Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English
and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Jan Štěrba

Word-formation Processes in TV
Series
Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Naděžda Kudrnáčová, Csc.

2015
 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..
Jan Štěrba
I would like to thank my supervisor doc, PhDr. Naděžda Kudrnáčová, Csc., for her time,
kindness and willingness to help.
Table of Contents

Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 6
1. Word-formation ............................................................................................................ 9
1.1 Definitions of Basic Terms ..................................................................................... 9
1.1.1 Lexeme, word-form, derivation and inflection................................................. 9
1.1.2 Root, stem and base ........................................................................................ 10
1.2 Definition of Word-formation ............................................................................... 11
1.3 Productivity and Lexicalization ............................................................................ 12
2. Word-formation Processes in English ........................................................................ 13
2.1 Compounding ........................................................................................................ 13
2.1.1 Definition ........................................................................................................ 14
2.1.2 Compounds and phrases ................................................................................. 14
2.1.3 Distinguishing compounds from phrases ....................................................... 15
2.1.3.1 Stress ........................................................................................................ 16
2.1.3.2 Spelling and lexicalization ....................................................................... 16
2.1.3.3 Inflectibility ............................................................................................. 17
2.1.3.4 Inseparability and modification ............................................................... 18
2.1.3.5 Semantic criteria ...................................................................................... 18
2.1.4 Types of compounds....................................................................................... 19
2.1.4.1 Primary and synthetic compounds ........................................................... 20
2.1.4.2 Syntactic and lexical compounds ............................................................. 20
2.1.4.3 Endocentric, exocentric, subordinate and coordinate compounds ........... 21
2.1.5. Neo-classical compounds. ............................................................................. 22
2.2 Affixation .............................................................................................................. 24
2.3 Conversion ............................................................................................................ 25
2.4 Clipping ................................................................................................................. 26
2.5 Blending ................................................................................................................ 26
2.6 Back-formation ..................................................................................................... 27
3. Analysis of the Corpus ................................................................................................ 28
3.1 Borderline Cases ................................................................................................... 30
3.2 General Overview ................................................................................................. 31
3.3 Compound Nouns.................................................................................................. 32
3.3.1 Noun + noun ................................................................................................... 33
 3.3.2 Verb + noun .................................................................................................... 37
3.3.3 Adjective + noun ............................................................................................ 38
3.3.4 Particle + noun ................................................................................................ 40
3.3.5 Verb + particle ................................................................................................ 41
3.4 Compound Adjectives ........................................................................................... 42
3.4.1 Noun + adjective............................................................................................. 43
3.4.2 Adjective + adjective ...................................................................................... 44
3.4.3 Particle + adjective ......................................................................................... 45
3.4.4 Adverb + adjective ......................................................................................... 46
3.4.5 Noun + noun. .................................................................................................. 46
3.4.6 Adjective + noun ............................................................................................ 48
3.4.7 Particle + noun ................................................................................................ 48
3.4.8 Verb + verb ..................................................................................................... 49
3.4.9 Verb + particle ................................................................................................ 49
3.5 Compound verbs ................................................................................................... 50
3.5.1 Particle + verb................................................................................................. 51
3.5.2 Noun + verb .................................................................................................... 51
3.5.3 Particle + noun ................................................................................................ 51
3.6 Compound Adverbs .............................................................................................. 52
3.6.1. Particle + noun ............................................................................................... 52
3.6.2 Noun + adjective............................................................................................. 53
3.7 Phrasal Compounds ............................................................................................... 53
3.7.1 Phrasal nouns .................................................................................................. 54
3.7.2 Phrasal adjectives ........................................................................................... 54
3.8 Neo-classical Compounds ..................................................................................... 55
3.9 Comparing Friends and The Big Bang Theory ..................................................... 56
3.9.1 General comparison of the series ................................................................... 56
3.9.2 Comparison of characters ............................................................................... 58
3.10 Summary ............................................................................................................. 60
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 66
Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 69
Resumé in English .......................................................................................................... 74
Resumé in Czech ............................................................................................................ 75
 Introduction

Word-formation is considered to be “the deepest, most secret part of language”

(Bauer, 1983, p. 206). Therefore, it proves particularly interesting to study the English

word-formation processes, which is also the topic of this thesis. This thesis will focus

on one specific word-formation process, namely compounding. Compounding is

regarded as the most productive English word-formation process (Kavka and Štekauer,

2006, p.52) and is thus the most difficult to delimit. The main aim of this thesis is to

classify compound words which result from the process of compounding.

The classification was done using contemporary British and American TV series

where studies regarding compound words are rather rare. The choice of series relevant

for this thesis was based on nature of the series and occurrence of compounding. Scope

of the thesis was also taken into account. This thesis will cover Friends and The Big

Bang Theory. These TV series are well-known and successful all over the world and

their focus also seems to be slightly different and so they allow comparison and

contrast. After going through transcripts of various episodes of these TV series, the first

ten episodes of the first season were analyzed for each series. Corpus was created using

the transcripts and is enclosed on a CD.

This thesis mainly relies on Bauer’s book called English Word-formation (1983)

and his classification of compound words was adopted. Most of the terminology used in

the text also corresponds with Bauer’s approach to the theory of word-formation.

Differences from this terminology will be remarked on in the text. Another important

source is the book Words, Meaning, and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern

English Lexicology written by Jackson and Amvela (2007). However, this thesis also

makes use of various other sources.

6
 The focus of this work is mainly practical, but sufficient theoretical background

is also needed. For this purpose, the first two chapters will have a largely theoretical

basis. The first chapter will be concerned with definitions of basic terms which will be

then used throughout the whole text. Also the definition of word-formation is provided.

The second chapter will present an overview of various English word-formation

processes. Of course, the vast majority of the chapter is devoted to compounding.

Because of lack of inflectional morphemes in English, distinguishing between

compound words and syntactic phrases is a problem. Therefore, various tests of

‘compoundhood’ will be provided. Afterwards, the main types of compounds will be

introduced. The greatest space will be devoted to endocentric and exocentric

compounds, because this division will be essential for the following analysis. Neo-

classical and phrasal compounds, which can be regarded as special subtypes of

compounds, will be also mentioned.

Other word-formation processes will be also mentioned although much more

briefly than compounding. However, only those are included which are relevant for the

latter part of the thesis because of being on the borderline with compounding in some

cases. Therefore, this listing should not be treated as exhaustive. It will include

affixation, conversion, clipping, blending and back-formation.

After the two theoretical chapters, the third chapter will form the central part of

this thesis. The whole chapter will be devoted to the analysis of the transcripts.

Compounds will be classified according to criteria presented by Bauer (1983), although

words which are on the borderline with phrases, proper nouns as well as scientific terms

will not be taken into account. Compounds will be classed into categories based on the

word class of their constituents. All the criteria will be described at the beginning of the

chapter. The most productive patterns will receive the greatest attention. The basic

7
division among the categories will be made according to semantic criteria.

Further division will be made and commented for each of the categories. Neo-

classical and phrasal compounds, which are special subtypes of compounds, will not be

classified in this way but will be also briefly mentioned. The analysis will be backed

with tables which will illustrate the occurrence of compounding patterns.

The last part of the analysis will be concerned with a comparison of

compounding patterns between Friends and The Big Bang Theory. Language of main

characters will also be compared among each series with focus on compounding.

However, these comparisons will be rather brief as they will serve mainly for providing

a general picture. As a conclusion of the analysis, all the findings will be clearly

summarized in form of tables including frequency of all the patterns found.

8
 1. Word-formation

This chapter serves as a starting point to the whole thesis, since it presents the

basic notions of the English word-formation. It will not discuss the term ‘word’1,

because it is suggested by the majority of linguists that no satisfactory definition of

word exists (Bauer, 1983, p. 8). At first, the terms ‘lexeme’ and ‘word-form’ will be

introduced. This will allow to define other constituents of word-formation which will be

recurring throughout the whole thesis. The term ‘word’ will be used vaguely between

word-form and lexeme as by Bauer (1983). Afterwards, definition of word-formation

itself will be provided which will be followed by the notions of productivity and

lexicalization. Before moving on to the definitions, a few technical remarks should be

made. All examples will be written in italics, while non-grammatical forms will be

preceded by an asterisk and new terms will appear in bold the first time they are

mentioned.

