Types of Compound Words
Compound word does have its own characteristics, compound words behave grammatically and semantically as single words. There is also no affixes usually occur between their component elements. Some of the examples are bathroom, bedroom or blackboard. However, there is the exception for some words like brother in law or courts-martial. So there is also one important characteristics of English compounds, is that they can be written in three different ways: closed compound words, open compound words and hyphenated compound words.
Closed (solid is also possible) compound words are the words that are written as a single word and it is without a space or hyphen between the component elements of the compound, from one side these words were not utilize together in old English, but now they are accepted as areal word in the modern English language, e.g. bookstore, fireman, haircut, newspaper. There is the second element of the compound which is also known as head word usually determines the grammatical category to which the compound belongs, for example, sunrise is the combination of two nouns, overtake is the combination of preposition and verb, and off-day is the combination of preposition and noun.
Open compound words are usually written as separate words and in most cases they are created when the modifying adjective is used with its noun to create a new noun. We just use a space between the adjective and the noun, so sometimes it can be hard to identify as a compound, but, however if two words are commonly used together, it is considered to be a compound word. For example, living room, real estate or dinner table.
Hyphenated compound words are the words that used a hyphen in between two words and the hyphen separates the elements of the compound words. One thing we should know that in most cases a compound adjective hyphenated if it placed before noun it modifies, but not if placed after the noun, such as well-known, second-rate, merry-go-round, long-term-solution.
1.3The structure and meaning of Compounding
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |