english compound nouns in a contrastive analysis with the vietnamese equivalents and some implications for teaching and learning vocabulary in the textbook english for the hotel and tourist industry

ENGLISH COMPOUND NOUNS IN A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS WITH THE VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS AND SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING VOCABULARY IN THE TEXTBOOK “ENGLISH FOR THE HOTEL AND TO

ENGLISH COMPOUND NOUNS IN A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS

WITH THE VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS AND SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING VOCABULARY IN THE TEXTBOOK “ENGLISH FOR THE HOTEL AND

TOURIST INDUSTRY”

(Danh từ ghép tiếng Anh trong sự so sánh đối chiếu với tiếng Việt và một số gợi ý trong việc dạy và học từ vựng trong giáo trình “English for the Hotel and Tourist

Industry”) M.A Minor Thesis

Field:English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15

HANOI – 2009

ENGLISH COMPOUND NOUNS IN A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS

WITH THE VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS AND SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING VOCABULARY IN THE TEXTBOOK “ENGLISH FOR THE HOTEL AND

TOURIST INDUSTRY”

(Danh từ ghép tiếng Anh trong sự so sánh đối chiếu với tiếng Việt

và một số gợi ý trong việc dạy và học từ vựng trong giáo trình “English for the

Hotel and Tourist Industry”)

M.A Minor Thesis

Field:English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15

Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr Trần Hữu Mạnh

HANOI – 2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii

ABSTRACT iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

LIST OF ABBREVIATION vi

PART 1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Rationale 1

1.2 Aims and objectives of the study 2

1.3 Scope of the study 2

1.4 Methods of the study 3

1.5 Design of the study 3

PART 2 DEVELOPMENT 5

CHAPTER 1 THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE ON ENGLISH WORDS AND WORD FORMATION PROCESSES 5

1.1 Notion of words and word structures 5

1.2 Word formation 7

1.2.1 Affixation 8

1.2.2 Conversion 8

1.2.3 Shortening 8

1.3 Compounding .9

1.3.1 Definition 9

1.3.2 Structure of compound words 9

1.3.3 Meaning of compound words 10

CHAPTER 2 AN INVESTIGATION INTO ENGLISH COMPOUND NOUNS 11

2.1 An introduction to English compound nouns 11

2.2 Structure of compound nouns 12

2.3 The distinction between a compound noun and a noun phrase 12

2.4 General characteristics of compound nouns 14

2.4.1 Syntactic features 14

2.4.2 Semantic features 15

2.5 Classification of compound nouns 16

2.5.1 According to the meaning 16

2.5.2 According to componential relationship 17

2.5.3 According to the relation of the compound noun as a whole to its constituent 17 2.6 Compound nouns and their pragmatic properties 18

2.7 Types of English compound nouns 18

2.7.1 Noun-centred compound nouns 19

2.7.2 Verb-centred compound nouns 21

CHAPTER 3 VIETNAMESE COMPOUND NOUNS IN A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS WITH ENGLISH EQUIVALENTS 23

3.1 An overview of Vietnamese compound nouns 23

3.1.1 General characteristics 23

3.1.2 Classification 24

3.2 Comparison between English and Vietnamese compound nouns 26

3.2.1 Similarities 26

3.2.2 Differences 27

3.2.3 Summaries 29

CHAPTER 4 IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING VOCABULARY IN THE TEXTBOOK “ENGLISH FOR THE HOTEL AND TOURIST INDUSTRY” 30

4.1 Introduction 30

4.2 An analysis on the main types of compound nouns in the textbook: “English for the hotel and tourist industry” 30

4.2.1 An introduction to the textbook: “English for the hotel and tourist industry” 30

4.2.2 The main types of English compound nouns in the textbook 31

4.3 The research 32

4.3.1 Aims of the research 32

4.3.2 Subjects 32

4.3.3 Data collection instruments 33

4.3.4 Findings and discussion 33

4.4 Implications for teaching and learning vocabulary in the textbook: “English for the hotel and tourist industry” 36

PART 3 CONCLUSION 39

3.1 Recapitulation 39

3.2 Suggestions for further study 40

REFERENCES 41 APPENDIX I I APPENDIX II III

LIST OF ABBREVIATION

Adj: Adjective ESP: English for Specific Purpose -ing: present participle affix

N: Noun

Pre: Preposition

V: Verb

New English words are formed in various ways such as borrowing, affixation, conversion, composition, shortening, etc Among which, compounding or composition is a rich source

