Compound (linguistics)

In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. That is, in familiar terms, compounding occurs when two or more words are joined to make one longer word. The meaning of the compound may be similar to or different from the meanings of its components in isolation. The component stems of a compound may be of the same part of speech—as in the case of the English word footpath, composed of the two nouns foot and path—or they may belong to different parts of speech, as in the case of the English word blackbird, composed of the adjective black and the noun bird. With very few exceptions, English compound words are stressed on their first component stem.

Formation of compounds

Compound formation rules vary widely across language types.

In a synthetic language, the relationship between the elements of a compound may be marked with a case or other morpheme. For example, the German compound Kapitänspatent consists of the lexemes Kapitän (sea captain) and Patent (license) joined by an -s- (originally a genitive case suffix); and similarly, the Latin lexeme paterfamilias contains the archaic genitive form familias of the lexeme familia (family). Conversely, in the Hebrew language compound, the word בֵּית סֵפֶר bet sefer (school), it is the head that is modified: the compound literally means "house-of book", with בַּיִת bayit (house) having entered the construct state to become בֵּית bet (house-of). This latter pattern is common throughout the Semitic languages, though in some it is combined with an explicit genitive case, so that both parts of the compound are marked (e.g. Arabic عبد الله ʕabdu ʔal-lāhi "servant-of-God").

Agglutinative languages tend to create very long words with derivational morphemes. Compounds may or may not require the use of derivational morphemes also. The longest compounds in the world may be found in the Finnic and Germanic languages. In German, extremely extendable compound words can be found in the language of chemical compounds, where, in the cases of biochemistry and polymers, they can be practically unlimited in length, mostly because the German rule suggests combining all noun adjuncts with the noun as the very last stem. German examples include Farbfernsehgerät (color television set), Funkfernbedienung (radio remote control), and the jocular word Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze (Danube steamboat shipping company Captain's hat).

In Finnish, although there is theoretically no limit to the length of compound words, words consisting of more than three components are rare. Even those with less than three components can look mysterious to non-Finnish such as hätäuloskäytävä (emergency exit). Internet folklore sometimes suggests that lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas (Airplane jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student) is the longest word in Finnish, but evidence of it actually being used is scant and anecdotal at best.[1]

Compounds can be rather long when translating technical documents from English to some other language, since the lengths of the words are theoretically unlimited, especially in chemical terminology. For example, when translating an English technical document to Swedish, the term "Motion estimation search range settings" can be directly translated to rörelseuppskattningssökintervallsinställningar, though in reality, the word would most likely be divided in two: sökintervallsinställningar för rörelseuppskattning – "search range settings for motion estimation".

Subclasses

Semantic classification

A common semantic classification of compounds yields four types:

An endocentric compound consists of a head, i.e. the categorical part that contains the basic meaning of the whole compound, and modifiers, which restrict this meaning. For example, the English compound doghouse, where house is the head and dog is the modifier, is understood as a house intended for a dog. Endocentric compounds tend to be of the same part of speech (word class) as their head, as in the case of doghouse. (Such compounds were called tatpuruṣa in the Sanskrit tradition.)

Exocentric compounds (called a bahuvrihi compound in the Sanskrit tradition) are hyponyms of some unexpressed semantic head (e.g. a person, a plant, an animal...), but not of any its component which may be perceived as a formal head, and their meaning often cannot be transparently guessed from its constituent parts. For example, the English compound white-collar is neither a kind of collar nor a white thing. In an exocentric compound, the word class is determined lexically, disregarding the class of the constituents. For example, a must-have is not a verb but a noun. The meaning of this type of compound can be glossed as "(one) whose B is A", where B is the second element of the compound and A the first. A bahuvrihi compound is one whose nature is expressed by neither of the words: thus a white-collar person is neither white nor a collar (the collar's colour is a metonym for socioeconomic status). Other English examples include barefoot.

Copulative compounds are compounds which have two semantic heads.

Appositional compounds refer to lexemes that have two (contrary) attributes which classify the compound.

Type Description Examples
endocentric A+B denotes a special kind of B darkroom, smalltalk
exocentric A+B denotes a special kind of an unexpressed semantic head skinhead, paleface (head: 'person')
copulative A+B denotes 'the sum' of what A and B denote bittersweet, sleepwalk
appositional A and B provide different descriptions for the same referent actor-director, maidservant

Syntactic classification

Noun–noun compounds

Most natural languages have compound nouns. The positioning of the words (i. e. the most common order of constituents in phrases where nouns are modified by adjectives, by possessors, by other nouns, etc.) varies according to the language. While Germanic languages, for example, are left-branching when it comes to noun phrases (the modifiers come before the head), the Romance languages are usually right-branching.

In French, compound nouns are often formed by left-hand heads with prepositional components inserted before the modifier, as in chemin-de-fer 'railway' lit. 'road of iron' and moulin à vent 'windmill', lit. 'mill (that works)-by-means-of wind'.

In Turkish, one way of forming compound nouns is as follows: yeldeğirmeni ‘windmill’ (yel: wind, değirmen-i:mill-possessive); demiryolu 'railway'(demir: iron, yol-u: road-possessive).