1.1 Definitions of Basic Terms

This section will outline notions which will be used in the further text.

Throughout the whole thesis, problems concerning inconsistency of terminology used

among scholars will be felt. This will be also the case here although larger discrepancies

will be present later.

1.1.1 Lexeme, word-form, derivation and inflection

It is important to distinguish between lexemes and word-forms. Lexemes are

“all the possible shapes that a word can have” (Bauer, 1983, p. 11). On the other hand,

word-form is the particular shape of a given word. As it usually occurs at a specific

1
For detailed discussion on the term word, see Matthews (1974); for overview of various potential
definitions of ‘word’, see Kavka and Štekauer (2006, p. 8-12).

9
occasion, word-forms2 are much more concrete and realize lexemes (Bauer, 1983, p.

11). This can be illustrated by the lexeme FLY3. This lexeme subsume all the words

like flies, flying, or flew and these words are word-forms of the lexeme FLY. These

forms are also termed inflectional (Huddleston and Pullum, 2002, p. 27) and therefore

inflection is the process of creating new word-forms. Contrary to derivation4, which is

process of creating new lexemes (Lyons, 1977, p.522). Free forms are those that can

occur alone, such as all the examples, while the term bound forms refers to entities that

cannot occur in isolation. Typical examples of bound forms are affixes5. They could be

defined as bound forms attached to lexemes that do not realize unanalyzable lexemes

(Bauer, 1983, p. 11). They are usually divided into prefixes such as dis- or re- and

suffixes (-dom, -ness). Prefixes are attached before the lexemes, while suffixes occur

behind them.

1.1.2 Root, stem and base

Contrary to affixes, roots are most usually free forms and are “at center of word-

derivational processes” (Stockwell and Minkova, 2001, p. 69). All lexemes include

roots, as they are the forms that remain after removal of all inflectional as well as

derivational affixes (Bauer, 1983, p. 20). Stem is concerned only with inflection and so

it is form of the word without all the derivational affixes, which are “analysable as

such” (Quirk et al, p.1519). Therefore, in unbeatable, beat is the root, while the stem is

unbeatable, as the word does not contain any derivational affixes. Finally, base is “any

form to which affixes of any kind may be added” (Bauer, 1983, p. 20). This means that

all stems and roots are bases, but this is not so the other way around. In the example of

unbeatable, beatable may be a base for a prefixation by un-, but neither root nor stem.

2
For further discussion regarding lexemes and word-forms, see e.g. Matthews (1974) or Beard (1995).
3
Lexemes are conventionally written in capital letters.
4
Derivation is also often defined as addition of affixes (Lipka, 1992, p. 72).
5
Several approaches to affixes were adopted by Lieber and Štekauer (2009).

10
Bases are normally free, but also bound bases can be found (Huddleston and Pullum,

2002, p. 1625). Words that can be broken down into smaller meaningful units are called

complex (Plag, 2003, p, 12). These units are named morphemes (Bauer, 1983, p.11).

Morphemes can be defined as “the indivisible semantic units” (Matthews, 1974, p. 20).

In contrast, words, which are not analyzable this way are simple, or simplex (Bauer,

1983, p. 30). For example, happiness or unbeatable are complex words, while beat or

happy are simplex.

1.2 Definition of Word-formation

After introducing the essential terms for the study of word-formation, definition

of word-formation can now be attempted. Lipka (1992) defined word-formation as “the

combination of lexical6 morphemes with each other” (p. 70) and also stated that it could

be in fact labelled ‘lexeme-formation’. That is because it forms complex words, i.e.

complex lexemes. Therefore, word-formation can be defined as the process of

producing complex forms7 (Bauer, 1983, p. 31). It is important to remark, what should

be understood under the heading of word-formation. Lipka (1992) noted that word-

formation includes not only derivation (i.e. addition of affixes), but also “the

combination of free lexical morphemes” (p. 72). This combination will be in short

referred to as the process of compounding. As a result, word-formation can be initially

divided into derivation and compounding. However, some categories are not covered by

either of these headings (Bauer, 1983, p. 30). Inflection does not fit the definition at all

and therefore is usually separated from word-formation (Lipka, 1992, p. 70). But, as

admitted by Bauer (1983), there are sometimes no clear dividing lines between

inflection and derivation (p. 35).

6
Morphemes that are used to produce new lexemes, see Lipka (1992, p. 69-70).
7
Highly similar definition is also used by Plag (2002, p.17).

11
1.3 Productivity and Lexicalization

This introductory chapter will now be concluded with the notions of two

important terms, which are recurring throughout the whole thesis. Productivity will be

one of the main concerns in the analytical part of this thesis. A process is productive8,

when it is still able to create new words, or more precisely, new complex forms (Plag,

2002, p. 55). Plag dealt with productivity at the example of affix, but any process may

be productive (Bauer, 1983, p. 18). As opposed to creativity, productivity is predictable

and rule-governed (Lipka, 1992, p. 92). When a process is not used for coining new

complex lexemes, it is regarded as non-productive.

Lexicalization may be seen as a converse of productivity (Huddleston and

Pullum, 2002, p. 1629). According to Lipka (1992), there is no universal definition of

lexicalization. Lexemes are generally said to be lexicalized when they are or used to be

further morphologically analysable, but they cannot “be formed with their present

meaning by the current rules of word-formation” (Huddlestone and Pullum, 2002, p.

1629). Alternatively, it can be said that a complex lexeme gradually becomes a single

lexeme (Lipka, 1992, p. 95). Lexicalization is to be distinguished from

institutionalization, which is mentioned by Quirk et al. (1985), and can be described as

integration of lexeme with a specific meaning and form into already established lexicon

as an acceptable lexeme (Lipka, 1992, p. 95-96).

8
For detailed discussion regarding productivity and creativity, see Bauer (1983, p. 62-100).

12
 2. Word-formation Processes in English

After dealing with word-formation in general, this chapter will provide overview

of English word-formation processes. It will not be an exhaustive listing by any means.

As the main aim of this thesis is to classify compounds in TV series, main attention will

be devoted to compounding. Apart from briefly discussing definition of compounds,

similarity of compounds and syntactic word groups (phrases) will be pointed out.

Therefore, means of distinguishing between compounds and phrases will be discussed.

Afterwards, basic types and terms regarding compounds according to their semantic

criteria will be provided before moving on to the sub classification of compounds. This

classification will also serve as the starting point for the practical part of this thesis. To

conclude this chapter, selected other word-formation processes will also be listed, as

they often overlap with compounding and sometimes they are also on the borderline

with compounding.

2.1 Compounding

Compounding, or also equally termed composition, is one of the major English

word-formation processes and also serves as an excellent source of nonce formations9

(formations created for a single occasion) and neologisms. As mentioned by Štekauer

(2000, p. 99) it is even often regarded as the most productive process of the English

word-formation. Plag (2002) also maintained this opinion. Furthermore, Plag (2002, p.

169) added that compounding is the most controversial process in English in terms of

linguistic analysis. This is due to the fact that “numerous issues remain unresolved and

convincing solutions are generally not easy to find” (Plag, 2002, p. 169). Because of

this, there is no universal definition of compounds (Kavka and Štekauer, 2006), so an

attempt to find one, which would be highly unfeasible, will not be made.

9
See Bauer (1983).

13
 2.1.1 Definition

The probably most intuitive definition of compounding was proposed by Bauer

(1983, p. 11) who described it as “the process of putting two words together to form a

third”. But as this definition is rather vague at first sight and would also rule out many

established compounds, need for providing a more complex one can be felt. The most

suitable definition for purposes of this thesis may be the treating of compounds as free

lexical units consisting of two or more roots and “functioning both grammatically and

semantically as a single word” (Quirk et al., 1985, p. 1567). The “freeness” of its

constituents is also regarded as an essential criterion10 for ‘compoundhood’ among other

scholars such as Lipka (1992, p. 83). Adams (1973, p. 30) added that order of

compound elements is fixed which leads to a conclusion that they cannot be separated

by inserting another free form between them. Lipka (1992, p. 83) also remarked that

constituents in compounds may be complex themselves such as sitter in baby-sitter. In

English, it is most typical for compounds to consist of two bases, but constructions with

theoretically infinite number of bases can be formed11. However, as Bauer (1983, p.

