Chapter 6: Compound words, blends and phrasal words

Reference: Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, An Introduction to English Morphology

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Compound words, blends and phrasal words

1. Compounds versus phrases

2. Compound verbs
3. Compound adjectives
4. Compound nouns
5. Headed and headless compounds
6. Blends and acronyms
7. Compounds containing bound combining forms
8. Phrasal words
9. Conclusion

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 6.1 Compounds versus phrases
• Compounds: words formed by combining roots
• phrasal words: items that have the internal structure of phrases but function syntactically as words.

1. a green house

2. a greenhouse

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 6.1 Compounds versus phrases
• Compounds: words formed by combining roots
• phrasal words: items that have the internal structure of phrases but function syntactically as words.

A. Stress
a green house (a house that is green)
a greenhouse (a glass structure; not usually green in color!)
Ø If the stress is on the last word, items are generally classified as phrases
Ø If the stress is on the first element, the items are generally classified as compounds
• this stress pattern applies consistently only to compound nouns, not to compounds in other word
classes.
B. Semantic
a compound tends to have a meaning that is more or less idiosyncratic
or unpredictable.

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 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): freeze-dry all these compounds have a verb as

(7) noun–verb (NV): hand-wash the rightmost element. Let us call
these compounds right-headed, the
(8) adjective–verb (AV): dry-clean rightmost element being the head.
(9) preposition–verb (PV): underestimate

Ø Only the PV type is really common

Ø some compounds with under-, over- and out- do not need to be classed as lexical items. For
example, outsing and overcriticise.

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 6.3 Compound Adjectives
Examples of right-headed compound adjectives:
(10) noun–adjective (NA): sky-high
(11) adjective–adjective (AA): grey-green
(12) preposition–adjective (PA): over-smooth, overactive

Ø 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
Ø In overactive
Ø the head of the compound is the adjective active derived from the verb act
Ø In structure, therefore, this adjective is not a mere string of morphemes (over + act + -ive), but
rather a nested structure: [over[act-ive]].

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 6.3 Compound Adjectives

• Adjectives with a VA structure:

• ‘float-light’ ‘light enough to float’
• ‘sing-happy’ ‘happy enough to sing’.
• fail-safe ‘designed to return to a safe condition if it fails or goes wrong’.

Ø However, other such compounds scarcely exist. This reflects the relative reluctance of verbs to
participate in compounding generally in English

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 6.4 Compound Nouns
• It is with nouns that compounding really comes into its own as a word forming process in English.
1. verb–noun (VN): playtime
2. adjective–noun (AN): blackboard
3. preposition–noun (PN): overcoat
4. noun–noun (NN): hairnet, mosquito net, butterfly net, hair restorer

Ø The fact that hair restorer, butterfly net and mosquito net are spelled with a space does not affect the fact that
they each constitute one complex word.
Ø almost any pair of nouns can be juxtaposed in English so as to form a compound or a phrase
Ø Does each one have a precise interpretation that is clearly the most natural, on the basis of the meanings
of their two components?
• hair restorer (a substance for restoring hair growth).
• hairnet, butterfly net and mosquito net ?
• Arriving at the precise meanings of these compounds depends on our knowledge of the world rather than on purely
linguistic knowledge.

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 6.4 Compound nouns
Hair restorer vs. Hairnet

• restorer in hair restorer is derived from a verb (restore). Verbs, unlike most nouns and adjectives, impose
expectations and requirements on the noun phrases that accompany them in the sentence.
• 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.
A primary or root compound: 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 secondary or verbal compound: a NN compound like hair restorer in which the first element is
interpreted as the object of the verb contained within the second (Yet another term sometime used is
synthetic compound.)

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6.4 Compound nouns

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.

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6.5 Headed and headless compounds

1. Blackboard

2. Faintheart

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6.5 Headed and headless compounds

1. Blackboard (AN) “a kind of board”

2. Faintheart (AN) “is not a kind of heart but a kind of person”

• although heart is a noun, it is not appropriate to call heart the head of the compound.
• faintheart is headless, in the sense that its status as a noun is not determined by
either of its two components.

