Syntactic and Semantic Features of English Compounds

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Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2, 3, University of Rostock, language: English, abstract: Compounding is a very productive word formation process. Productivity is "one of the defining features of human language which allows a native speaker to produce a large number of words and sentences according to the rules of a generative grammar" (Bauer 1991:84). In the English language there exists a vast number of words which were produced by compounding. In my term paper I am going to explain in detail what we understand by the term compound. I am going to look at semantic and syntactic characteristics and how compounds can be distinguished from syntagms which look very similar to them. In the further progress of my manuscript I am going to make a pilot study of the frequency of compounds in newspaper articles from different genres. I give answer to the question which genre seems to favour the use of compounds and which not. Of course my study is not going to be sufficient enough to present generally accepted results but after it prospects can be estimated.