As we saw at the end of section (
4.4.1
), compounding and affixation are by no means incompatible. An
affixed base may serve as input to a compounding process, and vice versa. In [4.20b], the suffix is separated
by ‘=’ from the base.
Compounds differ in their structure. The majority of English compounds are nouns. Common types of
noun compounds include the following:
[4.21]
red tape
bathroom
schoolteacher
High Court
ball-point
head-hunter
blackberry
briefcase
speech-writer
greenfly
bulldog
housekeeper
hothouse
ashtray
firelighter
White House
desktop
matchmaker
soft-ball
housewife
gamekeeper
easychair
inkwell
door-keeper
New Year
millstone
mine
sweeper
blueprint
dustman
can
opener
Let us now turn to examples of adjectival compounds. Some are listed in [4.22]:
[4.22]
N+Ven
Adj.+Ving
Adj.+Ven
crestfallen
hard-working
clear-sighted
waterlogged
good-looking
hard-featured
heartbroken
easygoing
soft-hearted
frost-bitten
fast-growing
new-born
Note: Ven
is the past participial form of the verb. It
is the verb form that ends in -en or
-ed after
has in, e.g.
It has
eaten
or in
It has wounded.
An interesting property of most compounds is that they are HEADED. This means that one of the words
that make up the compound is syntactically dominant. In English the head is normally the item on the right
hand of the compound. The syntactic properties of the head are passed on to the entire compound. Thus, in
our examples above, if we have a compound like
easychair which is made up of the adjective
easy and the
noun
chair, syntactically the entire word is a noun. This applies to all the words in the left-hand column in
[4.21].
Furthermore, the syntactic head is usually also the semantic head of the compound. The non-head
element in the compound specifies more narrowly some characteristic of the head. So, an
easychair is a type
of
chair, a
bulldog is a kind of
dog, a
bedroom is a kind of
room etc. If a compound contains a semantic
head, it is called an ENDOCENTRIC COMPOUND.
Unfortunately, at the semantic level headedness is not consistently applied. A minority of compounds
have no semantic head. Take
turncoat, head-hunter and
red tape. Turncoat is not a coat at all, but a person.
Literally, a
turncoat is a person who ‘turns his or her coat’. But the word is used metaphorically to mean
50 BUILDING WORDS
‘renegade’. A
head-hunter at one time might literally have hunted people for their heads, armed with a bow
and arrow, or a heavy club. But today’s head-hunters who occupy plush office suites are not hunters who
collect heads for trophies. They are simply (peaceful) recruiters of top business executive talent.
Likewise,
red tape may literally refer to pinkish red tape used to secure legal and bureaucratic
documents. But in most uses of that expression today it is more likely to mean obsessive adherence to
administrative procedures which gets in the way of positive decision-making and action. Red tape in this
sense is not a kind of tape.
Let us now turn to the phonology of compounds. As mentioned in
Chapter 2
, compounds typically have
one word that receives the main word stress while the other word is relatively less prominent. Contrast the
stress pattern of the compound nouns in [4.23a] and in the noun phrases containing the same words in [4.
23b]:
[4.23]
a.
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