MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF UKRAINE Zhytomyr State Ivan Franko University

Morphological WordBuilding: (Composition)

Sokolova Alla Group 44

Zhytomyr 2011 Contents Introduction.3 1. The Morphological Structure of a Word.3 2. Word Formation in English.6 3. Composition (Compounding) in English Language. Composition as the Way of Word-building.8 4. Types of Composition of English Compounds..10 5. Compound Categories11 6. Endocentric and Exocentric Compounds13 7. Meaning in Compounds..15 Conclusion..16 List of Used Literature18

Introduction All languages, on scientifically linguistic point of view, are equal. There are components of languages that are interrelated, such as: phonology, morphology, syntax and semantic. Morphology is a branch of linguistic which investigates the word-formation of a language. Mathew states that morphology is a simple term for that branch of linguistic which concerns with formation of word in different uses and construction. It is in line with OGrady who also mentions that morphology refers to system of categories and rules that are involved in word-formation and interpretation. There are various processes of word-formation, for instances: conversion, clipping, blending, backformation, compounding, affixation, and reduplication. Compounding is one of word-formation processes which is very interesting since it can creates a new word whose meaning, sometimes cannot be traced back from its constituent. Moreover, compounding can create a larger word. OGrady notes that compounding is the combination of lexical categories (noun, adjective, verb, or preposition) to create a larger word. Compounding word can be found both in spoken and written. Written material is a source of word-formation in which compounding is easily found. Writers tend to use compounding to create a new word which fulfils their desires. This sentence is taken from Tolstoy God Sees The Truth, But Waits: Where did you spend last night? Were you alone, or with a fellow-merchant? 1. The Morphological Structure of a Word There are two levels of approach to the study of word- structure: the level of morphemic analysis and the level of derivational or word-formation analysis. Word is the principal and basic unit of the language system, the largest on the morphologic and the smallest on the syntactic plane of linguistic analysis. It has been universally acknowledged that a great many words have a composite nature and are made up of morphemes, the basic units on the

morphemic level, which are defined as the smallest indivisible two-facet language units. The term morpheme is derived from Greek morphe form+ -eme. The Greek suffix eme has been adopted by linguistic to denote the smallest unit or the minimum distinctive feature. The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of form. A form in these cases a recurring discrete unit of speech. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may consist of single morpheme. Even a cursory examination of the morphemic structure of English words reveals that they are composed of morphemes of different types: rootmorphemes and affixational morphemes. Words that consist of a root and an affix are called derived words or derivatives and are produced by the process of word building known as affixation (or derivation). The root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of the word; it has a very general and abstract lexical meaning common to a set of semantically related words constituting one word-cluster, e.g. (to) teach, teacher, teaching. Besides the lexical meaning root-morphemes possess all other types of meaning proper to morphemes except the part-of-speech meaning which is not found in roots. Affixational morphemes include inflectional affixes or inflections and derivational affixes. Inflections carry only grammatical meaning and are thus relevant only for the formation of word-forms. Derivational affixes are relevant for building various types of words. They are lexically always dependent on the root which they modify. They possess the same types of meaning as found in roots, but unlike root-morphemes most of them have the part-of-speech meaning which makes them structurally the important part of the word as they condition the lexico-grammatical class the word belongs to. Due to this component of their meaning the derivational affixes are classified into affixes building different parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. Roots and derivational affixes are generally easily distinguished and the difference between them is clearly felt as, e.g., in the words helpless, handy,

