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For example, road-building, baby-sitter, woman-doctor. Subordinative compounds may be syntactic which depends on syntactic rules. For example, mad-doctor, bluebell, a slow-coach (adj-r-n) and asyntactic. for example, red-hot, oil-rich, long-legg'ed (adj-adj:): there is no syntactic rule and it does not depend on the syntactic rules. Many compounds are polysemantic. E.g. the verb to whitewash has the following meanings:
1) make white with whitewash
I) to glass or cover up vices, crimes etc.
But their polysemy is not based on the polysemy of their constituents. They
develop a polysemy of their own.
F u n c t i o n a l l y compounds are viewed as words of different parts of speech. It is the head-member of the compound, i.e. its second IC that is indicative of the grammatical and lexical category the compound word belongs to. Compound words are found in all parts of speech, but the bulk of compounds are nouns and adjectives. Each part of speech is characterised by its set of derivational patterns and their semantic variants. Compound adverbs, pronouns and connectives are represented by an insignificant number of words, e.g. somewhere, somebody, inside, upright, otherwise, moreover, elsewhere, by means of, etc. No new compounds are coined on this pattern. Compound pronouns and adverbs built on the repeating first and second IC like body, ever, thing make closed sets of words with some, any, every, no } + } body, thing, one, where.
On the whole composition is not productive either for adverbs, pronouns
or for connectives.
Verbs are of special interest. There is a small group of compound verbs made up of the combination of verbal and adverbial stems that language retains from earlier stages, e.g. to bypass, to inlay, to offset. This type according to some authors, is no longer productive and is rarely found in new compounds.
There are many polymorphic verbs that are represented by morphemic sequences of two root-morphemes, like to weekend, to gooseflesh, to spring-clean, but derivationally they are all words of secondary derivation in which the existing compound nouns only serve as bases for derivation.
They are often termed pseudo-compound verbs. Such polymorphic verbs
are presented by two groups:
1) verbs formed by means of conversion from the stems of compound nouns as in to spotlight from a spotlight, to sidetrack from a side-track, to handcuff from handcuffs, to blacklist from a blacklist, to pinpoint from a pin-point;
2) verbs formed by back-derivation from the stems of compound nouns, e.g. to babysit from a baby-sitter, to playact from play-acting, to housekeep from house-keeping, to spring-clean from spring-cleaning.
The linguistic analysis of extensive language data proves that there exists a regular correlation between the system of free phrases and all types of subordinative (and additive) compounds1. Correlation embraces both the structure and the meaning of compound words, it underlies the entire system of productive present-day English composition conditioning the derivational patterns and lexical types of compounds.
The s t r u c t u r a l correlation manifests itself in the morphological character of components, range of bases and their order and arrangement. It is important to stress that correlative relations embrace only minimal, non-expanded nuclear types of phrases. The bases brought together in compound words are built only on the stems of those parts of speech that may form corresponding word-groups. The head of the word-group becomes the head-member of the compound, i.e. its second component. The typical structural relations expressed in word-groups syntactically are conveyed in compounds only by the nature and order of its bases. Compounds of each part of speech correlate only with certain types of minimal variable phrases.
S e m a n t i c a l l y correlation manifests itself in the fact that the semantic relations between the components of a compound mirror the semantic relations between the member-words in correlated word-groups. For example, compound adjectives of the n+Ven type, e.g. duty-bound, snow-covered, are circumscribed by the instrumental relations typical of the correlated word-groups of Ven+ by/with + N type regardless of the actual lexical meanings of the bases. Compound nouns of the n+n type, e.g. story-teller, music-lover, watch-maker, all mirror the agentive relations proper to phrases of the N who V+N, cf. a story-teller and one who tells
stories, etc.
Compound words, due to the fact that they do not require any explicit way to convey the semantic relationship between their components except their order, are of much wider semantic range, leave more freedom for semantic interpretation and convey meaning in a more compressed and concise way. This makes the meaning of compounds more flexible and situationally derived.
It is natural that those types of compound words which do not establish regular correlations and that are marked by a lack or very low degree of motivation must be regarded as unproductive as, for example, compound nouns of the a+n type, e. g. bluebell, blackbird, mad-doctor.
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