COMPOUND WORD 1. Definition Compounding is a formation of new words by stringing together other words.

A compound word is made when two words are joined to form a new word. Compound word is often used in place of phrasal word. However, compound word is not the same as phrasal word. See the following examples. Phrases black board : board that is black silk worm : worm made of silk (e.g. a soft toy) hair net : net made of hair white house : house that is white Hairnet : net for covering hair (the) White House : residence of the US President toy factory : factory that is a toy toy factory : factory where toys are made Compounds Blackboard : board for writing on Silkworm : caterpillar that spins silk

2. Classification a. 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: 1) verbverb (VV): stir-fry, freeze-dry 2) nounverb (NV): hand-wash, air-condition, steam-clean 3) adjectiveverb (AV): dry-clean, whitewash 4) prepositionverb (PV): underestimate, outrun, overcook Only the PV type is really common, however, and some compounds with under-, over- and out- do not need to be classed as lexical items. For example, out- can create a transitive verb meaning outdo in Xing from any verb denoting a competitive or potentially competitive activity (e.g. outsail, outsing,

outswim), while new words with over- can also be created freely (e.g. overpolish, overcriticise, overbleach). b. Compound adjectives According to their structure, compound adjectives are divided into: 1) nounadjective (NA): sky-high, coal-black, oil-rich 2) adjectiveadjective (AA): grey-green, squeaky-clean, red-hot 3) prepositionadjective (PA): underfull, overactive As with verbs, it is 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: for example, overindignant, oversmooth. In overactive, the head of the compound is the adjective active derived from the verb act. In structure, therefore, this adjective is not a mere string of morphemes (over + act + -ive), but rather a nested structure: [over[act-ive]]. c. Compound nouns It is with nouns that compounding really comes into its own as a word forming process in English. That is not surprising. Cultural and technical change produces more novel artefacts than novel activities or novel properties. These changes therefore generate new vocabulary needs that are more readily answered by new nouns than by new verbs or adjectives. Examples can be found with each of the other main word classes supplying the left-hand element: 1) verbnoun (VN): swearword, drophammer, playtime 2) nounnoun (NN): hairnet, mosquito net, butterfly net, hair restorer 3) adjectivenoun (AN): blackboard, greenstone, faintheart 4) prepositionnoun (PN): in-group, outpost, overcoat CLIPPINGS Clipping is a subclass of truncations. But clipping, in other publications, is often used as an equivalent to truncations. Clippings appear as a rather mixed bag of forms abbreviated from larger words, which, however, share a common function, namely to express familiarity with the denotation of the

derivative. Thus, lab is used by people who work in laboratories; demo is part of the vocabulary of people who attend demonstrations, and so on. Some clippings find their way into larger communities of speakers, in which case they lose their in-group flavor, as for example ad (for advertisement). Consider some data: 1. ad advertisement 2. condo condominium 3. demo demonstration 4. disco discotheque 5. fax telefax 6. lab laboratory 7. phone telephone 8. photo photography 9. porn pornography 10. prof professor Most clippings are monosyllabic or disyllabic, and are usually based on the first part of the base word, or, much less frequently, on material from a stressed syllable (teleph`one, telef`ax). Without going into further details, we see that it is restrictions on prosodic categories that constrain both the structure of clippings and their relation to their base words.

BLENDING A. Definition Definitions of blends in the morphological literature differ a great deal, but most treatments converge on a definition of blends as words that combine two (rarely three or more) words into one, deleting material from one or both of the source words. A straightforward example is smog, blended from smoke and fog; a more elaborate one is chortle (first used by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass), blended from chuckle and snort. Examples of partial blends, where only

one component is truncated, are talkathon (from talk plus marathon) and cheeseburger (from cheese plus hamburger). The ready acceptance of cheeseburger and similar blends such as beefburger and vegeburger may have been encouraged by a feeling that hamburger is a compound whose first element is ham scarcely appropriate semantically, since the meat in a hamburger (originally a kind of meat pattie from Hamburg) is beef. Other examples : 1. breath + analyzer breathalyzer 2. motor + camp mocamp 3. motor + hotel motel 4. science + fiction sci-fi 5. boat + hotel boatel 6. boom + hoist boost 7. breakfast + lunch brunch 8. channel + tunnel chunnel 9. compressor + expander compander 10. goat + sheep geep 11. guess + estimate guesstimate 12. modulator + demodulator modem 13. sheep + goat shoat 14. smoke + fog smog 15. Spanish + English Spanglish 16. stagnation + inflation stagflation B. Blending Formation There are many types of blends, based on how they are formed. Algeo, a linguist, proposed dividing blends into three group : 1. Phonemic Overlap : a syllable or part of a syllable is shared between

two words. Example: brunch is a blend of breakfast and lunch. 2. Clipping : the shortening of two words and then compounding them.

Example : intercom, from internal and communication.

3. Phonemic Overlap and Clipping : shortening of two words to a shared syllable and then compounding. Example : stagflation, from stagnation and inflation. Most blends are formed by one of the following methods: 1. The beginning of one word is added to the end of the other (see portmanteau). For example, brunch is a blend of breakfast and lunch. 2. The beginnings of two words are combined. For example, cyborg is a blend of cybernetic and organism. 3. Two words are blended around a common sequence of sounds. For example, the word Californication, is a blend of California and fornication. 4. Multiple sounds from two component words are blended, while mostly preserving the sounds order. An example of this is the word slithy, a blend of lithe and slimy. ACRONYMS Blends made up of initial letters are known as acronyms, of which wellknown examples are NATO (for North Atlantic Treaty Organization), ANZAC (for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), RAM (for random access memory), SCSI (pronounced scuzzy, from small computer systems interface), and AIDS (from acquired immune deficiency syndrome). 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. It is clear from these examples that acronymy is in active use for the creation of new vocabulary.