blackness, Londoner, refill, etc.: the root-morphemes help-, hand-, black-, London-, fill-, are understood as the lexical centers of the words, and less, -y, re- are felt as morphemes dependent on these roots. Distinction is also made of free and bound morphemes. Free morphemes coincide with word-forms of independently functioning words. It is obvious that free morphemes can be found only among roots, so the morpheme boy- in the word boy is a free morpheme; in the word undesirable there is only one free morpheme desire-; the word pen-holder has two free morphemes pen- and hold-. It follows that bound morphemes are those that do not coincide with separate word- forms, consequently all derivational morphemes, such as ness, -able, -er are bound. Root-morphemes may be both free and bound. The morphemes theor- in the words theory, theoretical, or horr- in the words horror, horrible, horrify; Angl- in Anglo-Saxon; Afr- in Afro-Asian are all bound roots as there are no identical word-forms. It should also be noted that morphemes may have different phonemic shapes. In the word-cluster please, pleasing, pleasure, pleasant the phonemic shapes of the word stand in complementary distribution or in alternation with each other. All the representations of the given morpheme, that manifest alternation are called allomorphs or morphemic variants of that morpheme. The combining form allo- from Greek allos other is used in linguistic terminology to denote elements of a group whose members together consistute a structural unit of the language (allophones, allomorphs). Thus, for example, -ion, -tion, -sion, -ation are the positional variants of the same suffix, they do not differ in meaning or function but show a slight difference in sound form depending on the final phoneme of the preceding stem. They are considered as variants of one and the same morpheme and called its allomorphs. Allomorph is defined as a positional variant of a morpheme occurring in a specific environment and so characterized by complementary description. Complementary distribution is said to take place, when two linguistic variants cannot appear in the same environment. -ness, -er,

Different morphemes are characterized by contrastive distribution, if they occur in the same environment they signal different meanings. The suffixes able and ed, for instance, are different morphemes, not allomorphs, because adjectives in able mean capable of beings. Allomorphs will also occur among prefixes. Their form then depends on the initials of the stem with which they will assimilate. Two or more sound forms of a stem existing under conditions of complementary distribution may also be regarded as allomorphs, as, for instance, in long a: length. 2. Word Formation in English Word-formation the process of forming words by combining root and affixal morphemes according to certain patterns specific for the language (affixation, composition), or without any outward means of word formation (conversion, semantic derivation). It is a branch of science of the language, which studies the patterns on which a language forms new lexical items (new unities, new words). Its a process of forming words by combining root and affixal morphemes. According to certain patterns specific for the language or without any outward means there are 2 major groups of word formation: 1) Words formed as grammatical syntagmas, combinations of full linguistic signs (types: compounding, prefixation, suffixation, conversion, and back derivation). 2) Words, which are not grammatical syntagmas, which are not made up of full linguistic signs. Ex.: expressive symbolism, blending, clipping, rhyme and some others. Common for both groups is that a new word is based on synchronic relationship between morphemes. There are different types of word formation:

compounding; prefixation;

suffixation; conversation (zero derivation). The morphological analysis of word-structure on the morphemic level aims at

splitting the word into its constituent morphemes the basic units at this level of analysis and at determining their number and types. The four types (root words, derived words, compound, shortenings) represent the main structural types of Modern English words, and conversion, derivation and composition the most productive ways of word building. According to the number of morphemes words can be classified into monomorphic and polymorphic. Monomorphic or root-words consist of only one root-morpheme, e.g. small, dog, make, give, etc. All polymorphic word fall into two subgroups: derived words and compound words according to the number of root-morphemes they have. Derived words are composed of one root-morpheme and one or more derivational morphemes, e.g. acceptable, outdo, disagreeable, etc. Compound words are those which contain at least two root-morphemes, the number of derivational morphemes being insignificant. There can be both root- and derivational morphemes in compounds as in pen-holder, light-mindedness, or only root-morphemes as in lamp-shade, eye-ball, etc. These structural types are not of equal importance. The clue to the correct understanding of their comparative value lies in a careful consideration of: 1) the importance of each type in the existing wordstock, 2) their frequency value in actual speech. Frequency is by far the most important factor. According to the available word counts made in different parts of speech, we find that derived words numerically constitute the largest class of words in the existing wordstock; derived nouns comprise approximately 67% of the total number, adjectives about 86%, whereas compound nouns make about 15% and adjectives about 4%. Root words come to 18% in nouns, i.e. a trifle more than the number of compound words; adjectives root words come to approximately 12%.

