Compound (linguistics)
In linguistic morphology, a compound is a word (lexeme) that consists of more than one free morpheme. Compounds occur in most or all word classes, including closed word classes. Composition should not be confused with derivation. Due to the differences between natural languages, general statements about compounds are difficult (see morphology).
The meaning of the compound is generally a combination of the meanings of its parts, and it is said to be a transparent compound. See bahuvrihi for an example in which this is not the case. If the meaning of the compound is a combination, the most important element (head, determinatum) may be left-modified or right-modified by another element (modifier, determinans), depending on language. Left-modified languages include Japanese and the Germanic languages, right-modified languages include Tibetan and the Romance languages. If the elements belong to different word classes, the compound generally belongs to the same class as the head.
Compounds may be classified by the word classes or the semantic relationship of their elements. Much of the terminology used to describe compounds is derived from Sanskrit.
In a perfectly analytical language, compounds are simply elements strung together without any markers. In the English language, for example, science fiction is a compound noun that consists of two nouns and no markers. A corresponding example from the Mandarin language, would be Hànyǔ (漢語; simplified: 汉语), or "the Han Chinese language", which also consists of two nouns and no markers.
In synthetic languages, the relationship between the elements of a compound are frequently marked. In the German language, for example the compound Kapitänspatent consists of the lexemes Kapitän (sea captain) and Patent (license) and the genetive case marker -s. In the Latin language, the lexeme frontispiece contains the genetive form frontis of the lexeme frons (forehead).
Agglutinative languages tend to create very long words with derivational morphemes. Compounds may or may not require the use of derivational morphemes also. The well-known Japanese compound kamikaze (神風 | かみかぜ), for example, consists only of the nouns kami (god, spirit) and kaze (wind).
See also
