English Phonetics and Phonology by Philip Carr

Author:Philip Carr [Carr, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-07-06T23:00:00+00:00

8.6 Compound Words

Compound words are, put simply, words which can be analysed as consisting of two (or more) words, rather than as containing a base and an affix. For instance, while mole-hill is a compound, boldness is not (the form -ness is a suffix, not a word). We will focus on two-part compounds here. The Compound Stress Rule in English says, of two-part compounds: of the two elements, the first is the most prominent. Two-word compounds thus have the opposite pattern to two-word phrases, such as the noun phrase black bird (a bird which is black), the adjective phrase very tall, verb phrases such as kissed Mary, adverb phrases such as very slowly and prepositional phrases such as into London. These all exhibit the English Phrasal Stress Rule (which we will return to in chapter 9): in all of these, it is the second element which is most prominent. Examples of compounds which have the regular compound stress pattern, with the first element the most prominent, are: atom-bomb, backdrop, blackbird, car-park, classroom, comeback, corkscrew, darkroom, dragonfly, filing cabinet, flower-bed, flowerpot, grammar school, handshake, high-school, make-up, place-name, social life, sex life, snowstorm, steamboat, textbook, woodpecker.

How can we tell whether a given two-word sequence is a compound or a phrase? When the two parts are written as one word (e.g. flowerpot) or with a hyphen (e.g. atom-bomb), it is easy to see that one is dealing with a compound. But if the two parts are written as separate words (e.g. grammar school), it is less easy. (There is also variation in how compounds are written: one may find, for example, the written forms textbook, text-book and text book.) In many cases, compounds have a different kind of semantics (meaning) from phrases. Take the phrases black bird, dark room and green house. Compare their meanings with the compounds blackbird, darkroom and greenhouse. While all (male) blackbirds are black birds, not all black birds (phrase) are blackbirds (compound): ravens, jackdaws and cormorants are black birds (phrase), but they are not blackbirds (compound). While all darkrooms are rooms which are normally dark, not all dark rooms are darkrooms (places for developing photographs): if I close the shutters and switch off the lights in my study, it becomes a dark room (phrase), but not a darkroom (compound). A green house (phrase) is a house which is painted green, but a greenhouse (compound) is not a house, and may be painted white. It seems likely that, in the history of English, compounds started off as phrases: a (male) blackbird is indeed black, a darkroom is indeed normally dark, and a greenhouse is a house-shaped structure where one grows green things. But such phrases have made the transition to becoming single words.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.