of English neologisms According to an analysis of the Longman Register of new words Vol 1, it accounts for 39.8 % of new words (Ayto, in Anderman 1996:65) while a similar analysis of the Macquarie Dictionary of new words shows that it can account for 54.5% (Butler, in Ayato in Anderman 1996:66) Given, therefore, that compounding is highly productive process of word formation Moreover, compounding is an effective tool to express ideas concisely However, compound words have specific and complicated features that many learners of English find it not easy to use Furthermore, there is a fact that nominal compounds appear most in our daily life, especially in professional texts as in business, medicine, science and technology as well as other areas of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Thus, students of ESP have a greater difficulty when coping with them Because of its importance and complication, study on compound nouns interests so many linguists and researchers There have been a number of studies on compound nouns conducted by many researchers In our university some have been carried out at under-

graduate level but none of the studies have done at post-graduate level None of them have given the suggestions for dealing with compound nouns in a professional text, either For those reasons, as a learner as well as a teacher of English, I would like to do a research

on this matter with the hope that I would understand properly the features of English compound nouns and find out an appropriate way to teach them to my students of ESP

1.2 Aims and objectives of the study

The major aims of this study are:

- To make a comparison of compound nouns in English and Vietnamese To achieve this aim, the study will examine the characteristics of compound nouns in terms of syntactic and semantic features as well as their classifications and types in English and Vietnamese From these characteristics, the author will compare English compound nouns and the Vietnamese equivalents

- To give the suggestions for teaching vocabulary in ESP textbooks in general and the textbook “English for the hotel and tourist industry” in particular The study will examine the main types of compound nouns used in the textbook, the descriptions of students in term of English level, learning conditions and how they understand and use compound nouns in this textbook as well as some common errors they often make Then the suggestions for teaching and learning English compound nouns will be given based on the findings

Thus, the following research questions are raised for guided research

1 What are the characteristics of English and Vietnamese compound nouns?

2 What are the differences and similarities of compound nouns in English and Vietnamese in term of their syntactic, semantic features and their classifications?

3 What are the suggestions for teaching and learning vocabulary in the textbook

“English for the hotel and tourist industry”?

1.3 Scope of the study

Compounding is a complicated subject matter that received a lot of linguists’ attentions They have proposed a number of researches on various interesting aspects, mostly on semantic interpretation of nominal compounds Within a minor thesis, I only focus on the similarities and differences between compound nouns in English and Vietnamese in terms

of semantic, syntactic features and their classifications which provide teachers of English

an adequate understanding on the issue so that they will have an appropriate teaching method to compound nouns

1.4 Methods of the study

This study uses the combination of some different methods:

The strategic method chosen is the descriptive which seeks to describe and explain the phenomenon Contrastive Analysis is also used in this research

Together with these methods, researcher also uses the quantitative procedures that based

on facts and features to examine common compound nouns used in the ESP textbook and the reality of teaching and learning compound nouns in her university Data is collected by conducting a test on students’ using and understanding of compound nouns

Supporting techniques such as reference to the publication, consultation with the supervisor, discussion with colleagues, and personal observations are also of significant contribution to the study

1.5 Design of the study

The study is divided into three main parts:

Part 1 entitled “Introduction”, in which the rationale, aims, scope of the study, methods

and design of the study are all introduced

Part 2 is the “Development” This part is the focus of the study which is divided into 4

chapters as following:

Chapter 1: “Theoretical background” provides some important concepts on lexicology relevant to the subject matter which set the theoretical background for the study such as: words and words structures, word formation processes

Chapter 2: “The investigation into English compound nouns” focuses on all the characteristics of English compound nouns.

