Краткий курс лекций по лексикологии английского языка для студентов неязыковых вузов. Москалёва Е.В. - 49 стр.

                  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, blood-vessel 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, pinguin 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 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 greenhouse”. 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. middle-of-the-road, off-the-record, up-and-
            down etc. The two-stem pattern distinguishes English compounds
            from German ones.

                 WAYS OF FORMING COMPOUND WORDS.
                 Compound words in English can be formed not only by
            means of composition but also by means of :
                 a) reduplication, e.g. too-too, and also by means of
            reduplication combined with sound interchange, e.g. rope-ripe,

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