But we cannot fail to perceive that root-words occupy a predominant place. In English, according to the recent frequency counts, about 60% of the total number of nouns and 62% of the total number of adjectives in current use are root-words. Of the total number of adjectives and nouns, derived words comprise about 38% and 37% respectively while compound words comprise an insignificant 2% in nouns and 0.2% in adjectives. Thus it is the root-words that constitute the foundation and the backbone of the vocabulary and that are of paramount importance in speech. It should also be mentioned that root words are characterized by a high degree of collocability and a complex variety of meanings in contrast with words of other structural types whose semantic structures are much poorer. Root- words also serve as parent forms for all types of derived and compound words. 3. Composition (Compounding) in English Language. Composition as the Way of Word-building Morphology refers to the system of categories and rules which are involved in word formation and interpretation. Furthermore, the word formation is the use of variety of operation or process to modify the structure of word itself in order to express a new meaning. There are some processes of word formation, such as conversion, clipping, blending, back formation, affixation, reduplication and composition. OGrady proposes that composition is the combination of lexical category (noun, adjective, verbs, or prepositions) to create a larger word. According to Bauer, composition is the formation of new lexeme by joining two or more lexemes. Lexemes are abstract dictionary words and they are realized by one or more word forms. Katamba mentions that compound word is a word made up of at least two bases which can occur elsewhere as independent word. It can be concluded that composition is a word formation process that combine two or more words to create a new word whose meaning sometimes cannot be traced back from its constituents.

Composition is the way of word-building when a word is formed by joining two or more stems to form one word. The structural unity of a compound word depends upon : a) the unity of stress, b) solid or hyphenated spelling, c) semantic unity, d) unity of morphological and syntactical functioning. These are charachteristic features of compound words in all languages. For English compounds some of these factors are not very reliable. As a rule English compounds have one uniting stress (usually on the first component), e.g. hard-cover, best-seller. We can also have a double stress in an English compound, with the main stress on the first component and with a secondary stress on the second component, e.g. blood-vessel. The third pattern of stresses is two level stresses, e.g. snowwhite, sky-blue. The third pattern is easily mixed up with word-groups unless they have solid or hyphenated spelling. Spelling in English compounds is not very reliable as well because they can have different spelling even in the same text, e.g. war-ship, bloodvessel can be spelt through a hyphen and also with a break, insofar, underfoot can be spelt solidly and with a break. All the more so that there has appeared in Modern English a special type of compound words which are called block compounds, they have one uniting stress but are spelt with a break, e.g. air piracy, cargo module, coin change, penguin suit etc. The semantic unity of a compound word is often very strong. In such cases we have idiomatic compounds where the meaning of the whole is not a sum of meanings of its components, e.g. to ghostwrite, skinhead, brain-drain etc. In nonidiomatic compounds semantic unity is not strong, e. g., airbus, to bloodtransfuse, astrodynamics, etc. English compounds have the unity of morphological and syntactical

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functioning. They are used in a sentence as one part of it and only one component changes grammatically, e.g. These girls are chatter-boxes. Chatter-boxes is a predicative in the sentence and only the second component changes grammatically. There are two characteristic features of English compounds: a) both components in an English compound are free stems, that is they can be used as words with a distinctive meaning of their own. The sound pattern will be the same except for the stresses, e.g. a green-house and a green house. Whereas for example in Russian compounds the stems are bound morphemes, as a rule; b) English compounds have a two-stem pattern, with the exception of compound words which have form-word stems in their structure, e.g. middleof-the-road, off-the-record, up-and-doing etc. The two-stem pattern distinguishes English compounds from German ones. 4. Types of Composition of English Compounds There are three types of composition of English compounds: Neutral Morphological Syntactic Neutral compounds - two stems are joined together without any connecting elements (i.e. they are juxtaposed): scarecrow, goldfish, crybaby (). There are such subtypes of neutral compounds:

simple neutral compounds - consist of simple affixless stems: sunflower, bedroom, blackbird derivational, or derived compounds - have affixes in their structure: longlegged, broad-minded, globe-trotter contracted compounds - have a shortened stem in their structure ( ): H-bag (handbag), TV-set (television set), A-bomb (atomic bomb), V-day (victory day).

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Morphological compounds - components are joined by a linking element (o, i, s): videophone, microchip; tragicomic, handicraft; craftsman. Syntactic compounds are formed by the whole fragments of speech: man-ofwar ( ), forget-me-not, mother-in-law. Types of word-composition

5. Compound categories Combining various lexical categories (nouns, adjectives, verbs, or prepositions) produces a compound word, which may be a noun, a verb, an adjective, and in some cases also a preposition. In most compounds the right-most element of the compound determines the linguistic category of the entire word. Otherwise, the morpheme which decides the category of the whole word is known as the head. Noun compounds The most common type of word formation is the combination of two (or more) nouns in order to form a resulting noun: Noun + Noun = Noun Examples: landmine, wallpaper, toothbrush The first of the two compounds may be descriptive (i.e. tablecloth, a cloth with which to clean or cloth tables), or both compounds may create a whole new