Chapter 3: “Vietnamese compound nouns in a contrastive analysis with English equivalents” investigates the Vietnamese compound nouns and points out the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese compound nouns

Chapter 4 entitled “Implications for teaching and learning vocabulary in the textbook “English for the hotel and tourist industry” consists of following sections:

- An analysis on the common types of compound nouns in the textbook

- The research

- Pedagogical implications for teaching vocabulary in the textbook: “English for the hotel and tourist industry”

Part 3 is the conclusion This part briefly presents review of the major findings,

conclusions remarked and suggestions for further study

PART 2 DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1 THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE ON ENGLISH

WORDS AND WORD FORMATION PROCESSES

1.1 Notion of words and word structures

Word is a fundamental unit of language The term “word” seems to be a simple concept but in fact it is very difficult to define For decades, many linguists have attempted to propose different definitions of word in different approaches Some considered it on the semantic point of view; others looked at it from the morphology or phonology sides However, none of the definitions appear to be totally satisfied in all aspects Famous scholars as Palmer (1976), Arnold (1986), Bauer (1983), Plag (2003) etc have discussed thoroughly about this issue In this section, I would like to mention some of them

When talking about the notion of word, most of us may think of the word as a unit in the writing system, namely, orthographic word, then we may say that a word is an uninterrupted string of letters which is marked by blank spaces or punctuation Hence, it is

clear that the sentence “English is an interesting language” consists of five words

However, in some cases, it is impossible to apply this rule to count the number of words in

a sentence For example, it is not easy to decide how many words there are in the sentence

“Benjamin’s girlfriend lives in a high-rise apartment building” (Plag, 2003) ‘Benjamin’s

may be one or two words It depends on our consideration for apostrophes to be a

punctuation mark or not Besides, girlfriend can be attested with spellings as <girlfriend>

or <girl friend> Then it can be one word or two depending on the writer The same cases are happened in ‘high-rise’ and ‘apartment building’ Thus, such cases are quite annoying and this definition is not entirely reliable

Equally, in terms of sound structure (i.e phonologically), a word is said to be a unit of speech surrounded by pause However, in natural speech, people sometimes do not make pause before or after each word Let’s think about assimilation and linking rules in English, for example And speakers can make pauses not only between words but also

between syllables for emphasis Besides, many functional words such as the, a, to, of might

not be sometimes spoken in natural speech

Referring to semantic point of view, a word is one that expresses a unified semantic concept Although it may be true for most of words, in some cases it is violated Not every

unified concept is denoted by one word and vice versa For instance, the phrase ‘the

woman who lives next door’ refers to a person and therefore is a unified concept and it is

expressed by more than one word

Thus, however the term ‘word’ is defined there are some items in the language which are called words but they are not covered by the definition And despite the difficulties in defining what ‘a word’ is most of us still have a feeling of what is or is not a word Perhaps, the definition given by Antrushina may consider to be entirely reliable as it combines all the features of a word

“The word is a speech unit used for the purposes of human communication, materially

representing a group of sounds, possessing a meaning, susceptible to grammatical

employment and characterised by formal and semantic unity” (Antrushina et al 1985:10)

According to him, a word possesses three structural aspects: external structures i.e its morphological structure, internal structure or its meaning, and unity The word contains both external (or formal) unity and semantic unity By formal unity he means the word is

an indivisible unit and no intervening material can be inserted into it By semantic unity he means the word conveys only one concept no matter how many component morphemes it

may have Take the word ‘blackbird’ as an example, it is characterised by formal unity It possesses a single grammatical framing: blackbird/s We can only put affixes before or

after it but cannot insert anything inside It is different from the word-group consists of

identical constituents ‘black bird’ in which each constituent black and bird can acquire

grammatical forms of its own: The blackest birds And other words can be inserted in

between the constituents as in ‘a black night bird’ Besides, the word ‘blackbird’ has only

one meaning or one concept: a type of bird Thus, it possesses a semantic unity whereas in

the word-group ‘black bird’, each component conveys a separate concept: bird – a kind of

living creature; black-a colour Thus, the definition from him seems to be reliable in all aspects

Regarding the structure of a word, grammarians divide it into smaller units called

‘morphemes’ They are considered as smallest meaningful constituents of word Morphemes are subdivided into roots and affixes While a root morpheme is the basic form, and it is often called a free morpheme, an affix or a bound morpheme is the one that attached to the root There are two kinds of affixes; prefixes are the ones that attached

before the root (as re-do, un-happy); suffixes are morphemes that are put after the root as –

er and -dom in teach-er and free-dom.

