11 - Word composition. Classification of compounds.

Word compounding (word composition) is a universal way of deriving new words. It is also one of the most ancient, productive and active types of word-formation in English. About one-third of all derived words in modern English are compounds.

Word compounding is a kind of word-formation based on combining two immediate constituents (1C) where each is a derivational base.

Derivational bases in compounds may have different degrees of complexity: one or each of them may be simple as in snow+man, derived as in shoe+(make+er) or even compound as in water+(boat+man) 'a pond-bug'. But most English compounds have two simple bases, or, from the point of view of morphological analysis, two roots as in water-gun or snow-man. In other Germanic languages the number of roots in a compound is very often more than two.

In many cases, lexical meaning of a compound may be derived from the combined lexical meaning of its components and the structural meaning of its distributional pattern.

Usually the second derivational base is more important and determines lexical, grammatical and part-of-speech meanings of the whole compound: hall-mark is a noun meaning 'an official mark stamped on gold and silver articles in England', half-baked is an adjective meaning 'imperfectly baked, underdone'.

Compounds that have the same elements but differ in their distribution are different in lexical meaning, too (cf.: ring finger 'the third finger on the left hand (or in some parts of the world, the right hand) and finger-ring 'a ring to wear on a finger'; piano-player 'a person who plays the piano' and player piano 'a piano containing a mechanical instrument', see also armchair and chair-arm).

The types of semantic relations between the compound components are not formally expressed: they have to be deduced from the context and individually interpreted. The most frequent types, however, are:

In/on (water-house, garden-party, summer-house, oil-rich);

for (gun-powder, tooth-brush, baby-sitter, space-craft);

of (house-keeper, leather-boots);

resemblance (bell-flower, egg-head, snow-white, golf-fish);

be (oak-tree, black-board, she-cat);

do (rattle-snake, skyscraper, cry-baby

There are also relations between the components that may be expressed by the words have (sand-beach,), cause (hay-fever), use (hand-writing), and some others, and they still do not exhaust all possible relations of the compound constituents. Variations of their interpretations are diverse, and interpretation of compounds requires knowledge of their constituents' lexical meaning, of their structural pattern and general world knowledge. Water-bailiff, for example, has the meaning 'a construction to prevent poaching on preserved stretch of river', but water-battery 'series of voltaic cells immersed in water', water-colour 'artist's colour ground with water', water-closet 'sanitary convenience flushed by water', water-fall 'fall of water of a river'.

From this point of view, restrictions on their interpretation seem to be more interesting than listing their possibilities, but this kind of study has not been carried out yet.

The meaning of many compounds is quite transparent and may be easily deduced from the lexical meaning of their constituent parts and common knowledge about the relations of the concepts they stand for, as in the examples above. Nevertheless, many compounds have non-transparent meaning because along with morphological derivational processing of compounding the process of lexical-semantic derivation may take place there.

As a result of these processes the idiomaticity and unpredictability of a new word derived in this way becomes greater which requires much memorizing on the part of the learner. A green-bug, for example, is 'a green aphid very destructive to small grains', green dragon is 'an American arum with digitate leaves, slender greenish yellow spathe, and elongated spandix', greenroom is 'a room in a theater or concert hall where actors or musicians relax before, between or after appearances', green-heart is a 'tropical South American evergreen tree with a hard somewhat greenish wood'. Apple-jack is 'brandy distilled from cider', apple-maggot 'a two-winged fly whose larva burrows in and feeds esp. on apples', and apple-polish 'to curry favour (as by flattery) [fr. the traditional practice of schoolchildren bringing a shiny apple as a gift to their teacher].

Still another reason for meaning unpredictability in a compound is polysemy of its source words. The basic meaning of a polysemantic word is most actively used in one of the derivational bases of a compound but any other its sense being a separate nominative unit may become a derivational base for a word. Thus, the derivational base green in the compound green finch 'a very common European finch having olive-green and yellow plumage' employs the central meaning of the adjective green: 'of the colour green'. But green in greenhorn 'an inexperienced or unsophisticated person' ffr. obs greenhorn 'an animal with young horns] is used in its minor, less common meaning which, however, exists in the semantic structure of the word green: 'fresh, new, as in a green wound'. Green in greenhouse 'a glassed enclosure for the cultivation or protection of tender plants' uses its still another minor meaning, 'relating to green plants, and usually edible herbage, as in green salad'

The whole compound word, like any other lexical unit, simple or derived in any way, may be both mono- and polysemantic. The compound word magpie, for example, had only one meaning, 'any of numerous birds relating to the jays', but the word greenhouse has at least two of them '1. a glassed enclosure for the cultivation or protection of tender plants', 2. a clear plastic shell covering a section in an airplane'.

Classification of compounds may be done according to various principles.

1. First of all, from the derivational point of view one should distinguish between compounds proper that are made up of two derivational bases (sauce+pan) and derivational, or pseudo-compounds, that look like compounds only on the morphological level because they have more than one root but are derived by conversion, affixation, back-formation and other name derivational processes (a break-down, a pickpocket, long-legged).

Derivational compounds are further subdivided into three groups:

- derivational compound nouns,

- derivational compound adjectives

- derivational compound verbs.

Derivational compound nouns are usually built by conversion on the basis of so-called phrasal verbs: cast-offs from to cast off, a break-through from to break through, by substantivization of a phrase often accompanied by productive suffocation as in (six inch-)+-er, (two deck-)+-er, or by prefixation applied to a compound derivational base as in ex-+(house+wife).

Many scholars believe that completely demotivated compounds \\kefiddle-sticks, grass-widow, scape-goat should also be referred to this group because their meaning is completely different from the lexical meanings of their constituents. They are believed to be the final results of lexical-semantic derivation.

Derivational compound adjectives are built by suffixation applied to a free word group reduced to a stem: (broad shoulder-)+-ed; (heart shape-)+-ed or by adjectivalization (cleanup adj from clean-up n from clean up v; apple-pie adj 'of, relating to, or characterized by traditionally American values (as honesty or simplicity)' (from the noun apple-pie).

Derivational compound verbs are created by means of conversion applied to a compound derivational base: to weekend from a week-end or by means of back-derivation applied to a compound derivational base where one of the 1C is a suffixational derivative: to babysit from a baby-sitter, to dryclean from dry-cleaning.\