Morphology Ch 6 PDF

CH6: COMPOUND WORDS, BLENDS AND PHRASAL WORDS 6.1 COMPOUNDS VERSUS PHRASES In this chapter we will look at compounds, that is words formed by combining roots, and the much smaller category of phrasal words, that is items that have the internal structure of phrases but function syntactically as...

CH6: COMPOUND WORDS, BLENDS AND PHRASAL WORDS 6.1 COMPOUNDS VERSUS PHRASES In this chapter we will look at compounds, that is words formed by combining roots, and the much smaller category of phrasal words, that is items that have the internal structure of phrases but function syntactically as words.  Roots in English are mostly free rather than bound. How can we tell, then, whether a pair of such roots constitutes a compound word or a phrase, that is a unit of sentence structure rather than a complex word?  Consider the expressions a green house, with its literal meaning, and a greenhouse, meaning a glass structure (not usually green in color!) where delicate plants are reared.  There is a difference in sound corresponding to the difference in meaning: in the first expression the main stress is on house, while in the second the main stress is on green.  This pattern of semantic contrast between expressions stressed in different places is quite common, as in the following examples: 1. black bóard bláckboard ‘board that is black’ ‘board for writing on’ 2. silk wórm sílkworm ‘worm made of silk (e.g. a soft toy)’ ‘caterpillar that spins silk’ 3. hair nét háirnet ‘net made of hair’ ‘net for covering hair’ 4. white hóuse (the) Whíte House ‘house that is white’ ‘residence of the US President’ 5. toy fáctory tóy factory ‘factory that is a toy (e.g. in a model city)’ ‘factory where toys are made’ There are two ways to distinguish compounds from phrases: 1. Stress:  The items on the left in (1)–(5), like green hóuse, are phrases, because it is characteristic of phrases to be stressed on the last word. The items on the right, stressed on the first element like gréenhouse, are generally classified as compounds – though this stress pattern applies consistently only to compound nouns, not to compounds in other word classes. 2. a second criterion used for distinguishing compounds from phrases is semantic:  A compound tends to have a meaning that is more or less unpredictable. This is true of most of the compounds in (1)–(5). However, this criterion must be treated with caution because being semantically unpredictable does not correlate exactly with being a word. Yet, it is true that words are more likely to be lexical items than phrases are, so treating semantic idiosyncrasy as an indicator of compound status will not often be misleading. 6.2 COMPOUND VERBS  Verbs formed by compounding are much less usual than verbs derived by affixation.  Nevertheless, a variety of types exist which may be distinguished according to their structure: 6. verb–verb (VV): stir-fry, freeze-dry 7. noun–verb (NV): hand-wash, air-condition, steam-clean 8. adjective–verb (AV): dry-clean, whitewash 9. preposition–verb (PV): underestimate, outrun, overcook  Only the PV type is really common, however, and some compounds with under-, over- and out- do not need to be classed as lexical items. For example, out- can create a transitive verb meaning ‘outdo in Xing’ from any verb denoting a competitive or potentially competitive activity (e.g. outsail, outsing, outswim), while new words with over- can also be created freely (e.g. overpolish, overcriticise, overbleach).  Compounds have a verb as the rightmost element, and with most of them, the activity denoted by the compound as whole is a variety of the activity denoted by that rightmost element. Let us call these compounds right-headed, the rightmost element being the head. Most English compounds are right- headed, but not all, as we shall see in Section 6.6. 6.3 COMPOUND ADJECTIVES Here are some examples of right-headed compound adjectives: 10. noun–adjective(NA): sky-high, coal-black, oil-rich 11. adjective–adjective(AA): grey-green, squeaky-clean, red-hot 12. preposition–adjective(PA): underfull, overactive  As with verbs, it is the type with the preposition over as its first element that seems most productive, in that new adjectives of this type, with the meaning ‘too X’, are readily acceptable: for example, overindignant, oversmooth.  In overactive at (12), the head of the compound is the adjective active derived from the verb act. In structure, therefore, this adjective is not a mere string of morphemes (over + act + -ive), but rather a nested structure: [over[act-ive]].  Adjectives with a VA structure, corresponding to the VV verbs at (2), would resemble a hypothetical ‘float-light’ ‘light enough to float’ or ‘sing-happy’ ‘happy enough to sing’. One actual example is fail-safe ‘designed to return to a safe condition if it fails or goes wrong’.  All the compounds in (10)–(12) are right-headed. There are also a few compound adjectives that are not right-headed, but we will discuss them along with all headless compounds in Section 6.5. 6.4 COMPOUND NOUNS  It is with nouns that compounding really comes into its own as a word forming process in English. That is not surprising. Cultural and technical change produces more novel artefacts than novel activities or novel properties. These changes therefore generate new vocabulary needs that are more readily answered by new nouns than by new verbs or adjectives. Examples can be found with each of the other main word classes supplying the left-hand element: 13. verb–noun (VN): swearword, drophammer, playtime 14. noun–noun (NN): hairnet, mosquito net, butterfly net, hair restorer 15. adjective–noun (AN): blackboard, greenstone, faintheart 16. preposition–noun (PN): in-group, outpost, overcoat  All of these have the main stress on the left – an important characteristic for distinguishing compound nouns from noun phrases. (The fact that hair restorer, butterfly net and mosquito net are spelled with a space does not affect the fact that, from the grammatical point of view, they each constitute one complex word).Most of these are also right-headed, although we will defer further discussion of headedness to Section 6.6.  