Besides, grammarians also try to classify words into subclasses According to Quirk et al

(1972), there are two groups of words: ‘open-class items’ consisting of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs and ‘close-system items’ with pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, demonstratives, and interjections These word classes are also named ‘parts of speech’

Each formation process produces a specific type of words Modern English has many types

of words which are resulted from word formation processes such as affixation, conversion, compounding, shortening, sound-imitation, reduplication, and back-formation Among which affixation, conversion and compounding represent the most productive ways of modern English word-building which are introduced briefly in the following subsections

1.2.1 Affixation

A very common way to form words is affixation Affixation means that a bound morpheme

is attached to a free morpheme, or stem to create a new word There are three places where the bound morpheme can go: before, after, or in the middle of the stem The affixes that go before the root are called prefixes The ones that go after the root are referred to as suffixes And the affixes that go in the middle are labeled infixes Examples for pre- and

suffixes are plentiful in English as in unhappy, unlock, and doubtful, lockable, or lovely

for pre- and suffixes respectively, whereas, infixes appear rarely in English

1.2.2 Conversion

Conversion, according to (Quirk et al 1995:1520) is the process of assigning the base to a

different word class with no change of form to make a new word For example, the noun

hand in ‘She has small beautiful hands’ is also a verb as in ‘Hand me your paper on time’

Conversion is a very particular process of making new words in English Moreover, it is a highly productive and convenient way Most cases of conversion involve three major word classes: nouns, verbs and adjectives And the two categories of words affected most by

conversion are nouns and verbs Verbs made from nouns are plentiful (e.g to hand, to

back, to eye, to face etc.) Nouns are also frequently derived from verbs as in do, make, find, catch etc

1.2.3 Shortening

Shortening is a comparatively new way of word building and it is now becoming popular with a high degree of productivity, especially in American English One way of shortening

is to make a new word from a syllable of the original word in which a part of the stem is

retained It is called clipping New word may retain the beginning stem (ad from

advertisement), the end as in phone (from telephone), or the middle (flu from influenza)

Another way is coining a new word from the initial letters of a word group (e.g GMT is stand for Greenwich Mean Time) This process is often called initial shortenings or

initialism There are two man types, abbreviations and acronyms Abbreviations are

pronounced as sequence of letters as in TV, CIA, GPRS, SMS Meanwhile, acronyms are

pronounced like ordinary words, with the letters having their characteristic phonological

value (e.g NATO, AID, UNESCO)

Apart form three major processes of word formation above, there are some other minors processes which help to make English vocabulary abundant such as back formation, blending, sound imitation, reduplication which are not discussed in this minor thesis

1.3 Compounding

1.3.1 Definition

Together with affixation and conversion, compounding is one of the three most productive types of modern English word building Compounding is considered to be universal as it occurs in many other languages such as Thai, German and Vietnamese as well It possesses the most typical and specific characteristics of word structures Therefore, it has been received a lot of concern from linguistic scholars such as Arnold (1986), Bloomfield (1933), Bauer (1998) etc They have proposed a number of different definitions on

compounding In this study the definition of Quirk et al (1985) is considered to be of appropriate, sufficient and easy one to understand: “Compound is a lexical unit consisting

of more than one base and functioning both grammatically and semantically as a single word” (1985:1567)

1.3.2 Structure of compound words

The structure of compound words is characterized by the so-called ‘modifier-head’ structure Heads of compounds are typically the rightmost constituents and are modified by the other members of compound A compound, as a whole, usually possesses most of

semantic and syntactic features of their head In blackbird, for example, the head is bird which is a noun modified by black So it is a compound noun and functions as a single

noun in grammatical structure

As most compound words are made up of two stems, the modifier and the head, compounds are said to be of binary structure However, there are some cases where the

compound comprises of more than two elements as in mother-of- pearl, salt-and- pepper.

