Some compounds seem to use what may be considered ungrammatical or at least unusual word order in English.
For example, the structure ‘Noun + Adjective’ is not the most usual phrase pattern in English, but it occurs in compounds such as air-sick.
However, the orthographic treatment of compounds is by no means consistent.
Some are written as one word (with or without a hyphen, e.g. blackbird, byeffect), while others are written as two or more words (e.g. waste paper basket).
Meaning-changing prefixes include a-, anti-, bi-, il-, im-, in-, inter-, mal-, re-, semi-, and un-.
atypical (a- + typical), antibiotic (anti- + biotic) biannual (bi- + annual), chiefdom (chief + -dom) coldish (cold + -ish), coexist (co- + exist) disappear (dis- + appear), ex-wife (ex- + wife) illegal (il- + legal), impolite (im- + polite) inexact ( in- + exact), interchange (inter- + change) malpractice (mal- + practice), neighborhood (neighbor
These bound roots are often used with affixes to form new words. There are a few hundred English roots and stems around which thousands of English words cluster.
Class-maintaining derivations
Class-maintaining derivations do not change the word class of the stem but its meaning.
Most derivatives that are prefixes in English affect only the meaning of the root, not its syntactic class.
For example, fireman has become part of the colloquial or everyday language, and now because of the natural process of change, is going out of use, and is being replaced by firefighter.
However, in addition to the semantic criterion, we may also use involving order.
In a verb plus adverb compound like forthcoming, there is a clear difference in order between the phrases from which they derive (e.g. come forth) and the resultant compound.
From the root ced (and its variant form cess), ‘go, yield,’ are derived abscess, accede, accessory, ancestry, antecedent, cease, cede, concession, decease, exceed, excessive, incessant, intercede, precede, predecessor, proceed, recede, recess, succeed ….
The structure ‘Verb + Preposition’ is regular for verbs and unusual for nouns, but it does occur in the case of the compound splashdown which is a noun.
Usually a phrase has the literal meaning of its parts, whereas a compound does not.
However, there are unclear boundaries here.
While offspring means something rather more specific than one who springs off from somewhere, a bartender is certainly one who tends bars.
Its acceptance and use by the speaker will depend on how much and how long people use it to make it an entry in dictionaries.
Characteristics of Compounds
Compounding
Compounding refers to the faculty and device of language to form new words by combining or putting together old words.
Compounds are stems consisting of more than one root, e.g. bedside, blackbird, by-effect, rainbow, waste paper basket. Compounding is a very common and frequent process for enlarging vocabulary.
English compounds may be distinguished from phrases on phonological, syntactic, and semantic grounds.
Phonologically, there is always a single primary stress in English words, so that compounds are often recognized by stress pattern and lack of juncture.
The criterion of stress applies only to nominal compounds, and the distinction between compound and idiom becomes fuzzy for verbs and other nominompounds are single lexical units and have specific features. The grammatical relations between the constituents of the compound are sometimes obscure.
Similar examples are provided by verbs, adjectives, and nouns like backpedal, jet-propelled, and upkeep.
By contrast, such a phrase as look out for, which is usually considered an idiom rather than a compound, involves no modification of the underlying word order.
Objects usually follow their verbs in sentence structure, but not necessarily in compounds, e.g. knee-jerk.
In most cases, their constituent elements can not be interrupted by extraneous elements. For example, the compound pickpocket cannot be used as ‘pick the pocket’, which is a phrase. The insertion of an extraneous element will destroy the stability of the whole structure.
Compounds have different stress patterns from noncompounds. Greenhouse and redcoat have the primary stress on the first part of the compound, while green house and red coat do not.