NOUN COMPOUNDS AND ADJECTIVE COMPOUNDS IN ENGLISH

Abstract

Compounds, typically defined as words composed of two or more words, are frequently found in everyday English usage. In the field of morphology, a number of word formation processes are present, including compounding as one of the most productive ones. This paper introduces some of the most important notions of the word-formation - noun compounds and adjective compounds. Following the theoretical introduction briefly explaining the structure and types of these compounds, the corpus selected for this article provides a classification of 32 noun compounds and adjective compounds in this study, including a discussion of their structure as well as stress patterns found in the compounds. For the purposes of the analysis, the examples were identified and collected from several women’s magazines, namely various issues of Cosmopolitan magazines, analysed and classified in order to present examples of noun and adjective compounds as well as some metaphorical compounds. In addition to the fact that the meaning of compounds is to a certain degree compositional and easy to comprehend, there are still compounds which may imply metaphorical or figurative meanings, and thus form confusion among speakers of listeners. In this way, compounding is believed to be one of the most productive aspect of language, as it can form as many words and composite words as possible in order to form a completely new meaning, either literal or non-literal. The paper concludes that compounding is considered to be highly productive, especially when interpreting compounds, with a particular focus on nouns and adjectives as heads.