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meaning altogether (railroad, which is not a "road" in the typical sense of the word.) It is also possible to form words whose components are equally important or descriptive of its meaning, for example, a washer-dryer refers to an object combining two functions. There are, of course, many more different ways how compound nouns. They can be related to each other and how their new meanings can best be explained grammatically. In most cases, however, the nature of these compounds is selfexplanatory. And their meanings are quite comprehensible even for those who encounter them for the first time. Compound nouns usually appear as two separate words, only those more commonly used, those found in every-day language, and usually compounds with no more than three syllables are found as one word. Hyphens between the segments of a compound noun are absolutely exceptional. Examples: windowsill (the sill attached under a window), shopwindow (a shop's window), doorkey (a key for the door), bookpage (a page in a book), silverspoon (a spoon made of silver), waterpipe (a pipe that carries water), dockyard (a yard for docks), fireman (somebody who fights fire). Adjective compounds Nouns and adjectives can also be compounded in the opposite order: Noun + Adjective = Adjective Camera + shy = camera-shy (Shy in respect of appearing or speaking before cameras). In this case, the resultant is an adjective, while the noun explaines the objective. Another possibility is that the noun supports the adjective, i.e. as an intensifier:dirt-cheap = cheap as dirt; paper-thin = thin as paper. Those rules do also apply to the linking of nouns and participial adjectives: English-speaking; soul-destroying; frost-bitten. More common and shorter compounds appear as one word whereas those longer and less common are linked by a hyphen. More examples of all subtypes:

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waterproof (proof or resistant against water), seaworthy (a ship withstanding the dangers of the sea), airworthy (an aircraft safely flyable), blameworthy (a person deserving blame), bookworthy (something worth being published). Verb compounds Here verbs describe what is done with an object or what a subject "does", in short, a new noun is formed, usually referring to something concrete, and the verb defines the action related to it: Verb + Noun = Noun: draw + bridge = drawbridge. A drawbridge is a bridge that can be inclined in order to allow ships to pass. Here, the noun is the direct object. Besides that, both segments can be related in other ways, i.e. the noun may stand for a adverb of place: walkway = people walk on the walkway. The usual rules apply to spelling. Examples: walkway (a way to walk on), divecenter (a place where one goes diving), runway (a strip of flat land where aircraft start or land ["run"]), filter-paper (paper used for filtering liquids or gases). Compound prepositions Compound prepositions are not very common in the English language: into, onto. There are various other types of compounds. They are not very common in English language too. Adjective+Adjective bitter-sweet, deaf-mute, aural-oral, Anglo-Saxon. Adjective + Participle far-reaching, far fetched, narrow-minded, single-minded, high-climbing, lowyielding, red-painted, bare-handed. 6. Endocentric and Exocentric Compound There are two types of compound words. From the point of view of its head, compound word is classified into endocentric and exocentric compound. Endocentric compound is a construction of compound that is hyponym of the head

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element, for example: schoolboy. The word schoolboy is made up of school (noun) and boy (noun). Schoolboy is a kind of boy. In addition, endocentric compound has certain characteristics as follows: They contain a constituent which function as the syntactic head. The syntactic properties of the head categories percolate to the entire compound word. The head is on the right hand (phrasal verb form clear and large class of exception to this generalization) There is a tendency for the semantic relation between the head and non head to be one modification. Exocentric compound is a construction of compound that the compound is not hyponym of the head element. This construction often cannot be transparently guessed from its constituent part. Exocentric compound has characteristics as follows: There is no element in compound that functions as the semantic head of the compound which is modified by the non head element. The meaning of this construction is opaque. It is impossible to work out what an exocentric compound means from the sum of the meanings of its constituent. Hence, the construction of sugar daddy is not a type of sugar-coated father but a womans lover who is deemed to be both overgenerous and much too old for her. Since the meaning of this construction can not be traced back from its constituent, this construction is said to be exocentric. Due to the fact above, exocentric compound tends to be used less frequently than endocentric compound in the creation of new word. From the above explanation, it can be concluded that endocentric construction is more productive than exocentric. It is found that: compound verb is formed from verb-preposition; compound noun is derived from noun-noun, verbnoun, adjective-noun; and compound adjective is made up from noun-adjective and adjective-adjective.