If you try to think of more examples for the four types at (13)–(16), you will probably find the task easiest for the NN type at (14). In fact, almost any pair of nouns can be juxtaposed (or combined) in English so as to form a compound or a phrase – provided that there is something that this compound or phrase could plausibly mean.  The issue of meaning turns out to play an important part in distinguishing two kinds of NN compound.  Consider the four examples at (14). Does each one have a precise interpretation that is clearly the most natural, on the basis of the meanings of their two components? For hair restorer, the answer is surely yes: it most naturally denotes a substance for restoring hair growth.  On the other hand, for hairnet, butterfly net and mosquito net the answer is less clear.  What tells us that a hairnet is for keeping one’s hair in place, while a butterfly net is for catching butterflies and a mosquito net is for keeping mosquitoes away? This information does not reside in the meaning of net, nor in the meanings of hair, butterfly and mosquito.  The most that one can conclude from these individual meanings is that each is a net that has something to do with hair, butterflies, and mosquitoes, respectively.  Arriving at the precise meanings of these compounds depends on our knowledge of the world (that some people collect butterflies, and that mosquitoes can carry disease) rather than on purely linguistic knowledge.  When the head of a NN compound is derived from a verb, as restorer is, the most natural way to interpret the whole compound is quite precise: the first element expresses the object argument of the verb (that is, the person or thing that undergoes the action).  For example, an X-restorer, whatever X is, something or someone that restores X.  Here are some more compounds whose second element is derived from a verb: 17. sign-writer, slum clearance, crime prevention, wish-fulfilment  For all of these, the most natural interpretation is clear. To interpret any of them some other way – for example, to interpret crime prevention as meaning not ‘prevention of crime’ but ‘use of crime for preventive purposes’ – seems contrived and unnatural.  Let’s call a NN compound like hairnet or mosquito net, in which the right-hand noun is not derived from a verb and whose interpretation is therefore not precisely predictable on a purely linguistic basis, a primary or root compound.  Let’s call a NN compound like hair restorer or slum clearance, in which the first element is interpreted as the object of the verb contained within the second, a secondary or verbal compound. (Yet another term sometime used is synthetic compound).  Paradoxically, then, although verbs are relatively rare as elements in compounds in English (the swearword pattern is unusual), verbal compounds, in the sense just defined, are common.  Secondary compounds are certainly right-headed, in that (for example) crime prevention denotes a kind of prevention and wish-fulfilment denotes a kind of fulfilment. In this respect they are like most NN compounds and most compounds generally – but not all, as we shall see in the next section. 6.5 HEADED AND HEADLESS COMPOUNDS  The AN compounds given at (15) included faintheart alongside blackboard and greenstone. However, whereas a greenstone is a kind of stone and a blackboard is a kind of board, a faintheart is not a kind of heart but a kind of person – someone who has a faint heart, metaphorically. So, although heart is a noun, it is not appropriate to call heart the head of the compound.  Rather, faintheart is headless, in the sense that its status as a noun is not determined by either of its two components. Similar headless AN compounds are loudmouth and redshank (a kind of bird that has red legs), and headless NN compounds are stickleback (a kind of fish with spines on its back) and sabretooth (a large extinct carnivorous mammal with massive curved upper canine teeth).  A few VN-type compound nouns resemble secondary compounds in that the noun at the right is interpreted as the object of the verb: 18. pickpocket, killjoy, cutpurse  These too are headless, in that a pickpocket is not a kind of pocket, for example.  An implication of these analyses is as follows: if the fact that heart and pocket are nouns is really irrelevant to the fact that faintheart and pickpocket are nouns too, we should expect there to be some headless nouns in which the second element is not a noun at all – and likewise, perhaps, headless adjectives in which the second element is not an adjective. Both expectations turn out to be correct. Some nouns consist of a verb and a preposition or adverb: 19. take-off, sell-out, wrap-up, sit-in  In Chapter 5 we saw that nouns are sometimes formed from verbs by conversion, that is with no affix. The nouns at (19) can be seen as a special case of this, where the base is a verb plus another word (sometimes constituting a lexical item), as illustrated in (20): 20. a. The plane took off at noon. b. The chairman wrapped the meeting up. c. The students sat in during the discussion.  As for headless adjectives, there are quite a number consisting of a preposition and a noun: 21. overland, in-house, with-profits, offshore, downmarket, upscale, underweight, over-budget  The adjectival status of these compounds can often be confirmed by their appropriateness in comparative contexts and with the modifier very: 22. a. They live in a very downmarket neighborhood. b. This year’s expenditure is even more over-budget than last year’s.  