Orthographically, compounds can be written in three different ways: the ‘solid’ or ‘closed’

form such as firefly, secondhand, redhead, keyboard, makeup; the hyphenated form such

as daughter-in-law, master-at-arms, over-the-counter; and the ‘open’ or spaced form consisting of newer combinations of usually longer words as distance learning, player

piano, etc The use of compounding is an evolving process When expressions become

more popular or adopt special meanings, they will change from two or more separate or

hyphenated words to single words e.g audio visual – audio-visual – audiovisual, wild life

- wild-life – wildlife

1.3.3 Meaning of compound words

The meaning of compounds is one of the central focuses of linguists’ interest That is the concern about correlation of the separate meanings of the constituents and the actual meaning of the whole compound Clearly, there exist two types of meanings: idiomatic and non-idiomatic

In some compound words, the meaning can be understood as the sum of their constituent

meanings, e.g classroom (a room for learning), working- man (a man who is working)

This kind of compounds is known as non-idiomatic compounds

In some other cases, the meaning of the word cannot be deduced from the sum of its

components as they may sometimes change their meaning For instance, football is not a ball but a game; white-collar is neither a kind of collar nor a white thing Lady-killer kills

no one but is merely a man who fascinates women However, the meanings of their constituents are still considered to be transparent; i.e the meaning of the whole can still be seen through its members Then once knowing the meaning of the constituents we can guess the meaning of the whole

However, for such compounds as: ladybird, tallboy, bluebottle, etc the key to meaning seems to have been irretrievably lost Ladybird is not a bird but an insect; tallboy is a piece

of furniture not a person So it’s impossible to define the meaning of the whole from its

constituents Such compounds as football, lady-killer, or ladybird, tallboy are said to have

idiomatic meanings

There are different ways of classifying compounds basing on different criteria And most

of us are familiar with the classification based on the parts of speech categories of the head Thus, we have compound nouns, compound adjectives, compound verbs if the head

is a noun, an adjective, a verb respectively

CHAPTER 2 AN INVESTIGATION INTO ENGLISH

COMPOUND NOUNS 2.1 An introduction to English compound nouns

Compound constructions are widely used and common in everyday speech in many languages In addition to this, they are widespread in written texts, especially professional texts And compound nouns, which are also known as nominal compounds, are considered

to be the largest in number and variety among others such as compound adjectives and compound verbs

Compound nouns are usually compounds which have nouns as heads and involve nouns, verbs or adjectives, prepositions as modifiers However, there are some rare cases where the noun head does not exist The table below will illustrate how other word classes combine to make a compound noun:

Adjective + Noun monthly ticket

Preposition + Noun underground

Noun + Preposition hanger on

Adjective + Verb dry- cleaning

Preposition + Verb output

A compound noun usually consists of two components and most of them include a noun modified by adjectives or attributive nouns However, there exist some noun compounds with more than two bases which can be constructed recursively by combining two bases at

a time In this case, a compound noun is itself a noun and can be subject to another

compound For instance, we have finance committee, finance committee secretary, finance

committee secretary election and so on.

2.2 Structure of compound nouns

Compounds are not homogeneous in structure In fact, its structure varies greatly It is very

common that two single stems can invent a compound noun: blackbird, shop-window,

sunflower.

Besides, derived or derivational compounds are also creative as in absent-mindedness,

honeymooner, teenager, etc

Compound nouns can have shortened stem in structure called ‘contracted compound’ For

instance: TV-set, Xmas (Christmas), V-day (Victory day), T-shirt, etc

Sometimes, linking vowels or consonants can form a compound noun This type is called

morphological compounds For example, Craftsmanship, Sino-Vietnamese, handiwork,

Anglo-Saxon, spokesman, etc

Segments of speech created by writers on their own combination also become compound

nouns as they are frequently used E.g Jack-of-all-trade, mother-in-law

2.3 The distinction between a compound noun and a noun phrase

One of the most problems to deal with compounding is the criteria for distinguishing between a compound and a phrase The problem arises most when it is a compound noun

rather than a compound verb or a compound adjective With adjective, for example,

tax-exempt is clearly a compound, there is no contrasting syntactic construction where an

adjective has a noun (tax) as modifier Similarly, it is unproblematic to distinct between the compound verb ‘baby-sit’ and a construction ‘baby sit’ In general, there are three criteria

that we can base on to distinguish a compound noun with a noun phrase: phonological, syntactic, and semantic These criteria are also used to distinguish the other types of compounds and a phrase in general

Phonologically, most (not all) compound nouns can be identified as having a main stress

on the first element meanwhile a phrase often has stress on the last Consider the following examples:

`green house a green `house

Syntactically, Jackson (2000) considers the specific syntactic features to make a compound noun different from a noun phrase, namely, word order, interruptibility, modification and inflectibility By word order, he refers to the position of the different elements of a compound in relation to one another Some compounds have ungrammatical or unusual

word order in English For example, dry-cleaning, output, haircut etc

Compound nouns have non-interruptible characteristic, i.e their constituents are not interrupted by extraneous elements This again confirms the assumption that a compound

is indeed a single lexical unit For example, the compound blackbird cannot be inserted extra elements as in the black night bird which is a noun phrase

By modifications he means the use of other words to modify the meaning of a compound

As a compound is a single unit, it can only be modified by other words as a whole but cannot be modified independently each of its constituents

Inflectibility is the use of inflections to present the grammatical function of compound To

make the compound noun bottle-neck plural, for example, its constituents cannot be inflected as bottles-necks Instead, bottle-necks must be used Similarly, we have the other compound nouns in plural as ash-trays, dishwashers, water paper baskets

Semantically, most compounds tend to acquire special meanings like idiom And some

authors take this special characteristic as their defining feature: “If the meaning of the

whole cannot be deduced from the meaning of the element separately, then we have a compound” (Jesperson 1942:137) Each compound conveys only one concept even though

it may consist of more than two stems Take the word tallboy as an example; it does not

denote a person, but a piece of furniture, a chest of drawers supported by a low stand

Tallboy expresses only one concept whereas a tall boy, a noun phrase, conveys two

concepts: a young male person and big in size

Although all the criteria above seem to be convincing, it is insufficient to base on a criterion alone, it is advisable to combine all three criteria to distinguish a compound noun from a noun phrase

2.4 General characteristics of compound nouns

distinctively, they take determiners like the, which, every, etc and adjectives as pre-head

modifiers For example, the new tallboy which is put in the bedroom, every woman doctor,

her poor father-in-law

Noun compounds also enter into inflectional contrasts of number (singular vs plural) and case (plain vs genitive) Compound nouns form the plural in different ways In fact, they vary greatly in their forms The inflection for plural may be put in the first, the last element, or both elements Most dictionaries will give variant spellings of compound plurals and they will help us to discover which spelling is acceptable for some compounds However, there are also some rules for the regular as the followings

Nowadays, it is considered that hyphenated and open compounds are regularly made plural

by the addition of the plural inflection to the element that is subject to the change in number In other words, the most significant word will take the plural form The significant word may be at the beginning, middle, or end of the term Consider the followings for

example, fathers-in-law, sergeants-in-arms, doctors of philosophy, coats – of – mail,

attorneys at law, bills of fare, chiefs of staff, notaries public, higher-ups, also-rans, betweens.

go-Some compounds, however, can occur with the plural either in the first or the last element

E.g attorney generals or attorneys general, courts-martial or court-martials,

The possessive of a hyphenated compound is created by attaching an apostrophe -s to the

end of the compound itself: my daughter-in-law's car, a friend of mine's car

To create the possessive of pluralized of compounded forms, most writers avoid the

apostrophe -s form and use an "of" phrase (the "post genitive") instead: the meeting of the

daughters-in-law, the schedule of half-moons Otherwise, the possessive form becomes

downright weird: the daughters-in-law's meeting, friends of mine's cars

In addition to the functional potential and inflection characteristics, compound nouns share syntactic structure relation with sentences in using the same lexical categories of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs The head and modifier of compounds are involved in complex grammatical function of subject, verb, object, complement, and adverbial like in clauses and sentences Quirk et al (1972, 1985) points out five types of the relationship between their constituents which bear to each other when the meaning of the compound is expressed as a sentence:

(1) subject and verb: sunrise (the sun rises)

(2) verb and object: blood test (X tests blood)

(3) verb and adverbial: swimming pool (X swim in the pool)

(4) subject and object: motorcycle

(5) subject and complement: girlfriend (the friend is a girl)

the modifier For example, blackboard is a kind of board; office manager is the manager of

an office

However, there are many cases where the meaning of the compound noun is a generalization instead of specialization It is in the case of coordinative and copulative compound nouns which will be discussed later