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7. Meaning in Compounds The lexical meaning of compounds is determined by the lexical meanings of its bases and the structural meaning of its distributional pattern. The distributional pattern shows the order and arrangement of the bases. Two compounds that have the same bases but different distributional patterns will have different meanings (a finger-ring, a ring-finger). As a rule a second base determines the part of speech meaning of the compound. The lexical meaning of a compound doesn't coincide with the combined meanings of its bases. There is always some additional semantic element that reflects among objects and phenomena in the outer world. Semantic relations between the compounds can be described as certain types: - special a garden-party, a finger-ring, a nose-ring; - functional a key-hole, a dollhouse/ a babysitter, a bodyguard; - resemblance - snow-white; - producing a similar effect or acting in a typical way a rattle-snake. If the meaning of the compound and the semantic relations between the bases are clear then the compound is motivated (red-current). If the meaning of the compound and the semantic relations between the bases are not clear then the compound is non-motivated (redneck). Compounds are inseparable lexical units that are presented in dictionaries in special entries and sub-entries. Compounds are reproduced and used in speech as lexical units. They are not formed in speech like free-word combinations. They are only pronounced as lexical units (a red rose, a redskin). Inseparability of compounds has graphical (one word or a hyphen), phonetic (stress), morphological (only 2 base shows grammatical category) and semantic (grammatical forms differ from the forms of the motivating words (richer more oil-richer) criteria.

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Conclusion Lexicology is the part of linguistics which deals with the vocabulary and characteristic features of words and word-groups. The term vocabulary is used to denote the system of words and wordgroups that the language possesses. The term word denotes the main lexical unit of a language resulting from the association of a group of sounds with a meaning. This unit is used in grammatical functions characteristic of it. It is the smallest unit of a language which can stand alone as a complete utterance. The term word-group denotes a group of words which exists in the language as a ready-made unit, has the unity of meaning, the unity of syntactical function, e.g. the word-group as loose as a goose means clumsy and is used in a sentence as a predicative / He is as loose as a goose/. Lexicology can study the development of the vocabulary, the origin of words and word-groups, their semantic relations and the development of their sound form and meaning. In this case it is called historical lexicology. Another branch of lexicology is called descriptive and studies the vocabulary at a definite stage of its development. The vocabulary of English consists of several hundred thousand words, and without an extensive vocabulary, communication in English just cannot occur in a meaningful way. In addition, a good understanding of English is essential for the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language. In fact, the status of vocabulary in a curriculum has been considerably enhanced, partly as a result of the development of the communicative approaches to language teaching and partly through the stimulus of comprehension-based methods. Fully aware of the importance of words, the author is to study English words, word-classes and wordformation with a view to improving the understanding of words in term of grammar. Compounding is the most common productive way of creating new words in English.

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English words are interesting, but difficult, to study. We have dealt with different definitions of words; the two classes of words including closed- and open-classes; and morphemes, types of morpheme and word-formation processes. Only by mastering the grammatical features of English words, can teachers and learners of, and translators into and out of English do good jobs of teaching, learning and translation. It is my suggestion for teachers of English that they should be aware of the complication of words in terms of grammar and base their teaching on their learners English levels so that they could avoid overwhelming their learners.

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List of Used Literature 1. .. . . 1956. 2. . . ( ): . / . . . .: , 1977. 240 . 3. .. .. 1959. 4. . . : . / .. , ., , .. . .: , 1999. 288 . 5. .. . ., 1979. 6. .., .. : . / .. , .. . : , 2000. 117 . 7. . . : . - . . . / . . . X.: , 1993. 256 . 8. . . : . / . . . .: , 1998. 260 .
9. .C. Dictionary of New Words

and New Meanings. .

, 1993.
10. Adams V. Introduction into English Wordformation. Lnd., 1983. 11. Arnold I.V. The English Word. M. 1986. 12. Burchfield R.W. The English Language. Lnd., 1985. 13. Ginzburg R.S. et al. A Course in Modern English Lexicology. M., 1979. 14. Potter S. Modern Linguistics. Lnd., 1957. 15. -: [http://chusnihadiati.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/

english-compounding].
16. -: [http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29

COMPOUNDWORD.html].

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