202) pointed out, they can be always broken into two analysable elements where each of

them can be compound.

2.1.2 Compounds and phrases

This chapter will once again focus on the problem of differentiating compounds

from syntactic groups or collocations. It is generally assumed that acceptable criterion

of delimiting compound from syntactic groups has not been found yet (Štekauer, 2000,

p. 100). This problem involves compounds such as school uniform or freezing point.

Those constructions could be treated as a noun + noun compounds or as a noun phrases.

As Vachek (1976, p. 17) pointed out, this fact is due to the highly analytical character of

10
Exceptions to this rule will be discussed later under the heading “neo-classical compounds”.
11
They are known as “phrasal compounds” and will be also mentioned later.

14
Modern English. Therefore, boundaries between words and word-groups are

significantly vague. This is not the case in synthetic languages like the Slavonic ones,

including Czech. In analytical languages such as English, it is perfectly possible to

insert (broadly speaking) infinite word-group, “that has been taken out of its semantical

environment” (Vachek, 1976, p. 17) before a given word. Consequently, its semantical

environment is changed as well as syntactical function of this word group, which can

even stand for the whole sentence. Vachek (1976, p. 17-18) demonstrated this on the

example of so called “quotational compounds”, e.g.: a never-to-be-forgotten event, or

the ten-fifty-two train. These instances of compounds will be labelled phrasal

compounds and will be commented on in the analysis. This occurs indeed very often in

English. Constructions such as credit card, shopping bag, or the aforementioned

examples are frequently appearing in various compound words classifications.

2.1.3 Distinguishing compounds from phrases

As stated before, sometimes it is really difficult to decide whether a given

formation is a compound or a phrase. While the definition itself is rather simple, as

compound is treated as “one word” and phrases as “two or more words” (Matthews,

1974, p. 94), the reality is considerably more complicated, as pointed out in 2.1.2. When

a noun is premodified (by noun, adjective, participle or nominalization), the sequence

which comes a result of this process may be either compound or a free phrase, as was

remarked by Adams (1973, p. 57). Of course, several tests of ‘compoundhood’ may be

applied to those constructions (e.g. green house, black bird), but the question is whether

is it really possible to come up with a definite answer. Adams (1973) stated that there is

no answer to this problem which would cover all the cases. It can be however supposed

that distinctions can be made “on phonological, syntactic and semantic grounds”

(Jackson and Amvela, 2007, p. 93). Thereupon, these aspects will be discussed

15
successively from now on by mentioning selected criteria which may be used for

recognising compounds.

2.1.3.1 Stress

Stress may often distinguish a compound from a phrase. This is caused by the

fact that words in English tend to have one primary stress, so compounds can be often

recognized by “having a stress pattern and a lack of juncture” (Jackson and Amvela,

2007, p. 94). It is generally believed that when the primary stress is on the first

constituent, the construction is regarded as a compound. When the primary stress falls

on the latter element, than the expression tends to be recognised as a noun phrase. This

can be seen on an example12: a ‘dark room vs. a dark’ room where the first expression

is a compound, while the latter one a noun phrase. Quirk et al. (1985, p. 1569) state that

“almost all compounds have this accentual pattern”. However, not every compound

receive this stress. According to Štekauer (2000, p. 100) this criterion cannot be

regarded as a “hard-and-fast rule”, as there are multiple expressions with two main

stresses which are definitely accepted as compounds (e.g.: ‘trade ‘union). Moreover,

Štekauer (2000) says that number of compounds with this stress pattern is increasing

and therefore it would be convenient to use a more general criterion. As Matthews

(1974) pointed out, this criterion is highly subject to variation, as there tends to be no

consistency of stressing the compounds, even among native speakers. It also often

depends on “sentence stress and intonation” (Matthews, 1974, p. 98) and therefore this

test of compoundhood is clearly not very reliable.

2.1.3.2 Spelling and lexicalization

Compounds are spelled in three different ways (Lieber and Štekauer, 2009, p.

376) – they may be solid, i.e. written as one word (e.g. blackboard), two hyphenated

12
‘Marks the primary stress.

16
words (baby-sitter) or written as two separate words (living room). That already

indicates a problem, as not much effort is needed to find a compound which can be

written in either of the three above mentioned ways. Example of this can be the word

girlfriend where all the forms girlfriend, girl-friend and girl friend are acceptable.

Therefore, spelling is often regarded as not particularly relevant and unreliable criteria

for compoundhood (Adams, 1973, p. 59).

Lexicalization is unfortunately not much of a different case, because while

compounds with lexicalized meanings can be found, such as blackbird, it was already

mentioned that productivity of compounding is enormous. So is also its ability to create

nonce formations13 and that is why lexicalization will probably never be treated as a

proper criterion for compoundhood.

2.1.3.3 Inflectibility

Inflectibility, which refers to “the use of inflections to modify the grammatical

functions of compounds” (Jackson and Amvela, 2007, p. 94), also appears frequently as

a test of compoundhood. An assumption is made in Jackson and Amvela (2007) that the

constituents of compounds are usually inflectionless and that they should be treated

(and inflected) as a single lexical unit. This works perfectly well in most cases, where

e.g. baby-sitters14 is acceptablem while *babies-sitters is not, but counterexamples may

be found again, like girl’s club or children’s hour (Lieber and Štekauer, 2009, p. 376).

So it is apparent that inflectibility, while it is sufficient in many cases, cannot be

regarded as totally universal criterion by any means.

13
E.g. compound word crapweasel meaning insincere person, coined in The Friends TV series.
14
Consider also baby-sat.

17
 2.1.3.4 Inseparability and modification

Inseparability is regarded as a much stronger test of compoundhood (in

comparison to methods described above) among the scholars. Lieber and Štekauer

(2009, p. 377) even stated that “inseparability is perhaps the strongest test of

compoundhood”. Also Jackson and Amvela (2007, p. 93) said that all compounds are

normally inseparable in a way that no extra element may be put between its constituent

parts and such tests as separating the first element from the head were also successfully

applied by Adams (1973). This implies that while there is nothing wrong with a pretty

girl friend, *a girl pretty friend is not acceptable anymore and cannot be recognized as a

compound in English.

Modification is closely tied to inseparability; when an arbitrary modifier is

inserted between elements of a compound, the resulting phrase is unable to maintain

compoundhood of the original (Lieber and Štekauer 2009, p. 377), as shown above.

Furthermore, as compound is treated as a single unit, its elements cannot be modified

separately. As seen in example taken from Jackson and Amvela (2007, p. 93-94), air-

sick can occur in a phrase like seriously air-sick, where seriously modifies the whole

compound, but it cannot modify just the second element which means that phrase air-

seriously sick is not possible.

2.1.3.5 Semantic criteria

Semantic criteria are the last ones that are to be discussed in this chapter, and

since the formal criteria mentioned above are not satisfying in many cases, semantics is

often emphasized (Matthews 1974, p. 95). This leads to Jespersen’s (1974) supposition

that “if the meaning of the whole cannot be logically deduced from the meanings of the

constituents the expression is a compound”, as cited by Štekauer (2000, p. 101). Also

Jackson and Amvela (2007) stated that compounds tend to acquire very specialized

18
meanings and therefore their constituents may lose their original meanings. This works

very well for lexicalised compounds such as blackboard (as it may have also a different

color) or dustbin (it is not entirely restricted to dust), as exemplified in Jackson and

Amvela (2007, p. 94). However, this is not true for all compounds as there are also

expressions whose meaning can be easily predicted from the meaning of their elements,

which include compounds like dance-hall or green-eyed (Štekauer 2000, p. 101).

Another drawback of this criterion is shown by Matthews (1974) on the example of

idioms15, where an expression such as He made his mind up has a literal meaning in

only greatly limited amount of cases, while there are “good reasons” (Matthews, 1974,

p. 96) for not treating idiomatic expressions as compounds.

