As in other Germanic languages, the compounds may be arbitrarily long. Since English is a mostly analytic language, unlike most other Germanic languages, it creates compounds by concatenating words without case markers. Types of compound nouns Native English compound Some compounds, such as salt and pepper or mother-of-pearl, cannot be constructed in this way, however. Combining "science" and "fiction", and then combining the resulting compound with "writer", for example, can construct the compound " science-fiction writer". Most English compound nouns that consist of more than two words can be constructed recursively by combining two words at a time. Due to the English tendency toward conversion, the two classes are not always easily distinguished. nominal phrases) that include a noun modified by adjectives or noun adjuncts. Most English compound nouns are noun phrases (i.e. Of all the types of word-formation in English, compounding is said to be the most productive. Close to two-thirds of the words in the Old English poem Beowulf are found to be compounds. English compounds may be classified in several ways, such as the word classes or the semantic relationship of their components.Įnglish inherits the ability to form compounds from its parent the Proto-Indo-European language and expands on it. The English language, like many others, uses compounds frequently. A compound is a word composed of more than one free morpheme.
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