Oxford University Press, 1996

BIBLIOGRAPHY