COMPOUNDING
Compounding is one of the major ways words are formed in English. Compounding is a word formation process that involves bringing to or more individual words to serve as one word. Simply put, compounding is the the process of bringing different FREE MORPHEMES or
STEMS together to serve as one word. The individual words are joined to have one meaning.
Look at the following:
1. Attorney General
2. Press conference
2. Government house
4. Bridesmaid
5. Boyfriend
6. Father-in-law
7. Breakthrough
8. Greenhouse
9. Boathouse
10. Chessboard
Now, attorney general would be seen as one word. Although both words are stems and have their individual meanings, they are joined in this case to function as one and they, together, have one meaning.
The same thing happens with press conference. If you check your dictionary, you’ll find something as press conference simply because both words have been married.
Chess + board = chessboard
Boat + house = boathouse
Now, boathouse for example consists of two free morphemes: BOAT and HOUSE.
For it to be a compound, the different units must be stems (complete words; the final state of the word). Forgotten what we said about the stem of a word? Click here.
Note:
Compound words can be written in three basic ways. As a candidate sitting an examination, you must be sharp enough to identify them. The three ways are:
1. OPEN FORMAT:
This compound is called “open” because the words that come together to form the compound are separated by a space. The space makes it open.
Look at the first two examples up there. Take press conference for example.
Even though both words serve as one, there is a space between them. This is why we call such a compound open.
2. CLOSE/BLOCK FORMAT:
This format is, by far, the easiest to identify. The individual words that make up the compound are written together without a space. Example is boyfriend which is made up of two free morphemes which are boy and friend
3. HYPHENATED FORMAT:
For this, the individual words in the compound are separated by a hyphen (-) Go back. Look at example 6. That’s a typical example of hyphenated compounds.
Clear enough? Yeah! Now, let’s go on.
SEMANTIC CLASSIFICATION OF COMPOUNDS
Based on meaning and how they function, we can identify three basic classes of compounds and these are: endocentric, exocentric and appositive compounds.
An endocentric compound consists of a head, i.e. the categorical part that contains the basic meaning of the whole compound, and modifiers, which restrict this meaning. For example, the English compound doghouse, where house is the head and dog is the modifier, is understood as a house intended for a dog. Endocentric compounds tend to be of the same part of speech (word class) as their head, as in the case of doghouse.
Look at farm house. There are two nouns here; Farm and house. The head of the compound is HOUSE because it carries the core meaning of the word. We are talking about a house and when we want to describe it further, we’d say the one in the
FARM.
An exocentric compound (called a bahuvrihi compound in the Sanskrit tradition) is a hyponym of some unexpressed semantic category (such as a person, plant, or animal): none (neither) of its components can be perceived as a formal head, and its meaning often cannot be transparently guessed from its constituent parts. For example, the English compound white-collar is neither a kind of collar nor a white thing. In an exocentric compound, the word class is determined lexically, disregarding the class of the constituents. For example, a must-have is not a verb but a noun. The meaning of this type of compound can be glossed as “(one) whose B is A”, where B is the second element of the compound and A the first. A bahuvrihi compound is one whose nature is expressed by neither of the words: thus a white-collar person is neither white nor a collar (the collar’s colour is a metonym for socioeconomic status). Other English examples include barefoot, Greenhouse, funny hone, dogear, etc.
An appositive compound is formed when we use a word to describe another. By this, I mean the different words/phrases in the compound refer to each other. They are correlative.
Look at the name John the baptist.
Who’s John? The Baptist. Who is The Baptist? John. Both units refer to each other.
Other examples include Amaka the Queen, Christ the King, etc.
Leave a Reply