Compound words, blends and phrasal words

Compounds versus phrases

We looked at words (that is, lexemes, not word forms) formed from other words, mainly by means of affixes. We will look at compounds, that is words formed by combining roots, and the much smaller category of phrasal words, that is items that have the internal structure of phrases but function syntactically as words. As we will see, some types of compound are much commoner than others. There are also some styles of writing (for example, newspaper headlines) in which compounds are especially frequent. But first we must deal with an issue that has not arisen so far, because until now all the complex words that we have looked at have contained at least one bound morpheme. Roots in English are mostly free rather than bound. How can we tell, then, whether a pair of such roots constitutes a compound word or a phrase, that is a unit of sentence structure rather than a complex word?

A definite answer is not always possible, but there are enough clear cases to show that the distinction between compounds and phrases is valid. Consider the expressions a green house, with its literal meaning, and a greenhouse, meaning a glass structure (not usually green in color!) where delicate plants are reared. There is a difference in sound corresponding to the difference in meaning: in the first expression the main stress is on house, while in the second the main stress is on green. This pattern of semantic contrast between expressions stressed in different places is quite common, as in the following examples:

(1) black bóard                                                 bláckboard

    ‘board that is black’                                    ‘board for writing on’

(2) silk wórm                                                    sílkworm

    ‘worm made of silk (e.g. a soft toy)’           ‘caterpillar that spins silk’

(3) hair nét                                                      háirnet

    ‘net made of hair’                                       ‘net for covering hair’

(4) white hóuse                                               (the) Whíte House

‘house that is white’                                       ‘residence of the US President’

(5) toy fáctory                                                 tóy factory

‘factory that is a toy                                      ‘factory where toys are made’ (e.g. in a model city)’

The items on the left in (1)–(5), like green hóuse, are phrases, because it is characteristic of phrases in English to be stressed on the last word, unless some contrast is being stated or implied (e.g. They live in a white house, not a yellow one! ’). The items on the right, stressed on the first element like gréenhouse, are generally classified as compounds – though this stress pattern applies consistently only to compound nouns, not to compounds in other wordclasses.

Apart from stress, a second criterion traditionally used for distinguishing compounds from phrases is semantic: a compound tends to have a meaning that is more or less idiosyncratic or unpredictable. This is true of most of the compounds in (1)–(5). This criterion must be treated with caution, however, because, being semantically unpredictable does not correlate exactly with being a word. All the same, it is true that words are more likely to be lexical items than phrases are, so treating semantic idiosyncrasy as an indicator of compound status will not often be misleading.

All the compounds in (1)–(5) are nouns, and compound nouns are indeed the commonest type of compound in English. We will examine them in detail later.