Лекции по лексикологии английского языка. Гусева Г.В. - 28 стр.

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Lecture 8

Compounding. Conversion. Shortening

I. Composition. Compound words

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) A unity of stress. As a rule, English compounds have one uniting stress,

e.g. 'best-seller. We can also have a double stress in an English

compound: 'blood-‚vessel. The main stress may be on the second

component: ‚sky-'blue.

b) Solid or hyphenated spelling. Spelling in English compounds is not very

reliable because they can have different spelling even in the same text,

e.g. war-ship, blood-vessel can be spelt through a hyphen and also with a

break. Insofar, underfoot can be spelt solidly and with a break.

c) Semantic unity. It 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. In non-

idiomatic compounds semantic unity is not strong, e.g. airbus,

astrodynamics.

d) Unity of morphological and syntactical functioning. They are used in a

sentence as one part of it and only one component changes

grammatically: These girls are chatter-boxes.

There are two characteristic features of English compounds:

a) both components in an English compound can be used as words with a

distinctive meaning of their own, e.g. a 'green-house and a 'green 'house;