The fact that the word class of these headless compounds is not deter- mined by any element inside them (that they have no internal ‘center’, one might say) has led some grammarians to call them exocentric – that is, having a ‘center’ outside themselves, figuratively speaking.  According to this approach, headed compounds would be regarded as having an internal ‘center’; and they are sometimes called endocentric. 6.6 BLENDS AND ACRONYMS  blends: a kind of compound where at least one component is reproduced only partially. A straightforward example is smog, blended from smoke and fog ; a more elaborate one is chortle blended from chuckle and snort.  Examples of partial blends, where only one component is truncated, are talkathon (from talk plus marathon) and cheeseburger (from cheese plus hamburger). The ready acceptance of cheeseburger and similar blends such as beefburger and vegeburger may have been encouraged by a feeling that hamburger is a compound whose first element is ham – scarcely appropriate semantically, since the meat in a hamburger (originally a kind of meat pattie from Hamburg) is beef.  The most extreme kind of truncation that a component of a blend can undergo is reduction to just one sound (or letter), usually the first. Blends made up of initial letters are known as acronyms, of which well-known examples are NATO (for North Atlantic Treaty Organization), ANZAC (for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), RAM (for random access memory), SCSI (pronounced scuzzy, from small computer systems interface), and AIDS (from acquired immune deficiency syndrome).  Intermediate between an acronym and a blend is sonar (from sound navigation and ranging).  The use of capital letters in the spelling of some of these words reflects the fact that speakers are aware of their acronym status.  It does not follow that any string of capital letters represents an acronym. If the conventional way of reading the string is by pronouncing the name of each letter in turn, as with USA and RP (standing for the ‘Received Pronunciation’ of British English), then it is not an acronym but an abbreviation.  It is clear from these examples that blending and acronymy are in active use for the creation of new vocabulary.  However, they differ from derivational affixation and normal compounding in being more or less self-conscious, and are concentrated in areas where the demand for new noun vocabulary is greatest, such as (currently) information technology. 6.8 PHRASAL WORDS  In some compounds, relationships are expressed that are the same as ones expressed in syntax: for example, the verb–object relationship between hair and restore in hair restorer. On the other hand, the way in which the verb–object relationship is expressed in this compound is quite different from how it is expressed in syntax, in that the two words appear in the opposite order: we say This substance restores hair, not *This substance hair-restores.  There is a clear difference between compound word structure and sentence structure here.  phrasal words are complex items that function as words, yet whose internal structure is that of a clause or phrase rather than of a compound.  An example of a phrasal word is the noun jack-in-the-box.  Structurally this has the appearance of a noun phrase in which the head noun, jack, is modified by a prepositional phrase, in the box, exactly parallel to the phrases people in the street or (a) book on the shelf.  However, it forms its plural by suffixing -s not to the head noun (as in books on the shelf ) but to the whole expression: not ‘jacks-in-the-box’ but jack-in-the-boxes, as in They jumped up and down like jack-in-the-boxes.  Though structurally a phrase, then, it behaves as a word.  Contrast this with another item which is at least as idiosyncratic in meaning and which has a superficially similar structure: brother-in-law.  A crucial difference is that brother-in-law forms its plural by affixing -s not to the whole expression but to the head noun: brothers-in-law. Despite its hyphens, therefore, brother-in-law is not a word at all but a phrase (although also a lexical item).  Can phrases other than noun phrases constitute phrasal words?  The answer is yes.  Adjectival examples are dyed-in-the-wool (as in a dyed-in-the- wool Republican) or couldn’t-care-less (as in a couldn’t-care-less attitude).  Syntactically, dyed-in-the-wool looks like an adjective phrase consisting of an adjective (died ‘artificially colored’) modified by a prepositional phrase, just like suitable for the party or devoted to his children.  However, such a phrase cannot entirely precede the noun it modifies (we say a man devoted to his children or suitable music for the party, not *a devoted to his children man or *suitable for the party music).  Therefore the behavior of dyed-in-the-wool is that of a word rather than a phrase.  As for couldn’t-care-less, its structure is that of a verb phrase, but again its behavior is that of an adjective (e.g. Your attitude is even more couldn’t-care-less than hers!).  a small and rather old-fashioned class of lexical items exemplified by governor general, attorney general, court martial and lord lieutenant.  How do they form their plural: like attorney generals, or like attorneys general?  If you prefer the former, then these items may seem at first like further phrasal words – except for the fact that they differ from normal English noun phrases in having an adjective following the noun rather than preceding it.  It seems better, therefore, to treat them as examples of something that we have not so far encountered: endocentric words which, untypically, have their head on the left rather than on the right.  On the other hand, if you prefer the latter sort of plural (attorneys general), they seem more akin to brother(s)-in-law: not words but lexicalized phrases. 6.9 CONCLUSION  This chapter has illustrated various ways in which an English word may itself be composed of words.