Verb–noun compounds

A type of compound that is fairly common in the Indo-European languages is formed of a verb and its object, and in effect transforms a simple verbal clause into a noun.

In Spanish, for example, such compounds consist of a verb conjugated for the second person singular imperative followed by a noun (singular or plural): e.g., rascacielos (modelled on "skyscraper", lit. 'scratch skies'), sacacorchos ('corkscrew', lit. 'pull corks'), guardarropa ('wardrobe', lit. 'store clothes'). These compounds are formally invariable in the plural (but in many cases they have been reanalyzed as plural forms, and a singular form has appeared). French and Italian have these same compounds with the noun in the singular form: Italian grattacielo, 'skyscraper'; French grille-pain, 'toaster' (lit. 'toast bread').

This construction exists in English, generally with the verb and noun both in uninflected form: examples are spoilsport, killjoy, breakfast, cutthroat, pickpocket, dreadnought, and know-nothing.

Also common in English is another type of verb–noun (or noun–verb) compound, in which an argument of the verb is incorporated into the verb, which is then usually turned into a gerund, such as breastfeeding, finger-pointing, etc. The noun is often an instrumental complement. From these gerunds new verbs can be made: (a mother) breastfeeds (a child) and from them new compounds mother-child breastfeeding, etc.

In the Australian Aboriginal language Jingulu, a Pama–Nyungan language, it is claimed that all verbs are V+N compounds, such as "do a sleep", or "run a dive", and the language has only three basic verbs: do, make, and run.[2]

A special kind of composition is incorporation, of which noun incorporation into a verbal root (as in English backstabbing, breastfeed, etc.) is most prevalent (see below).

Verb–verb compounds

Main article: Compound verb

Verb–verb compounds are sequences of more than one verb acting together to determine clause structure. They have two types:

Serial verb expressions in English may include What did you go and do that for?, or He just upped and left; this is however not quite a true compound since they are connected by a conjunction and the second missing arguments may be taken as a case of ellipsis.

De rabia puso rompiendo la olla, 'In anger (he/she) smashed the pot.' (Lit. from anger put breaking the pot)
Botaremos matándote 'We will kill you.' (Cf. Quichua huañuchi-shpa shitashun, lit. kill-CP throw.1plFut.
Likewise in Hindi: तेरे को मार डालेंगे tere ko mār DāleNge, lit. "we will kill-throw you").
What did you go and do that for?
If you are not giving away free information on your web site then a huge proportion of your business is just upping and leaving.
Big Pig, she took and built herself a house out of brush.

Compound adpositions

Compound prepositions formed by prepositions and nouns are common in English and the Romance languages (consider English on top of, Spanish encima de, etc.). Japanese shows the same pattern, except the word order is the opposite (with postpositions): no naka (lit. "of inside", i.e. "on the inside of"). Hindi has a small number of simple (i.e., one-word) postpositions and a large number of compound postpositions, mostly consisting of simple postposition ke followed by a specific postposition (e.g., ke pas, "near"; ke nīche, "underneath").

Examples from different languages

Anishinaabemowin/Ojibwe:

Chinese (Cantonese Jyutping):

Dutch:

Finnish:

Sewage-treatment-facility - The German language has many compounds

German:

Ancient Greek:

Icelandic:

Italian:

Japanese:

Korean:

Spanish:

Tamil: In Cemmozhi (Classical Tamil), rules for compounding are laid down in grammars such as Tolkappiyam and Nannūl, in various forms, under the name punarcci. Examples of compounds include kopuram from 'kō' (king) + 'puram' (exterior). Sometimes phonemes may be inserted during the blending process such as in kovil from 'kō' (king) + 'il' (home). Other types are like vennai (butter) from 'veḷḷai' (white) + 'nei' (ghee); note how 'veḷḷai' becomes 'ven'.

In koṭuntamizh (Non-standard Tamil), parts of words from other languages may be morphed into Tamil. Common examples include 'ratta-azhuttam' (blood pressure) from the Sanskrit 'rakta' (blood) and Cemmozhi 'azhuttam' (pressure); note how 'rakta' becomes 'ratta' in Tamil order to remove the consonant-cluster. This also happens with English, for examples 'kāpi-kaṭai' (coffee shop) is from English 'coffee' which becomes 'kāpi' in Tamil, and the Tamil 'kaṭai' meaning shop.

Tłįchǫ Yatiì/Dogrib:

Germanic languages

In Germanic languages, compounds are formed by prepending a descriptive word in front of the main word. For example, "starfish" is a specific "fish" with a "star" shape. Likewise, the noun phrase "star shape" means a star-like shape. While some compounds (like "starfish") may have a predefined meaning, compounds like "star shape" and "starlike" can be composed when needed, and their interpretations are bound by the rules of compounding. Germanic compounds inherit the lexical category of the main word, and are inflected by inflecting the main word. That is to say, since "fish" and "shape" are nouns, "starfish" and "star shape" must also be nouns, and take plural forms "starfish" and "star shapes". This principle still holds for languages that express definiteness by inflection (as in North Germanic), whereas for languages that use a definite article instead, the definite article precedes the whole compound rather than intermingling with it. The compound is understood as a word in its own right. As such, it may in turn be used in new compounds, so forming an arbitrarily long word is trivial. This contrasts to Romance languages, where prepositions are more used to specify word relationships instead of concatenating the words.

