Nukus State Pedagogical Institute named after Ajiniyaz

The meaning of Compounds. Motivation
According to semantic criterion of compounds, as we find the opposition of motivated and unmotivated compounds, also known as figurative. In fact, may compounds are motivated, it is possible to deduce the meaning of a compound from the meanings of the components, and the compound word`s meaning depends on the order of the constituents.
Motivated compounds can be completely motivated or semi(partially) motivated, but again the degree will vary: completely motivated compounds are the words, whose meanings are clear from the lexical meaning of their components, e.g. door-handle, hand-bag, watering-can, writing-table, dining-room, etc. In some compounds the motivation is not so clear, they might be termed semi-motivated or partially motivated compound words, compound words such as hand-bag, flowerbed, handcuffs, castle-builder are all only partially motivated, but still the degree of transparency of their meanings is different, e.g. handcuffs which are not cuffs, but metal rings on a chain placed on the wrists of a criminal; flower-bed is another example for this kind, which is not a bed, but a piece of ground specially prepared and shaped for growing flowers on; a sweetmeat which has nothing to do with meat but comes from OE ‘meta’ = food. In this meaning, ‘meat’ is preserved only in the proverb ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison`; a castle-builder is not a ‘builder’ as the second component suggests but ‘a day-dreamer, one who builds castles in the air’.There are compounds that sometimes are called lack motivational or also unmotivated compounds together. Unmotivated compounds are figurative, idiomatic in meaning: we cannot deduce the meaning of the whole from the lexical meaning of the components: e.g. pineapple, a tropical fruit which has nothing in common with a pine tree, neither is it anything like an apple; ‘bluestocking’ a pedantic woman affecting a taste for literature; ‘wall-flower’ a girl or woman who is not invited to dance and has to sit at the wall; this compound is a homonym of a wall-flower, a tall-growing flower planted against the garden wall, - a motivated compound.
In some cases, a seemingly unmotivated compound is formed from an idiomatic phrase: e.g. ‘castle-builder’ one who goes in for idle dreaming) originates from the phrase ‘to build castles in the air’; the above compound is motivated to anyone who knows the idiomatic phrase.
The motivation of a compound may be dependent on its distributional pattern: the order in which the components stand determine their motivation and through that – the meaning of the word: e.g. ‘ring-finger’, ‘finger-ring’; ‘bell-tower’ – a belfry, ‘tower-bell’ – a bell in a tower; ‘market-fruit’ – marketable fruit, i.e. fruit which is suitable to be sold in the ‘fruit-market.