5.2.5. Compounding

Definition. Structure and meaning. Compounds and word combinations. Classifications

1. hefiiiiliim. Structure and meaning!

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).

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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' [fr. 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'.

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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'.