After this overview of various tests of compoundhood, it is clear that none of the

above mentioned criteria would cover all the possible cases. However, it is to be noted

that these criteria “operate simultaneously” (Jackson and Amvela, 2007, p. 94) and

when applied all together, the probability of successful distinguishing compound from a

phrase rises.

2.1.4 Types of compounds

In this section, only compounds consisting of two elements will be included. The

so-called “phrasal compounds” will not be mentioned here. Compounds can be divided

into main groups by taking lots of different approaches which appear to vary among

linguists. Various criteria are therefore applied. This chapter will provide an overview

of the most common ones and although they may have much in common and even

overlap each other in some respects, they will be discussed separately.

15
Expression whose meaning is not wholly predictable from its structural description (Lieber and
Štekauer 2009, p. 181).

19
 2.1.4.1 Primary and synthetic compounds

Štekauer (2000) divided compounds based on presence or absence of verbal

element. If a compound includes a deverbal element, which is derived from a verb, he

named them synthetic (verbal) compounds (Štekauer, 2000, p. 102). Examples include

earthquake-struck or good-looking. Otherwise (i.e. no verbal element is present) they

are referred to as primary (non-verbal) compounds (Štekauer, 2000, p. 102), e.g.

blackbird or birthday. Selkirk (1982, p. 24-25) also pointed out that while range of

possible relations between non-verbal compounds is broad, this is not the case with

verbal compounds. Thus, earthquake-struck means “struck by earthquake”. Therefore,

synthetic compounds are sometimes termed predictable, or regular (Štekauer, 2000, p.

102). Synthetic compounding is claimed to be very productive in English, whereas

primary compounding tends to be similarly productive only when concerned with

combinations of nouns and adjectives (Lieber and Štekauer 2009, p. 375).

2.1.4.2 Syntactic and lexical compounds

As already indicated in the title of this section, this division is done according to

syntactic principles. This is proposed as the starting point by Stockwell and Minkova

(2001, p. 10). Like in 2.1.4.1., this sorting of compounds is once again a very general

one. By syntactic compounds, forms which are formed with respect to regular rules of

grammar are meant. Stockwell and Minkova (2001) added that those compounds are

formed similarly to sentences and are usually not listed in dictionaries (p. 10).

Therefore, birthday (the day of birth), or daylight (light which occurs during the day)

are examples of syntactic compounds. In contrast, meaning of lexical compounds

cannot be predicted from the regular rules of grammar, e.g. ice cream and water-proof.

This means that their meaning has to be looked up in dictionary (Stockwell and

Minkova, 2001, p. 10.) Lexical compounds can be also termed non-syntactic

20
compounds (Jackson and Amvela, 2007, p. 97). Štekauer (2000) added that constituents

in lexical compounds are “ordered differently from the corresponding syntactic phrases”

(p. 104) as opposed to syntactic compounds.

2.1.4.3 Endocentric, exocentric, subordinate and coordinate compounds

This classification16 is based on semantic principles and was done by Bauer

(1983), or Jackson and Amvela (2007). As this approach will be followed in the

practical part, this classification will be of the biggest importance in this thesis.

Terminology varies here, but this thesis will mostly stick to the Bauer’s (1983)

terminology including slight subdivision made by Jackson and Amvela (2007). Most of

the English compounds tend to have “modifier-head structure” (Plag, 2002, p. 173)

which means that the left-hand element modifies the right-hand one. As pointed out by

Ackema and Neeleman (2004, p. 81), this ensures that there is a semantic relation

between its constituents.

Compounds with the previously described structure will be termed endocentric.

They can be in short described “to have a head, and that head is on the right” (Selkirk,

1982, p. 19). Bauer (1983, p. 30) added that the left-hand element does not mark neither

gender, nor number in his classification. In his words (p. 30), “the compound is

hyponym of its grammatical head”, as in armchair or boyfriend, where armchair is a

type of chair and boyfriend is a boy who is also a friend. As the latter compound can be

often described vice-versa, difference between these examples can be seen. Compounds

such as armchair or call-girl will be thus named subordinate (Jackson and Amvela,

2007, p. 97) as they contain one head root and a modifier. On the other hand,

compounds having two head roots (e.g. girlfriend, maidservant) will be termed

coordinate8 compounds (Jackson and Amvela, 2007, p. 97). Bauer (1983, p. 30)

16
The same terminology is also used by e.g. Heine and Narrog (2010).

21
referred to this type of compounds as appositional compounds and said that both

elements are hyponyms of each other.

Special subtype of coordinate compounds is also often distinguished and named

dvandva, or copulative compounds (Huddleston and Pullum, 2002, p. 1648). Dvandva

compounds cannot be used individually as opposed to non-dvandva coordinate

compounds. They can be alternatively described as constructions with no clear head

present (Bauer, 1983). Therefore, mainly proper nouns are dvandva compounds in

English (Huddleston and Pullum, 2002). This type of compounds can be exemplified by

Alsace-Lorrine or Rank-Hovis (Bauer, 1983, p. 31) and is exceedingly rare. Probably

the only commonly used dvandva compound is panty-hose (Bauer, 1983).

However, not all compounds fit into this category. Some of them appear to

“have no head at all” (Selkirk, 1982, 19). For example, skinhead is not a type of skin,

pickpocket is also not a kind of pocket at all. These compounds are known as

exocentric17, where the semantic head is not expressed (Bauer, 1983, p. 30). They are

also sometimes named bahuvrihi compounds (Bauer, 1983, p. 30). It is to be noted that

this terminology is far from constant and can differ considerably across the scholars.

Therefore, it was possible for Plag (2002, p. 188) to state that dvandva compounds are

in fact quite common in English, because he defines them slightly differently.

2.1.5. Neo-classical compounds.

Previous chapters were concerned only with compounds which correspond to the

definition formulated in 2.1.1. This means that all of their constituents are free forms.

However, a special type of compounds, where at least one of its elements is a bound

form, can be often found in English. This is due to the fact that English tends to borrow

from Greek or Latin extensively to coin new words (Adams, 1973, p. 129). These words

17
Some linguists argue whether exocentric compounds really exist in English, see e.g. Štekauer (1998).

22
contain so-called combining forms (Štekauer, 2000, 103), such as socio-, micro-, tele-,

phile-, phobe- and many others. Resulting words are generally known as

neo-classical compounds and can be defined as “forms in which lexemes of Greek or

Latin origin are combined to form new combinations” (Plag, 2002, p. 199). They mostly

appear in scientific or technological fields, but words such as microphone or television

are highly common also in everyday speech. Therefore, proper clarification of how to

classify neo-classical compound is important. Quirk et al. (1985, p. 1545) decided to

treat them under the heading of affixation18 but also added that arbitrariness is involved.

This comes from an assumption that neo-classical forms can be added to some bases

precisely like affixes (Bauer. 1983, p. 213). For example, music + al is a clear example

of affixation, therefore music + ology has to be affixation as well.

Nonetheless, as Bauer (1983) mentioned, this can lead to “the embarrassing

conclusion” (p. 213) that forms such as electrophile and galvanoscope, including only

prefixes and suffixes while having no roots, can exist. Furthermore, these combining

forms can perfectly combine with each other as shown above. This is not the case with

“regular” affixes (Bauer, 1983) and this implies that forms like *electroness or

*electroization do not exist. Also, they can be combined even with affixes “which is a

feature of word-formation bases” (Štekauer, 2000, p. 103). As Štekauer (2000) added,

the combining forms can have their independently found counterparts serving as

independent words, like photo, mini or kilo. Based on these facts, neo-classical items

will be treated as combining forms and therefore as compounds in this thesis, mainly in

its analytical part. Bauer (1983) also observed that these compounds are very productive

and also function as bases in derivational processes.