Referring to the meanings of compounds, many linguistic scholars pay attention to the meaning relations between the compound and its head There are two kinds of meaning relations existed in compound nouns, namely hyponymy and non-hyponymy A high proportion of English compound nouns are hyponymic; i.e the compound noun as a whole

is a hyponym of the grammatical head (Huddleson et al: 2002) In compound noun the relation of hyponym is reflected in the morphologically structure The meaning of the head

noun is fully contained in the meaning of the compound In wall-flower, for example, the head flower denotes a particular kind of flower Bulldog, consists of bull as modifier and

dog as head and denotes a particular kind of dog

When the meaning is not the hyponym of the head, we call this compound ‘exocentric compound’ The semantic head, in this case, is not explicitly express within the compound

And the compound is the hyponym of unexpressed semantic head E.g redhead is not a kind of head, but it is a person with red hair A lion heart is not a kind of heart but it is a

person with a heart like a lion (brave, courage) This type of compound nouns is said to be metaphorical or synecdoche (Bauer: 1983)

There is also a case when compound noun is a hyponym of both elements That is the case

of appositional compound (also known as dvandva) Maidservant, for example, is a hyponym of both maid and servant A poet-translator is both a poet and a translator

By contrast, in copulative compound, it is not easy to decide which element is the head and the compound is hyponym of neither elements The elements name separate entities which combine to form the entity denoted by the compound In this case the compound noun meaning is a generalization, not a specialization as the above

2.5 Classification of compound nouns

Linguists working in the field are interested first and foremost in how compounding being classified, however, classification of English compounding in general and compound nouns in particular is in the state of flux They base on different criteria to classify compounds This study introduces three common ways of classify compound nouns as below

2.5.1 According to the meaning

A compound noun can be idiomatic or non-idiomatic according to its meaning Meaning of idiomatic compound is hardly deduced from the constituents’ meaning For example,

blackbird, minute steak, butter-finger, etc

Meanwhile, non-idiomatic compound nouns are compound nouns of which meaning can

be deduced from the constituents, i.e the meaning is the sum of its part and it can be

guessed even they are out of context E.g doorkeeper, working man, dining table.

2.5.2 According to componential relationship.

In terms of componential relationship, compound nouns can be coordinative or subordinative Coordinative compound nouns are compounds whose constituents are both semantically and structurally independent The constituents are often of the same part of speech or of the same semantic group

There are three subtypes of coordinative: additive which denotes a person or an object as

two things at the same time such as actor-manager, secretary-typist Reduplicative compounds created by repetition of the same stem: bye bye, hush-hush Ablaut and rhythm compound are the third subtypes E.g zigzag, chitchat, walkie-talkie.

On the other hand, subordinative compounds are those that characterized by the domination of one component over the other semantically or structurally The second component, which is also called the determenatum, is the structural center and the dominant part of the word The first component is called the determinant which modifies the second Subordinative compound nouns account for a great part of compounds in modern English In subordinative compound nouns, the semantic relations between the components can be interpreted differently E.g:

- honey-bee, oil well (2 produces/yields 1)

- air-brake, hydrogen bomb (1 powers/operates 2)

- doorknob, table leg, piano keys (has 2)

- pine tree (2 is 1)

- sandwich-man (is like one)

2.5.3 According to the relation of the compound noun as a whole to its constituent

Based on the relations of compound as a whole to its member, there are two kinds of compound nouns: endocentric and exocentric

In endocentric compounds, the semantic head is contained within the compound itself; a

blackboard is a type of board, for example, and a footstool is a type of stool

Exocentric compounds (also called a bahuvrihi compound in the Sanskrit tradition) do not have a head inside and their meaning often cannot be transparently guessed from its

constituent parts E.g the English compound white-collar is neither a kind of collar nor a

white thing In these compounds, the word-class is determined lexically, disregarding the class of the constituents

2.6 Compound nouns and their pragmatic properties

Compound nouns have an important role in the language lexicon because of their ability for creating new a class of nouns intended for naming entities with no pre-existing names Compounds are characterized by ‘packing a maximum amount of information into a minimal amount of linguistic structure’ In everyday English especially in technology and

in other fields of science, compound nouns are used to designate new concepts, new

desires In general, endocentric compound denote kinds of people and jobs (girlfriend), things (writing paper) and actions (handshake) in which the referent is named by a head

noun and characterized by the modifier

Besides, compound nouns, especially bahuvrihi compounds, are also used to express speaker’s emotional tones or attitudes Bahuvrihi designate possessive exocentric formation in which a person, an animal or a thing is metonymically named after some striking feature they possess, chiefly in their appearance In this case, the bahuvrihi compound nouns are almost invariable characterized by an ironically emotional tone E.g

blockhead (a very stupid person), loudmouth (a person who talks too much and says

offensive or stupid thing), lazy bone (a lazy person).

When they denote kinds of people, they are generally derogatory Sometimes they are used

as vocative; e.g Hey, birdbrain!

2.7 Types of English compound nouns

Considering the types of English compound nouns, many linguistic scholars give different types based on different criteria Bauer (1983) pays attention to the part of speech of the

constituents’ combination, meanwhile Quirk et al (1972, 1985) classifies compound nouns

based on the underlying structure In the latest publication, Huddleston et al (2002) divide compound nouns into two distinguish groups, namely noun-centred compound nouns and verb-centred compound nouns in which he describes both the elements’ combination and the semantic relation analyzing underlying structure In each group of compounds, he divides them into subtypes In this study the author gives the priority to Huddleston’s view According to Huddleston et al (2002), a noun-centred compound noun (or verbless compound noun as called by other linguists) is a compound in which the head is purely or

at least primarily a noun For example, in girlfriend the head friend can only be a noun

A compound, by contrast, is a verb-centred compound noun in that the head is the lexical

base of a verb or else formed from one by suffixation or conversion For example, in

bus-driver, life-guard, take-away, driver are formed by suffixation, guard is form by

conversion and take is, of course, a verb We will look at these types in turn in the

following sections

2.7.1 Noun-centred compound nouns

These compounds have a noun as the final base Usually, the first constituent is the modifier and the second one is the head However, there are some cases as in coordinative, dvandva the two elements are equal In noun-centred compound nouns, the first element (the dependent) may be a noun, adjective, verb or some other categories We will look at it

in turn in the following parts

2.7.1.1 Noun + noun compound nouns

Examples of this type are: ashtray, bedtime, beehive, birdcage, life raft, motorcycle,

steamboat, bulldog, goldfish, handbag etc Clearly, this type is not only the most

productive kind of compounding but also the most productive kind of word-formation This type is often used to denote a new concept Their semantic relationships compound nouns can vary greatly

The vast majority of compound nouns in this class are endocentric They have the meaning which is systematically predictable from the meaning of the component bases For

example, handbag is a kind of bag; goldfish is a kind of fish

However, there are also many compound nouns in this class which are exocentric such as:

ladybird, shoes-tree, network etc We will leave them till the end of this section

In addition, some noun-noun compounds make up coordinative and dvandva For example,

secretary-treasurer, singer-songwriter, Bosnia-Herzegovina

The relations between two components of this type are subject and complement (as in

girlfriend) or subject and object (as in power plant)

2.7.1.2 Adjective + noun compounds

This type often causes ambiguous for the learners as it is similar to a noun phrase in its form However, this type possesses a quite high degree of semantic specialization and lexicalization The compound, therefore, differs significantly from a syntactic construction

consisting of an attributive adjective +head noun As we have already seen blackbird is different in meaning from black bird Many other examples of this class are: blueprint,

madman, smalltalk, busybody,etc.

2.7.1.3 Verb + noun compounds

These compounds have the noun as head and the verbal element in dependent position The semantic relation between the two constituents is similar to clausal construction

The head noun may stand in a subject relation to verb:

E.g crybaby ~ the baby cries

hangman ~ the man hangs (people sentenced to death)

The head noun may match up with a clausal object

E.g punch bag ~ X punches the bag

call girl ~ X calls the girl

The noun may also stand in an adverbial relation to verb The relations involved instrument

(e.g swearword, grindstone), location (e.g bake house, dance hall) or time (e.g payday)

With the compounds having the verbal element in –ing suffix (i.e V-ing + Noun), they denote a purposive meaning

E.g chewing gum ~ gum for chewing

frying pan ~ pan for frying