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    Philology - Free and Fixed Compounds (Short Note)

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    Anaya Anand
    This document discusses different types of compound words in English. It explains that free compounds are formed by joining two nouns together, where each part retains an independent meaning that can be easily separated, such as "headmaster" or "apple-tree". Fixed compounds are also formed by joining two words originally but have become fixed as a single unit over time, where the individual parts can no longer be separated and the meaning has deviated from the original parts, such as "daisy" from "day's eye" or "nostril" from "nosu thyrel". The document provides examples of both free and fixed compounds.

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    Philology - Free and Fixed Compounds (Short Note)

    Uploaded by

    Anaya Anand
    447 views2 pages
    This document discusses different types of compound words in English. It explains that free compounds are formed by joining two nouns together, where each part retains an independent meaning that can be easily separated, such as "headmaster" or "apple-tree". Fixed compounds are also formed by joining two words originally but have become fixed as a single unit over time, where the individual parts can no longer be separated and the meaning has deviated from the original parts, such as "daisy" from "day's eye" or "nostril" from "nosu thyrel". The document provides examples of both free and fixed compounds.

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    Philology, Free and fixed compounds (Short note)

    Original Title

    Philology_ Free and Fixed Compounds (Short Note)

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    This document discusses different types of compound words in English. It explains that free compounds are formed by joining two nouns together, where each part retains an independent meaning that can be easily separated, such as "headmaster" or "apple-tree". Fixed compounds are also formed by joining two words originally but have become fixed as a single unit over time, where the individual parts can no longer be separated and the meaning has deviated from the original parts, such as "daisy" from "day's eye" or "nostril" from "nosu thyrel". The document provides examples of both free and fixed compounds.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    447 views2 pages

    Philology - Free and Fixed Compounds (Short Note)

    Uploaded by

    Anaya Anand
    This document discusses different types of compound words in English. It explains that free compounds are formed by joining two nouns together, where each part retains an independent meaning that can be easily separated, such as "headmaster" or "apple-tree". Fixed compounds are also formed by joining two words originally but have become fixed as a single unit over time, where the individual parts can no longer be separated and the meaning has deviated from the original parts, such as "daisy" from "day's eye" or "nostril" from "nosu thyrel". The document provides examples of both free and fixed compounds.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 2

    Philology

    (Short Note)

    Free And Fixed Compounds

    Nowadays none thinks of "daisy" and "nostril" as compounds of "day's


    eye" and "nosu thyrel". Nevertheless, the fixed compounds are felt as independent
    units, isolated from the component parts both in sound and in meaning. In English,
    compound words are formed freely. On the whole, composition (or compounding)
    denotes the growth of the English language from within.

    Composition is the process of word - formation that creates compounds. In


    this method, a new word is formed by joining together two or more separate words.
    The new words thus formed are called compounds. There are two major types of
    compounds: free compounds and fixed compounds.

    Free Compounds: The commonest of the English compounds are the free
    compounds in which two nouns are joined together. In such compounds, the second
    element expresses a general meaning, which is modified and limited by the first.
    Each part of these compounds can easily be isolated (/separated) with an independent
    meaning. Examples include "headmaster", "railway", " rainbow", "schoolboy",
    "handwriting", "apple-tree", "newspaper", "weekday", "weekend", "pocket-
    money", "bookcase", "table-lamp", "electric-light", etc.
    Even with the free compounds , we may have long strings of words like
    "railway refreshment room", "waste-paper basket", "New Year Eve", "Fancy dress
    ball", "Republic-day parade", etc.

    Fixed Compounds: In the fixed compounds, two parts are fixed, and one
    part cannot be separated from the other, e.g., "Daisy" was originally formed by
    joining together two words, "day's" and "eye". This later became fixed as "daisy".
    Similarly we have "nostril" from O.E. "nosu" and "thyrel" (i.e. "hole"), "woman"
    from "wif" and "man", "good-bye" from "God be with you", "Christmas" from
    "Christ's muss".

    ****

    References

    Laurie Bauer (2017) Compounds and Compounding : Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, ¹55

    Ralph W. Fasold (2006) An Introduction to LANGUAGE and LINGUISTICS : Cambridge

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