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6.5 Headed and headless compounds

Ø There are some headless nouns in which the second element is not a noun at all – and
headless adjectives in which the second element is not an adjective.

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 6.5 Headed and headless compounds
Ø There are some headless nouns in which the second element is not a noun at all – and headless adjectives in
which the second element is not an adjective.

In Chapter 5 we saw that nouns are sometimes

Ø Some headless nouns consist of a verb and a preposition or adverb: formed from verbs by conversion, that is with no
affix.
(19) take-off, sell-out, wrap-up, sit-in The nouns at (19) can be seen as a special case of
(e.g. night take-offs and landings are banned at this airport). this, where the base is a verb plus another word.
e.g. The plane took off at noon.

Ø As for headless adjectives, there are quite a number consisting of a preposition and a noun:
(21) overland, over-budget, etc.
• The adjectival status of these compounds can often be confirmed by their appropriateness in
comparative contexts and with the modifier very/more:
• This year’s expenditure is even more over-budget than last year’s.

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6.5 Headed and headless compounds

exocentric endocentric

• headless compounds is not determined • headed compounds would be regarded

by any element inside them as having an internal ‘centre’
• having a ‘centre’ outside themselves

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6.6 Blends and acronyms

• a kind of compound where at least one component is reproduced only partially.

These are known as blends “fusing two independent lexical items”.
• A straightforward example is smog, blended from smoke and fog.
• Partial blends “where only one component is truncated”: cheeseburger (from
cheese plus hamburger)

• 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.
• In other words, acronyms are words derived from the initial letters of different
words.
• e.g. RAM (for random access memory) “pronounced ramm”

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6.6 Blends and acronyms

• 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.

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6.6 Blends and acronyms

Blending and acronyms 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.

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6.7 Compounds containing bound combining forms
• Most of the compounds that we have looked at so far involve roots that are free forms.
• But the vocabulary of English, especially in scientific and technical areas, includes a huge repertoire
of compounds that are made up of bound roots, known as combining forms,
(23) Anthropology
• anthrop(o)- ‘human’ plus -(o)logy ‘science or study’ yields a word that means ‘science or study
of human beings’
• anthropology differs in two other ways from most compound nouns:
1. it has a central linking vowel -o- that cannot conclusively be assigned to either root. In this
respect it resembles many combining-form compounds
2. although it is a noun, its stress is not on the first element – unless the linking -o- belongs there.

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6.8 Phrasal words

There are complex items that function as words, yet whose internal structure is that of
a clause or phrase rather than of a compound.
There is no standard term for these items, so I will introduce the term phrasal words.
• e.g. jack-in-the-box

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 6.8 Phrasal words
• 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 (book on the shelf)

Plural form?
1. book on the shelf

2. jack-in-the-box

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 6.8 Phrasal words
• jack-in-the-box
• 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

Ø Though structurally a phrase, then, it behaves as a word.

Ø Contrast this with another item which is at least as idiosyncratic in meaning and which has a
superficially similar structure: brother-in-law.
Ø 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.
Ø Despite its hyphens, therefore, brother-in-law is not a word at all but a phrase.

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6.8 Phrasal words

• Can phrases other than noun phrases constitute phrasal words? The answer is yes.
Adjectival example: couldn’t-care-less (as in a couldn’t-care-less attitude).

• couldn’t-care- less structure is that of a verb phrase, but its behaviour is that of an
adjective (e.g. Your attitude is even more couldn’t-care-less than hers!).

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 6.8 Phrasal words
• This seems an appropriate point to mention a small and rather old- fashioned class of lexical items
exemplified by governor general, attorney general, etc.

• 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

• 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.

• If, finally, neither kind of plural sounds quite right to you, that is not surprising, because however
these items are analyzed, their structure is unusual.

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6.9 Conclusion

• This chapter has illustrated various ways in which an English word may itself be
composed of words.
• We have seen that at least one syntactic relationship can be expressed within
compounds just as well as within sentences, namely the verb–object relationship (or
perhaps one should say the action–goal relationship), as in hair restorer.

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