As a member of the Germanic family of languages, English is special in that compounds, as a main rule, are written in their separate parts. As in Dutch or German, noun phrases like "Girl Scout troop", "city council member", and "cellar door" are arguably compound nouns and used as such in speech. Writing them as separate words or together is merely an orthographic convention.

Russian language

In the Russian language compounding is a common type of word formation, and several types of compounds exist, both in terms of compounded parts of speech and of the way of the formation of a compound.[4]

Compound nouns may be agglutinative compounds, hyphenated compounds (стол-книга 'folding table' lit. 'table-book', i.e., "book-like table"), or abbreviated compounds (acronyms: колхоз 'kolkhoz'). Some compounds look like acronym, while in fact they are an agglutinations of type stem + word: Академгородок 'Akademgorodok' (from akademichesky gorodok 'academic village'). In agglutinative compound nouns, an agglutinating infix is typically used: пароход 'steamship': пар + о + ход. Compound nouns may be created as noun+noun, adjective + noun, noun + adjective (rare), noun + verb (or, rather, noun + verbal noun).

Compound adjectives may be formed either per se, e.g., бело-розовый 'white-pink', or as a result of compounding during the derivation of an adjective from a multiword term: Каменноостровский проспект ([kəmʲɪnnʌʌˈstrovskʲɪj prʌˈspʲɛkt]) 'Stone Island Avenue', a street in St.Petersburg.

Reduplication in Russian language is also a source of compounds.

Quite a few Russian words are borrowed from other languages in an already compounded form, including numerous "classical compounds" or internationalisms: автомобиль 'automobile'.

Sanskrit language

Main article: Sanskrit compounds

Sanskrit is very rich in compound formation with seven major compound types and as many as 55 sub-types.[5] The compound formation process is productive, so it is not possible to list all Sanskrit compounds in a dictionary. Compounds of two or three words are more frequent, but longer compounds with some running through pages are not rare in Sanskrit literature.[5] Some examples are below (hyphens below show individual word boundaries for ease of reading but are not required in original Sanskrit).

Recent trends

Although there is no universally agreed-upon guideline regarding the use of compound words in the English language, in recent decades written English has displayed a noticeable trend towards increased use of compounds. Recently, many words have been made by taking syllables of words and compounding them, such as pixel (picture element) and bit (binary digit). This is called a syllabic abbreviation.

There is a trend in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages towards splitting compound words, known in Norwegian as særskriving (literally "separate writing") and in Dutch as Engelse ziekte (the "English disease"). Because the Scandinavian languages rely heavily on the distinction between the compound word and the sequence of the separate words it consists of, this has serious implications. For example, the adjective røykfritt (literally "smokefree", meaning no smoking allowed) if separated into its composite parts, would mean røyk fritt ("smoke freely"). In Dutch, compounds written with spaces may also be confused, but can also be interpreted as a sequence of a noun and a genitive (which is unmarked in Dutch) in formal abbreviated writing. This may lead to, for example, commissie vergadering ("commission meeting") being read as "commission of the meeting" rather than "meeting of the commission" (normally spelled commissievergadering).

The German spelling reform of 1996 introduced the option of hyphenating compound nouns when it enhances comprehensibility and readability. This is done mostly with very long compound words by separating them into two or more smaller compounds, like Eisenbahn-Unterführung (railway underpass) or Kraftfahrzeugs-Betriebsanleitung (car manual). Such practice is also permitted in other Germanic languages, e.g. Danish and Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk alike), and is even encouraged between parts of the word that have very different pronunciation, such as when one part is a loan word or an acronym.

Compounding by language

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "Seattle FinnFest '09".
  2. ↑ Pensalfini, R. (1992) Jingulu Grammar, Dictionary and Texts, pp. 138-139. Unpublished PhD thesis submitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 12, 1992.
  3. ↑ "Diccionario De La Lengua Española : limpiaparabrisas". Real Academia Española. Retrieved 16 February 2013.
  4. ↑ Student Dictionary of Compound Words of the Russian Language(1978) ISBN 0-8285-5190-1
  5. 1 2 3 Kumar, Anil; Mittal, Vipul; Kulkarni, Amba (2010). "Sanskrit Compound Processor". In Jha, Girish Nath (ed.). Sanskrit Computational Linguistics: 4th International Symposium, New Delhi, India, December 10–12, 2010: Proceedings (Volume 6465 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Series). Springer. pp. 57–69. ISBN 978-3-642-17527-5.
  6. ↑ Harper, Douglas. "Himalaya". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 2011-07-17.
  7. ↑ Kumar, Animesh (May 23, 2007). "Sruti Krta Rama Stuti". Stutimandal.com. Retrieved July 1, 2011.
  8. ↑ "Virudavali – Jagadguru Rambhadracharya". Shri Tulsi Peeth Seva Nyas. Retrieved October 25, 2011.

References

External links

Look up compound word in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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