18
Affixation will be discussed in 2. 2.

23
 Of course, compounds can be classified further. As Bauer (1983) mentioned, this

can be done in many different ways, out of which none proves to be ultimately

successful. Furthermore, subtypes of compounds vary from four to one hundred among

these classifications (Bauer, 1983) indicating that a generally accepted classification is

not known yet. Compounds can be classified by e.g. the form classes of compound’s

constituents, semantic classes, syntactic function, linking compound to “sentential or

clausal paraphrases” (Quirk et al., 1985, p.1570) and so on. Some authors, like Jackson

and Amvela (2007), or Adams (1973) use combinations of the above mentioned criteria.

However, this thesis will stick to classification proposed by Bauer (1983) which is

based on the form classes. The classification will be complemented by Jackson’s and

Amvela’s (2007) classification relying on syntactic function as described in 2.1.4.3.

This will be discussed in more detail in 3.

2.2 Affixation

Affixation is the process of adding affixes in order to form new words.

Therefore, inflectional affixes as described by Jackson and Amvela (2007) will not be

taken into account, because they serve for creating new forms of the same word.

Affixation defined above is usually termed derivational affixation, or simply derivation

(Bauer, 1983) which was defined in 1.1. As Bauer19 (1983) continued, the lack of clear

dividing line between compounds and derivation is often felt, as described on suffixes

like –hood where it is unclear whether hood functions as lexeme, or as a bound form in

words like childhood.

Affixation is typically divided into prefixation and suffixation. As pointed out by

Štekauer (2000), infixes are almost non-existent in English although some examples,

such as abso-goddam-lutely may be found. Affixes can be also further divided into

19
Described in more detail on p. 35-36 in Bauer (1983).

24
class-changing and class-maintaining. Instances of the latter type is e.g. prefixation by

re- from consider to reconsider while example of the first type is suffixation by –ment

from pay to payment. Bauer (1983) observed that in English, “prefixation is typically

class-maintaining, and derivational suffixation is typically class-changing” (p. 31).

Matthews (1974) further stated that processes of suffixation are more common in

English, as they serve for most lexical derivations. As added by Jackson and Amvela

(2007), affix –ly which creates adverbs from a given stem, is the most productive

English derivational affix.

2.3 Conversion

Conversion, sometimes also called zero derivation, “involves changing a

word’s syntactic category without any commitment change of form” (Huddleston and

Pullum, 2002, p.1640). Therefore, it is possible to change the noun trouble into a verb

while not touching its form. Because of this, Adams (1973) treated conversion as a

‘derivation by zero suffix’. Some linguists do not regard conversion as a word-

formation process, because they feel it is rather using word in its less typical word class

(Štekauer, 2000). Conversion also creates lots of problems when classifying compounds

which will be the concern of practical part of this thesis. This is mainly due to the fact

that there are almost no rules of conversion (Bauer, 1983). Bauer (1983) also pointed

out that all the word classes and even affixes can serve as bases for conversion.

Furthermore, some instances of phrasal compounds may be also regarded as a result of

conversion of the whole phrase, such as under-the weather which functions as an

adjective (Bauer, 1983). As remarked by Stockwell and Minkova (2001), conversion is

still extremely productive and its forms are even often given separate entries in

dictionaries.

25
2.4 Clipping

The following word-formation processes are sometimes regarded as ‘minor’

word-formation processes (Huddleston and Pullum, 2002). Clipping is a process when

a lexeme is shortened without change of its meaning and word class (Štekauer, 2000, p.

111). The lexeme may be either simplex, or complex (Bauer, 1983). As remarked by

Stockwell and Minkova (2001), not only single words, but also phrases may be

shortened in this way. For example, ad or advert are clipped from advertisement, while

zoo from zoological garden. Because of this, clipping may be seen as an unpredictable

formation (Bauer, 1983) as there is no general rule which base of the word will be

shortened and how many syllables will be retained. Usually, the first part of the word is

retained as demonstrated on the example above, but also the middle can prevail like in

jams clipped from pyjamas. Clipping may also serve as a base for further word-

formation processes, typically for conversion (Štekauer, 2000). They can be also used in

compounds, such as org-man from organization man (Bauer, 1983).

2.5 Blending

Definition of blending is already predictable from the term itself, as it refers to

process of merging two words into a single one (Štekauer, 2000). Furthermore, the

resulting formation “remains wholly analysable” (Quirk et al., 1985, p. 1583), as

enough of both words is usually retained. Examples of blending include brunch, which

was created from breakfast and lunch, or smog, where smoke and fog were blended.

However, examples with another structure, such as Nixonomics where the first word

remains untouched, can be also found and therefore blending should be also regarded as

an unpredictable formation (Štekauer, 2000). As Plag (2002) remarked, some of the

blends resemble coordinate compounds discussed in 2.1.4.3 and also Štekauer (2000)

regarded them as a subtype of compounds, as they can be seen as “compounding itself”

26
(p. 111) or as a “formal reduction of compound” (p. 111). Bauer (1983) added that

while blending is rather not a clearly defined category, as it overlaps with compounding,

clipping or another processes, it is definitely productive in Modern English.

2.6 Back-formation

As the term suggests, back-formation occurs when the process of forming new

word from a base seem to be reversed (Adams, 1973). It usually refers to clipping of a

recognizable affix, such as how to burgle was formed from burglar, or cherry from

cerise (Stockwell and Minkova, 2001). As Bauer (1983) remarked, most of the words

resulting from back-formation are verbs. However, as pointed out by Stockwell and

Minkova (2001), the majority of words formed are not transparent, such as edit or dive

which both are not source for expected derivation, editor and diver respectively. On the

other hand, advisor was really formed by affixation from advise (Quirk et al., 1985). As

also noted by Quirk et al. (1985), back-formation is still highly productive nowadays.

27
 3. Analysis of the Corpus

While the previous chapters provided theoretical insight into word-formation

and its processes, this chapter will be concerned with practical analysis and will form

the central part of this thesis. It will focus on compounding and the main goal of the

analysis will be to classify compounds as found in a corpus. This corpus was created

using transcripts of episodes from two well-known TV series, namely Friends and The

Big Bang Theory (BBT). The corpus is enclosed to this thesis on a CD. The transcripts

of Friends were taken from Friendstranscripts.tk, while the source of BBT’s transcripts

is transcripts.foreverdreaming.org. The main reason for choosing these series was the

fact that their main focus is on creating entertaining episodes through series of dialogues

rather than concentrating on the plot itself. Furthermore, these series seem to be based a

bit differently which can prove as an interesting contrasting element. The above

mentioned facts lead to an expectation that number of compounds found in this corpus

should be high. And indeed, compounding was the most frequent word-formation

process present. Therefore, further subclassification can be made and it was pointed

before that many types of classification are possible.

As already mentioned before, this analysis will adopt Bauer’s (1983) approach

which relies on word classes of compounds’ elements. It will also largely consider

their form rather than function. As Bauer (1983) admitted, this classification is not

perfect in any means, but there is no classification that could not be considered non-

controversial (p. 202). This method of classification is perhaps the most straightforward

one and can be also clear for readers without knowledge of theoretical terms. Also,

when semantic relationships between elements are discussed, it proves valuable to

primarily concentrate on semantic relationships between the categories listed here

(Bauer, 1983, p. 202). However, this does not prevent ambiguity, because it is often

28
highly unclear to what class a given constituent of compound should be assigned which

will be remarked several times. This is, according to Bauer (1983), mainly because of

the high amount of conversion20 in English (p. 202). That is the biggest disadvantage of

this method but, as noted several times before, problems are inevitable while studying

compounds. As Plag (2002) remarked, classification based on another criteria, such as

semantics, involves even more arbitrariness (p. 182).

Further analysis will also include division to endocentric and exocentric

compounds, with the endocentric being split into coordinate and subordinate

compounds as done by Jackson and Amvela (2007). Copulative, or dvandva compounds

with respect to Bauer’s terminology will be recognized too. What Bauer (1983) terms

appositional compounds will not be mentioned here, as it is already covered by

endocentric coordinate compounds as written above. Remarks from other sources will

be also often taken into account.

