5 Morphology and Word Formation key concepts

Exercise 
Very bad teenager joke:
Q: How do you make a cat drink?
A: Put it in a blender.
What are the verbal tricks here?
In the compounds the main stress is on the first word; in the phrases the 
main stress is on the last word. While this pattern does not apply to all com-
pounds, it is so generally true that it provides a very useful test.
Second, the meaning of the compound may differ to a greater or lesser 
degree from that of the corresponding phrase. A blackbird is a species of 
bird, regardless of its color; a black bird is a bird which is black, regardless 
of its species. A trotting-horse is a kind of horse, regardless of its current ac-
tivity; a trotting horse must be a horse that is currently trotting. So, because 
the meanings of compounds are not always predictable from the meanings 
of their constituents, dictionaries often provide individual entries for them. 
They do not do this for phrases, unless the meaning of the phrase is idi-
omatic
and therefore not derivable from the meanings of its parts and how 
they are put together, e.g., raining cats and dogs. Generally the meaning of a 
phrase is predictable from the meanings of its constituents, and so phrases 
need not be listed individually. (Indeed, because the number of possible 
phrases in a language is infinite, it is in principle impossible to list them all.)
Third, in many compounds, the order of the constituent words is differ-
ent from that in the corresponding phrase:
(13) compound
phrase
sawmill
mill for sawing 
sawing horse 
horse for sawing
sawdust
dust from sawing
Fourth, compound nouns allow no modification to the first element. 
This contrasts with noun phrases, which do allow modification to the modi-
fier: compare *a really-blackbird and a really black bird.
There are a number of ways of approaching the study and classification of 
compound words, the most accessible of which is to classify them according 
to the part of speech of the compound and then sub-classify them according to the 
parts of speech of its constituents. Table 2 is based on discussion in Bauer (1983).

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Delahunty and Garvey 
 
134
1. Compound nouns
a. Noun + noun: bath towel; boy-friend; death blow
b. Verb + noun: pickpocket; breakfast
c. Noun +verb: nosebleed; sunshine
d. Verb +verb: make-believe
e. Adjective + noun: deep structure; fast-food
f. Particle + noun: in-crowd; down-town
g. Adverb + noun: now generation
h. Verb + particle: cop-out; drop-out
i. Phrase compounds: son-in-law
2. Compound verbs
a. Noun + verb: sky-dive
b. Adjective + verb: fine-tune
c. Particle + verb: overbook
d. Adjective + noun: brown-bag
3. Compound adjectives
a. Noun + adjective: card-carrying; childproof
b. Verb + adjective: fail safe
c. Adjective + adjective: open-ended
d. Adverb + adjective: cross-modal
e. Particle + adjective: over-qualified
f. Noun + noun: coffee-table
g. Verb + noun: roll-neck
h. Adjective + noun: red-brick; blue-collar
i. Particle + noun: in-depth
j. Verb + verb: go-go; make-believe
k. Adjective/Adverb + verb: high-rise;
l. Verb + particle: see-through; tow-away
4. Compound adverbs
uptightly
cross-modally
5. Neo-classical compounds
astro-naut
hydro-electric
mechano-phobe
table 2: english compounds (bauer, 1983)
An alternative approach is to classify compounds in terms of the seman-
tic relationship between the compound and its head. The head of a com-

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135
Morphology and Word Formation
pound is the constituent modified by the compound’s other constituents. 
In English, heads of compounds are typically the rightmost constituent (ex-
cluding any derivational and inflectional suffixes). For example, in traffic-cop 
the head is cop, which is modified by traffic; in line-backer the head is backer, 
which is modified by line. Linguists distinguish at least three different se-
mantic relations between the head and modifier(s) of compounds. 
First, the compound represents a subtype of whatever the head repre-
sents. For instance, a traffic-cop is a kind of cop; a teapot is a kind of pot; a 
fog-lamp is a kind of lamp; a blue-jay is a kind of jay. That is, the head names 
the type, and the compound names the subtype. These are called endocen-