TYPES OF COMPOUNDS

ACROSS LANGUAGES

by Martyna Jarońska, II BA
Definition of compounding

Compounding or composition is the process of combining two or more words (free morphemes) to
create a new word (commonly a noun, verb, or adjective).

blackboard
Handschuh ('hand shoe' or glove)
stofzuiger ('dust sucker' or vacuum cleaner)
organo-pektis ('instrument player' or musician)

The meaning of a compound word may be different from the meaning of its components in isolation.

A compound word is a union of two or more words to convey a unit idea or special meaning that is not
conveyed as easily or quickly by separated words.
Productivity
Semantic transparency - the degree of association and semantic similarity between the meanings
of a compound and each of its constituents

The general semantic pattern of a compound of the form XY is that it denotes a Y that has
something to do with X, or vice versa, depending on the language.

 German Donau-dampf-schiff-fahrtsgesellschaft ”Danube-steam-ship-travel-company”, the

name of a shipping company that used to be active on the Danube;

 English White House travel office staff

 In linguistics, the notion of "head" refers to the element
Compound of a compound that determines the grammatical
properties of the whole compound.
heads and Dutch: kind “child”; plural form kinderen

compound
modifiers kleinkind “grandchild”, plural form kleinkinderen

This illustrates that the head of the compound, which is

kind, determines the pluralization of the whole
compound.
 Compound heads and compound
modifiers in different languages

Germanic languages have head-final compounds, the last element carries its grammatical features and signifies its semantic category:

 English: skateboard, boardroom, doghouse

 German: Sprachschule (a school that teaches languages),
Handschuh (a glove)

The following examples of head-initial compounds are from Maori:

 roro hiko - brain electricity - “computer”
 wai mangu - water black - “ink”

Hebrew has head-initial compounds, as seen in chessboard which is formed

as "board-checkmate".

French has both head-initial and head-final compounds, but tends to prefer the former, as in the compound planche à roulette for "skateboard".
 A+B denotes a special kind
endocentric doghouse
of B

A+B denotes a special kind

of some unexpressed
exocentric semantic category white-collar
Semantic (such as a person, plant, or
animal)
classification
A+B denotes 'the sum' of bittersweet,
copulative
what A and B denote sleepwalk

A and B provide different hunter-

appositional descriptions for the same gatherer,
referent maidservant
Types of compounds
ENDOCENTRIC COMPOUNDS - compounds with a head - that the category of the whole
construction is identical to that of one of its constituents

EXOCENTRIC COMPOUNDS - a compound construction that lacks a head word: the

construction as a whole is not grammatically and/or semantically equivalent to either of its parts

 Italian: porta-lettere “lit. carry letters, postman”

 Spanish: lanza-cohetes “lit. launch rockets, rocket launcher”;
limpia-botas “lit. clean boots, bootblack”
 German: Kahlkopf “lit. bald-head, person with a bald head”,

 English: blue-stocking
Types of compounds
BAHUVRIHI-COMPOUNDS - a subset of the exocentric compounds, since they do not
refer to the entity mentioned by the head of the compound

Latin adjectival compounds:

auri-com-us “having golden hair” and magn-anim-us “magnanimous”

Here the noun aurum “gold” and the adjective magnus “great” combine with a noun (coma
“hair” and animus “soul” respectively) into a compound that is an adjective.

These compounds cannot be explained in terms of semantic interpretation in the same way
as baldhead, because they behave formally as adjectives, although there is no adjectival
head.
 Types of compounds
COPULATIVE COMPOUNDS - there is no semantic head, and the relation between the
constituent is a relation of coordination
the Sanskrit dvanda compounds:

These compounds function as dual or plural expressions, and are therefore quite
similar to NPs with coordination, which also receive a plural interpretation.
 Syntactic classification

Noun-noun compounds:
 French: chemin-de-fer 'railway', lit. 'road of iron'
 Turkish: yeldeğirmeni 'windmill' (yel: wind, değirmen-i: mill-possessive)
Verb–noun compounds:
 English: breastfeeding, backstabbing
(a mother) breastfeeds (a child) = mother-child breastfeeding