In addition to the general observation of compounds in Friends and BBT, the

main character’s compound usage pattern21 was also recorded for each series. Because

of this, such transcripts were needed where there are names of the characters included

next to their utterances. Therefore, only first seasons of both series were analyzed, as

they contained these information for Friends as well as for BBT. Furthermore, not

whole series, but the first ten episodes will be discussed here, as the pattern remains the

same for the rest of the season. Language of individual characters as well as comparison

of both series will be later discussed in separate chapters. Before moving on to the

actual classification it will be useful to specify which compounds were taken into

consideration in the next section.

20
See 2.3.
21
This is usually termed idiolect, see Saeed (2009).

29
3.1 Borderline Cases

This section deals mainly with formations discussed in 2.1.2 where the lack of

clear boundaries between compounds and phrases is the prevailing factor. Since any

universal solution of this problem has not been presented so far, treatment of formations

such as bowel movement, or school uniform is still arbitrary. Although most of the

scholars, including Bauer (1983) or Adams (1973), recognize these forms as

compounds, this will not be followed here as a result of the discussion presented in

2.1.2. It is mainly due to the fact that these phrases are not considered as compounds in

synthetic languages, such as Czech. The only exceptions are names of rooms, such as

living room, in order to prevent the situation where some rooms (e.g. bathroom) are

included while others not. In addition, big bang was taken into account as well, as it can

be found in the title of BBT. However, this is not the case with these words written

hyphenated and such words will be included. On the other hand, phrasal compounds22

will be included, because they highly contribute to the flow and amusement of the

episodes by creating nonce formations in most cases. Neoclassical compounds, as

mentioned in the introduction to the analysis, will be included and analysed separately

which was also implemented by Bauer (1983).

Apart from aforementioned examples, compounds concerned with scientific

terminology were also excluded due to the fact that they are not particularly relevant for

the study of the language itself. This is also the case with words which would not

probably seem to be compounds for many people, as they incorporated themselves into

the language core over the years. Examples of these words are pronouns such as

someone or everybody, adverbs like always or outside but also verbs like welcome and

become. This also affects nouns as afternoon, goodbye and so on. The same is the

22
Furthermore, they also tend to be written hyphenated, which corresponds to the criterion above.

30
situation with compounds containing names of people, locations, products, or events23.

All the compounds taken into account were highlighted in the corpus.

3.2 General Overview

While the previous chapter may seem highly restrictive, it serves rather as a cut

to eliminate all the constructions not particularly relevant for a linguistic analysis. Many

compound words were still found. In total, 271 of them were recognized. This shows

that even after limiting the count of episodes to ten for each series, the number of

registered compounds was still considerable enough. Most of them were written as one

word, i.e. solid, for example cheesecake or blackboard. Examples of compounds written

hyphenated, which cover about one third of entries, include fat-free or pant-suit. After

disallowing most of the possible compounds written as two words in 3.1, only ten such

were found, where nine of them were names of rooms with the tenth one being big

bang, as described in 3.1. This subgroup would otherwise form the majority of

compounds. However, as noted in 2.1.3.2, many words can be written in more of the

ways mentioned above. Two compounds also contained linking elements, concretely

bridesmaid and workaday. Instances of linking elements are common in some

languages, such as German (Štekauer, Valera & Körtvélyessy, 2012), but apparently not

so much in English. In this analysis, prepositions will be referred to as particles in these

compounds which was also done by Bauer (1983).

The table below presents the basic notion of compound patterns as found in the

transcripts. Adverbs were not highly represented because although many particles may

function adverbially, they were still classified as particles for consistency with Bauer’s

(1983) classification. Headings of lines represent word classes of left-hand elements,

headings of columns classes of right-hand elements and ‘x’ marks that no compound of

23
They are generally termed proper nouns (Bauer, 1983).

31
that type occurred in the corpus. This labelling will be also kept in all the following

tables.

Noun Adjective Verb Adverb Particle

Noun headphones lifelong role-played x x

Adjective sweetheart extra-large x x balled-up

Verb breakfast x put-put x break-up

Adverb x now-pink x x x

Particle offspring overrated underestimate x x

Table 1

Of course, this table does not include classes of resulting compound words, as it

would become highly complicated and hardly understandable. Apart from these

patterns, phrasal and neo-classical compounds were also recorded but they are not

included there, as they will be discussed in separate chapters. This overview is mainly

to demonstrate the patterns found in the corpus in a general manner, while the

subsequent chapters will deal with the compound words already after their breakdown

to their corresponding formal classes. The classes found here are nouns, adjectives,

verbs and adverbs, with phrasal and neo-classical compounds to follow. Chapters with

enough compound patterns present will be preceded by a chart showing randomly

chosen examples. Each class of compounds will be concluded by a table illustrating

productivity of all patterns.

3.3 Compound Nouns

It is widely believed that most of English compounds are nouns. As Bauer

(1983) noted, this is even more the case when dealing with compounds with more than

two constituents (p. 202). However, this will be the matter of concern in 3.7 and this

chapter will therefore focus on compounds containing two elements. As a result, it is

32
not unexpected that vast majority of recognized compounds fall into this group. In total,

roughly two thirds of all compounds found are nouns. However, this group has not the

highest variety of compounding patterns. Altogether, five patterns are found. For

illustration, they are demonstrated in the table below.

NOUNS Noun Particle

Noun warehouse x

Adjective flatware x

Verb popcorn breakthrough

Particle download x

Table 2

This chart explains, why the number of types of compound nouns is relatively

low compared to their total count. The main reason for this is that the second element is

a noun in extensive majority of cases, only a few noun compounds contain particles as

their second constituent, while other classes are not found at all in the second position.

All the compounds written separately fall into this class with vast majority of the rest

written as one word. The five patterns depicted above will be discussed in turn in the

following chapters. Each of them will feature a few randomly chosen examples of the

given patterns with information about its source series and episode provided in the

brackets, which will represent the compound types found and will be also mentioned

throughout the text.

3.3.1 Noun + noun

(1) …that guy she met at the coffeehouse. (Friends, 5)

(2) …the history of science-fiction is not on your side. (BBT, 3)

(3) Do you know the word crapweasel? (Friends, 7)

(4) You went on our honeymoon alone? (Friends, 2)

33
 (5) …I happen to be a human beatbox. (BBT, 5)

This pattern is by far the most frequent one and it will therefore receive the greatest

attention. Ryder (1994) even devoted a whole book to noun + noun compounds

providing a detailed description of various classifications. These compounds are said to

be the least semantically predictable with almost unlimited range of semantic

interpretations (Ryder, 1994, p. 4-5). Furthermore, this subgroup is also regarded as the

most productive pattern of the whole English word-formation (Huddleston and Pulum,

2002, p. 1647). This indicates that many compounds which does not seem to be very

similar can be found in this category. As Bauer (1983) proposed, many criteria would

be possible to classify compounds in this subgroup, but the division described in 2.1.4.3

appears to be the most helpful for studying word-formation (p. 203).

As the examples (1) – (4) suggest, four subtypes of noun + noun compounds are

found in this category. Generally speaking, the vast majority of these compounds are

endocentric. They are represented in the examples (1) and (2). It was mentioned in

2.1.4.3 that endocentric compounds can be split into subordinate (1) and coordinate (2).

Coffeehouse is definitely a type of a house, therefore it is a subordinate compound.

Endocentric subordinate compounds are the most frequent by far, further examples

include bathroom, eggplants, or jellyfish. Due to the restrictions applied earlier, only

two examples of gerund + noun compound, concretely living room and waiting room,

are found. This type is mentioned by Bauer (1983) to be particularly difficult to classify,

“since a gerund has both nominal and verbal characteristics” (p. 203). Furthermore, the

gerund could be also treated as an adjective, as it modifies room. However, it was

decided to keep this pattern within the noun + noun subgroup. The main reason was that

the semantic relationship between the gerund and the noun is most similar to the one

found in noun + noun compounds (Bauer, 1983) as opposed to verb + noun compounds,

34
which will be discussed in 3.3.2. Based on this, living room can be regarded as ‘a room

suitable for living’ and therefore seeming suitable for including it here, with waiting

room being treated similarly. Subordinate compounds contain words with literal as well

as more metaphorical meaning; the latter being represented by e.g. airport, snowman, or

painkillers. To illustrate the notion how diverse this group is, also compounds with part-

whole relationship or based on resemblance of shape, such as gunpoint or peanut, are

found. This indicates that it is virtually impossible to classify these compounds into

equally distinct groups.

