Some Observations on the Structure, Type Frequencies and Spelling of English Compounds  

Oleh:

Rakic, Stanimir

Jenis: Article from Journal
Dalam koleksi: SKASE: Journal of Theoretical Linguistics vol. 6 no. 1 (Jan. 2009), page 59-83.
Topik: English compounds; constituent structure; type frequency; spelling; parsability; productivity
Fulltext: Stanimir Rakic.pdf (317.51KB)

Isi artikel

This paper deals with the structure, type frequencies and spelling of English noun – noun compounds.1 On the basis of a corpus extracted from LDCE (2000), I note some regularities governing the structure, type frequencies and spelling of this type of English compounds. My main point is that the type frequencies and spelling of English compounds depend on the complexity of their constituents. The relevant generalization seems to be that spellers tend to insert a space in noun – noun compounds if any of its constituents is morphologically complex. In respect to the first constituent this tendency is particularly strong, so that solid compouds in English are overwhelmingly written with a monomorphemic first constituent. The exceptions to this generalization are not numerous and almost all can be accounted for in a principled way. The compound types which are easier to process are more frequent, and are also more often spelled solid. According to the proposed analysis of English compounds, solid compounds seem to differ from open compounds in four important features: spelling, morphological structure, type frequency and productivity.

Opini Anda

Klik untuk menuliskan opini Anda tentang koleksi ini!

Kembali