Incorporation is a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound with its direct object;
Incorporated nouns do not denote specific objects -> they are non-referential

Verb-verb compounds:
 Hindi: jā-kar dekh-o means "go and see."
 Compound words across writing
systems
• open compound words, which have spaces between the words (dining room)

• closed compound words, which have no spaces (babysit)

• hyphenated compound words, which have hyphens (free-for-all)

• In German, compounds are written without spaces between constituents whereas, - a person
reading a German compound is faced with the challenge of finding the constituent morphemes

• In English, compounds with more than two constituents are written with at least one space at the
point of the major constituent boundary.
(high-speed line, long-term loan, English-speaking nation)

• In Chinese, the reader needs to correctly group characters so that constituent morphemes are
joined into compound structures because the constituent morphemes are represented as single
characters surrounded by spaces. ( 學生 / 学生 'student’, 摩天樓 / 摩天楼 'skyscraper’, 打印機 / 打印机
'printer’)

• In Greek and Latin, they are typically joined by thematic vowels,

such as the -i- of Latin agricultura, the -o- of Greek biographia

• In French, one kind of compound has the form of a prepositional phrase: pomme de terre (‘apple
of earth’) potato; arc-en-ciel (‘arch in sky’) rainbow
 Not all languages use simple concatenations of
lexical elements to represent compound words.

Non-lexical • the French compound planche à roulette includes

the preposition à, indicating the semantic relation
elements between the lexical elements. The French word
for potato is the compound pomme de terre (apple

within of the earth) with the preposition de

compounds • the Dutch and Austrian German words for apple

of the earth (potato) do not contain a preposition:
ardappel, Erdapfel
 Non-lexical elements within
compounds
Compounds can have internal elements called interfixes. The vowel 'o' is a common
interfix in English, Latin, Greek, Romance languages, and Slavic languages.
English gasometer, thermometer (this particular interfix can be traced back to a
thematic vowel in Latin and Ancient Greek)
Italian sessu-o-fobo ‘sex-o-phobic’
Greek xart-o-péktis ‘card player’
Polish kraj-o-znawstwo (literally ‘country science’, meaning the study of national
customs)
Germanic languages like Dutch or German also display interfixes where compound
words can have different interfixes such as '-e-', '-en-', '-n-', '-s-', and '-er-’.

For instance, the word Kindergarten:

kind+er+garten, meaning child + interfix + garden

'-e-' in hundemüde (dog-tired)

'-ens-' in die Herzensgüte (goodness of heart)
 Dutch
 verjaardags­kalender 'birthday calendar': verjaardag 'birthday'
+ kalender 'calendar’
 universiteits­bibliotheek 'university library': universiteit 'university'
+ bibliotheek 'library’

Some Finnish
 sanakirja 'dictionary': sana 'word' + kirja 'book’
more  tietokone 'computer': tieto 'knowledge data' + kone 'machine’

exmaples Ancient Greek

 φιλόσοφος philosopher: φίλος phílos 'beloved' + σοφία sophíā 'wisdom'
 δημοκρατία dēmokratíā 'democracy': δῆμος dêmos 'people' + κράτος 'rule’

Italian
 millepiedi 'centipede': mille 'thousand' + piedi 'feet'
 pomodoro: pomo d'oro = apple of Gold = tomatoes

Spanish
 paraguas 'umbrella': para 'stops' + aguas '(the) water'
 Sources

 Booij, G. 2005. The Grammar of Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 Gary Libben, Christina L. Gagné and Wolfgang U. Dressle The representation and processing of compounds words
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/37598/9783110440577.pdf?sequence=1#page=344

 Rita Finkbeiner and Barbara Schlücker, 2019. Compounds and multi-word expressions in the languages of Europe
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330367670_Compounds_and_multi-word_expressions_in_the_languages_of_Europe

 https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/europe-language-compound-nouns
 https://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/Wortbildung/Komposita.html
 https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/compound-word