Lexicology

1. Word-composition - the comb of 2 or more existing words to create a new word - is one of the most common and imp. word-b. processes in Eng. It plays a central role in word formation in many lang. A comp. is a unit of vocab. that consists of more than 1 lex. stem, e.g. campsite (N+N), bluebird (A+N), whitewash (A+V), With very few exceptions, the resulting comp. word is a N, a V, or an adj. In most comp-ds the rightmost morpheme determines the category of the entire word, e.g. greenhouse is a noun because its rightmost component is a noun The morpheme that determ. the cat. of the entire word is called the head.

Compounds in Eng. can be written diff-ly. In terms of pronun., however, there is an impor. Generaliz. to be made. In partic., adj.-noun compounds are characterized by a more prominent stress on their first component. In noncompounds consisting of an adj. and a N, in contrast, the second element is generally stressed (cf greenhouse "a glass-enclosed garden" and an exp. green house "a house painted green").

A 2nd distinguishing feature of compounds in Eng. is that tense and pl. 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). Comp. are used to express a wide range of meaning relat-ps in Eng. In most cases, a comp. denotes a subtype of the concept denoted by its head. Thus, cat food is a type of food, sky blue is a type of blue. Such compounds are called endocentric (airplane, steamboat.) In a smaller number of cases, however, the meaning of the compound does not follow from the meanings of its parts. Thus, a redneck is a person and not a type of neck; wolkman is a type of portable radio. Such comp. are said to be exocentric 1)of the parts of speech compound words represent: a)nouns: night-gown, b)verbs: to outgrow; c)adjectives: peace-loving, d)adverbs: downstairs, e)prepositions: within, f)numerals 2)of the means of composition: a)neutral e.g.goldfish, b)morphological e.g. videophone, craftsman, c)syntactical-the components are joined by means of form-word stems, e.g. man-of-war; 3)of degree of semantic Independence: a)subord-ve compounds where 1 of the compon. is the semantic centre and the structural centre and the 2nd comp. is subordinate, and the subordinative relations can be comparative (world-wide);instrumental (sunrise); relations of purpose (bookshelf);emphatic (dead-cheap);funct.(bathrobe, textbook); sex relations (he-goat); various relations of adverbial type (colour-blind), etc. Subord. compounds make the bulk of English compound words; b) coordinative where both components are semantically indep. fall into 3 groups: reduplicative made up by the repetition of the same base, e.g. goody-goody,; compounds formed with the help of rhythmic stems, e.g. a walkie-talkie,additive are built on stems of the independently functioning words of the same part of speech. 4)of the order of Cs may be: a)syntactic - components in direct order that resembles the order of words in free phrases, e.g. blacklist, b)asynt. are comp. with indirect order e.g. oil-rich, rain-driven; 5)of their structure: a) compounds proper e.g. film-star, b)compound-derived words (stem + affixes), e.g. long-legged,c) compound-shortened words, e.g. h-bag,d)compounds where at least one of the constit-s is a compound stem: wastepaper-basket; 6)of the correlative relations with the system of free word-groups: a)non-idiomatic, if the meaning of the whole is the sum total of the meanings of the components, e.g. flower-bed; b)idiomatic are different in meaning from the corresponding free phrases, e.g. a night-cap.The theory of Immed Constit.was originally set forth by Bloomfield as an attempt to determine the ways in which lexical units are related to one another. This kind of analysis is used in lexicology mainly to discover the derivational structure of lexical units. Immediate const-nts are any of the two meaningful parts of a word. The main constituents are an affix and a stem.