Coordinate compounds are much less productive in the corpus, while dvandva

compounds are not found at all. Apart from clear examples like boyfriend or girlfriend,

also compounds not denoting people are present, such as science-fiction or

showbusiness. While stairwell and weekend also seem to fit into this category, the case

with compounds like staircase is a little different. Although it can be regarded as a type

of stairs, case has already lost its original meaning in this compound. Therefore, as it

does not refer to any particular kind of case or even to a case in sense that something

happens, it should not be treated as an endocentric compound at all. That implies that it

is better defined as an exocentric compound.

Exocentric compounds, which are represented by (3) and (4), are much less

frequent than the endocentric, although they happen to be more productive than the

endocentric coordinate compounds. As Lieber and Štekauer (2009, p. 378) pointed out,

exocentric compounds are often used as metonyms for people (3). Indeed, the class of

exocentric compounds turns out to be the most common in the corpus, represented by

compounds like mother-kisser, corn-husker, hammerhead, snicker-doodle or

crapweasel which was coined in the Friends TV series. Exocentric compounds not

referring to human beings (4) are of course found as well although they were in

35
minority. They can be exemplified by bedrock, cocktail and pitfalls. These tend to be

expressions which are used in an informal language, as it is the case with the majority of

exocentric compounds. Metaphorical connection to their presumed literal translation is

felt here as well but is not strong enough to classify these compounds as exocentric.

The last type of noun + noun compounds, represented by (5), is also exocentric.

Two of this sort are present in the corpus: beatbox and workshop. But they seem to

differ from the types (3) and (4) discussed before. In previous examples, hammerhead

was neither kind of hammer nor type of head, mother-kisser was neither a mother nor a

kisser at all and so on. However, while workshop is also not a shop it is obviously

associated with work. Similarly, when beatboxing, one does not box but produces beat.

This could indicate that the semantic head was on the left. But as the left-hand element

generally serves to modify the right-hand one and the syntactic head is on the right,

because forms like *boxbeat or *shopwork are not grammatical, these compounds must

be considered exocentric as well in the end. This demonstrates that even among the

relatively unproductive exocentric compounds, there is huge variety of compounds

fitting into the noun + noun category.

Examples of noun + noun compounds also include words which can be seen as a

borderline cases between compounds and derivation. In endocentric subordinate

compounds like mailman, congressman and snowman, the process of changing lexeme

MAN to suffix –man is ongoing (Bauer, 1983, p. 36). That is because it became

possible to say female mailman, so man starts to lose its original meaning. Furthermore,

mailman is pronounced with a reduced vowel as opposed to the lexeme MAN which

contains full vowel. However, as pointed out by Bauer (1983), “contrast is still made

between policeman and policewoman” (p. 36), which together with the fact that plural

of mailman is mailmen and not *mailmans suggests that MAN is still more lexeme than

36
suffix in English. However, not all compounds of this type are necessarily endocentric.

While mailman is a clear case of an endocentric compound, snowman is more

ambiguous case, because it refers to object made from snow which only resembles a

man. Walkman is already an instance of exocentric compound because it denotes

electronic device.

There are also compounds whose status depends on context and the degree of

literality in their usage. For example, showcase can be a genuine endocentric compound

when referring to a box which is containing exhibits, while it is highly borderline case

when representing an event. Also another example of derivation was found in this

category, as ex-boyfriend was formed from boyfriend by means of derivation while

retaining its compound status. One compound in this category, bridesmaid, also

contains linking –s. Furthermore, webcam is a compound resulting from application of

two word-formation processes. It is a combination of compounding and clipping, as

cam was clipped from camera. This illustrates that word-formation processes can freely

combine to produce new words.

3.3.2 Verb + noun

(1) You’re making eggs for breakfast? (BBT, 4)

(2) …he was trying to fight a bobcat for some licquorish. (BBT, 4)

As noted before, gerunds were classified as nouns and therefore this category will be

concerned with verb stem + noun compounds. (Bauer, 1983, p. 204). This subgroup of

noun compounds is not regarded as very productive in general (Lieber and Štekauer

(2009, p. 378) and it also appears rather minutely in the corpus; only eight examples are

recorded. Two patterns of verb + noun compounding are found. The first one (1) refers

to situation “where the noun is the direct object of the verb” (Bauer, 1983, p.205).

Another examples include crossbar and breakfront. These compounds are exocentric.

37
Compounds such as breakfast or breakfront fitting into the (1) pattern are also named

French (Kavka and Štekauer, 2006), or Romance24 (Bauer, 1998) type of compounds

because of their origin. This pattern is mostly rare and currently not very productive

(Bauer, 1983, p.205) and was also rarer in the corpus.

The rest of the verb + noun25 category subsumes compounds, where the noun is

not the direct object (2). This pattern appears to be slightly more frequent in the corpus

with examples like chopsticks, notebook or popcorn. These compounds are endocentric

and all of them are subordinate as they have a clear head on the right. Altogether in this

category, no compounds denoting people were found and only bobcat refers to an

animate being. As remarked by Bauer (1983, p. 205), the (2) pattern is the most

problematic to limit. That is particularly because deciding whether the first element is

verb or noun is very complicated, if not impossible to be consistently maintained.

Therefore, it is indicated by Bauer (1983) that some of these compounds may also fit

into the noun + noun category. For example, notebook could be glossed as ‘a book into

which one notes’ or as ‘a book into which one takes notes’. In the second case, note

functions as a noun. However, for purposes of this thesis, compounds with this

ambiguous status are recognized as verb + noun combinations. Nevertheless, it is not

disputed that they could be part of noun + noun pattern as well.

3.3.3 Adjective + noun

(1) Oh, c'mere, sweetheart. (Friends, 8)

(2) What about comic-books? (BBT, 6)

This pattern is still productive, particularly when the compound constituents are written

separately (Bauer, 1983). However, this analysis is not concerned with such

constructions. Some of the neo-classical compounds could be discussed under this

24
For further discussion regarding this type, see Bauer (2008).
25
For detailed classification of verb + noun compounds, see Huddleston and Pullum (2002).

38
heading but they will be mentioned in a separate section. According to Huddleston and

Pullum (2002, p. 1649), the productivity of this pattern is actually quite low when

creating new words. Yet, it is one of the most numerous patterns in the corpus, yielding

only to the dominating noun + noun category. As further remarked by Huddleston and

Pullum (2002), many compounds from this category involve lexicalization and therefore

they highly differ from the syntactic phrases (p. 1650). Such compound is exemplified

in (1). Such compounds are exocentric and used for denoting animate beings. So,

sweetheart refers to a kind of person and bluebell to a flower. As observed by Bauer

(1998), “this existence of one of these with a particular meaning does not appear to

block its existence with another, unrelated, meaning” (p. 5). This also works on

examples from the corpus, as blue bell could definitely relate to ‘a bell which is blue’ as

well. However, this construction would lose its compounds status and would be

regarded as a phrase. That is not possible with, for example, exocentric noun + noun

compounds since it is not possible to use words like honeymoon or walkman in a

different sense.

Exocentric compounds are in a severe minority which is probably a little

surprising. Most of the adjective + noun compounds were endocentric (2) and all of

them were subordinate. In total, 15 out of 17 compounds have this structure. This

subtype includes classic examples like big bang, flatware, gentlemen, softball or

whiteboard but also some unclear cases. Some of the compounds are spelled

hyphenated rather marginally, like comic-books, or high-school so they can be already

treated as a borderline cases, as they would not be mentioned here if they had been

spelled as two words. Like formations discussed in the verb + noun category, goldfish is

also a compound, where the class of gold is not clear cut. It could be adjective in ‘a fish

39
which is gold’ or noun in ‘a fish that resembles gold’26. Once again, it was eventually

not treated as a noun although it would be very possible as well.

3.3.4 Particle + noun

(1) Underdog has just gotten away. (Friends, 10)

(2) We’d have the same cultural background... (BBT, 2)

(3)… I apologise for my earlier outburst… (BBT, 7)

This pattern appears to be moderately productive with just over ten compounds present.

