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Concept
English compound
Summary
A compound is a word composed of more than one free morpheme. The English language, like many others, uses compounds frequently. English compounds may be classified in several ways, such as the word classes or the semantic relationship of their components.
English inherits the ability to form compounds from its parent the Proto-Indo-European language and expands on it. Close to two-thirds of the words in the Old English poem Beowulf are found to be compounds. Of all the types of word-formation in English, compounding is said to be the most productive.
Most English compound nouns are noun phrases (i.e. nominal phrases) that include a noun modified by adjectives or noun adjuncts. Due to the English tendency toward conversion, the two classes are not always easily distinguished. Most English compound nouns that consist of more than two words can be constructed recursively by combining two words at a time. Combining "science" and "fiction", and then combining the resulting compound with "writer", for example, can construct the compound "science-fiction writer". Some compounds, such as salt and pepper or mother-of-pearl, cannot be constructed in this way, however.
Since English is a mostly analytic language, unlike most other Germanic languages, it creates compounds by concatenating words without case markers. As in other Germanic languages, the compounds may be arbitrarily long. However, this is obscured by the fact that the written representation of long compounds always contains spaces. Short compounds may be written in three different forms, which do not correspond to different pronunciations, though:
The or form consisting of newer combinations of usually longer words, such as "distance learning", "player piano", "ice cream".
The form in which two or more words are connected by a hyphen. Are often hyphenated:
Compounds that contain affixes: "house-build(er)" and "single-mind(ed)(ness)",
Adjective–adjective compounds: "blue-green",
Verb–verb compounds: "freeze-dried",
Compounds that contain articles, prepositions or conjunctions: "rent-a-cop", "mother-of-pearl" and "salt-and-pepper".
Official source
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