Prepositions and adverbs, which are collectively referred to as particles in this analysis,

both appeared as the left-hand elements. Adams (1973, p. 114) remarked that

distinguishing compounds containing particles from phrases is once again very

complicated. However, solid spelled nouns with particles are treated as compounds by

Adams (1973), corresponding to this classification. Similarly like gerunds mentioned in

3.3.1, particles may be seen to function as an attributive adjective. But Adams (1973)

pointed out that it is rather inaccurate, as they still function adverbially or

prepositionally. Therefore, underwear is found under other layers of clothes and

background is usually not the main point of concern and so it stands in the back (either

literally, or metaphorically).

As far as the individual compounds are concerned, both exocentric (1) and

endocentric (2)-(3) formations occur in the corpus. Exocentric compounds include

outlet, offspring and underdog. The last one is particularly interesting because although

its right-hand element indicates that is a kind of dog, it is typically used for

denoting people. This is also the only compound denoting animate being. Endocentric

compounds are more frequent and all of them are subordinate. They can be split into

two groups according to status of their right-hand element. The first one includes

26
This gloss is taken from Ryder (1994, p.5), where goldfish is treated as a noun + noun compound.

40
compounds where the noun did not result from the process of conversion (2). It contains

formations like background, overcoat or underside. The latter one is filled with

compounds containing nominalized verbs by the process of conversion27 (3). This

include download, outburst, overlay or underwear. These groups are almost balanced in

the corpus. Aside stands back-story which seems to fit into the pattern (2). However, it

in fact originated from background story28 and it could be therefore regarded as an

instance of blending.

3.3.5 Verb + particle

(1) This is the worst break-up in the history of the world. (Friends, 5)

(2) Sounds like a breakthrough... (BBT, 4)

This last subgrouping of compound nouns is similar to the previous category in some

aspects since it contains particles as well. They are equally frequent in the corpus as the

particle + noun type. However, these compounds are all exocentric, as they do not

contain any nouns. As Bauer (1983, p. 206) pointed out, compoundhood of some

formations in this group is arguable. That comes down to the fact that they can be seen

as nominalizations of phrasal verbs (1). Adams (1973) did not regard them as

compounds because of that. This type is common in the corpus and includes compounds

like blackout, break-up close-up, or knockout. The rest of compounds falling into this

category were not derived from phrasal verbs (2). Although Bauer (1983) remarked that

“they may be coined by analogy with phrasal verbs” (p. 206). They include flashback,

feedback, makeup or voiceover. The pattern (2) is slightly more productive in the

transcripts and also contains one compound denoting people; grown-ups.

27
Adams (1973) used the term ‘zero suffix’ for this group.
28
See the Online Etymology Dictionary for more information about etymology of backstory.

41
 All the nominal compounding patterns as well as their productivity are

illustrated in the following table. Semantic criteria used during the analysis are also

taken into account.

NOUNS Total Subordinate Coordinate Exocentric

N+N 122 94 9 19

V+N 8 5 0 3

Adj+N 17 15 0 2

Par+N 11 7 0 4

V+Par 11 0 0 11

Total 168 120 9 39

Table 3

3.4 Compound Adjectives

As expected, compound adjectives are much less frequent than nouns. They

account for about one quarter of the total number of compounds found which still

makes them rather productive. Bauer (1983, p. 209) noted that number of patterns

which form adjectival compounds is high. That was also the case in the corpus, as

compound adjectives are the most variable category based on quantity of forming

patterns found in the transcripts. However, some of them were highly marginal. Both

Adams (1973) and Bauer (1983) pointed out that it is again difficult to decide about

adjectival status of some constructions. This will be commented on individual cases.

The chart below illustrates all the adjectival patterns found.

42
 ADJECTIVES Noun Adjective Verb Adverb Particle

Noun boy-girl curry-based x x

Adjective high-resolution open-faced x x balled-up

Verb x x put-put x back-up

Adverb x now-pink x x x

Particle overflow overrated x x

Table 4

As opposed to compound nouns, there is much higher class variety of the right-

hand element and also left-hand elements functioning as adverbs were found here.

Therefore, doubts regarding adjectival status of compound can arise particularly when

the second element is not an adjective. That was the case with the majority of adjectival

compounds. This is contrary to nouns, where almost all of the formations contained

noun as their right-hand constituent. All the patterns depicted above will be now

discussed in the following text.

3.4.1 Noun + adjective

(1a)…Why are you smashing a flash-frozen banana. (BBT, 5)

(1b)…but your filter-tipped little buddy has to stay outside…. (Friends, 3)

(2a)…bringing up the whole baby-lesbian thing? (Friends, 2)

(2b)…substance abuse is a lifelong struggle… (BBT, 10)

(3)…I think the rest is fairly self-explanatory. (BBT, 1)

This is the most productive adjectival pattern with nineteen examples found.

Huddleston and Pullum (2002, p. 1657) observed that many noun + adjective

compounds involve high degree of lexicalization and it is therefore not always clear

whether they are endocentric, or exocentric. The majority of compounds in this category

are written hyphenated and include present or past participle as their right-hand element

43
(1a)-(1b) with the latter being more usual. Compounds containing participles are both

endocentric (1a) as well as exocentric (1b). Endocentric compounds are in majority.

Clear endocentric examples include flash-frozen, honey-glazed or cheesecake-scented,

as being cheesecake-scented entails being scented, being honey-glazed entails being

glazed and so on. Some of the compounds, such as carefree and fat-free, seem to be

more ambiguous cases, but based on discussion provided by Bauer (2008, p. 8-9) they

will be termed endocentric as well. A smaller number of participial compounds in this

category are exocentric, for example filter-tipped or life-affirming which are both

denoting people.

As for non-participial compounds (2a)-(2b), they are mostly exocentric (2a),

such as baby-lesbian or weasel-like, although endocentric examples (2b) occurred as

well, like lifelong. Also some of the compounds formed by the pattern (3) which are

including self- as their left-hand element are exocentric, concretely self-destructive and

self-taught. But also an endocentric example fitting into this pattern, self-explanatory,

can be found. Compounds beginning with self- are often referring to people but also to

inanimate things as in the example in the beginning of this section.

3.4.2 Adjective + adjective

(1)…this high-powered, driven career type.… (Friends, 2)

(2)…dumbfounded at his stupidity. (Friends, 4)

This pattern was less common than the previous one and contained mostly endocentric

compounds (1). Once again, almost all the words were written hyphenated. Bauer

(1983) made a distinction between subordinate and coordinate compounds in this

category, but no coordinate compounds are found. All of the formations in this group,

such as high-powered, middle-aged or good-looking, may also seem to fit into adverb +

adjective category, as it is unclear whether their left-hand elements function more

44
adverbially or adjectivally. However, because they are adjectives in form, they are

classified into this group. Participles are highly common for these compounds and

almost all of the compounds found include them, with exception of extra-tough. Past

participle is much more frequent and only one compound, good-looking, contains

present participle. It is to be remarked that this category is highly homogenous, as most

of the compounds share very similar structure. However, they can refer to both people,

which is much more common in the corpus, but also to inanimate things such as in

open-faced sandwich. Only one exocentric (2) example, dumbfounded, is found in the

corpus.

3.4.3 Particle + adjective

(1)…Passion is way overrated. (Friends, 7)

(2)…With the balled-up socks? (Friends, 10)

This pattern is not particularly productive with only four examples found. However, it is

still present as opposed to adverb + adjective subgroup included in Bauer (1983). Bauer

(1983, p. 210) noted that this type of adjectival compounds is most frequent with

participles which proves true in the corpus, as all the compounds found contain

participles. Three of them include participles as left-hand element (1), namely

overrated, upset and upbeat. The two latter examples are participial forms of phrasal

verbs and only the first one may be considered endocentric. As Adams (1973, p. 118)

pointed out, it is usual for particle compounds that over- and under- can often prefix to

the same stem and so underrated would be possible as well. Compounds with particle as

the right-hand constituent (2) are even rarer and only the one example mentioned above

is found.

45
 3.4.4 Adverb + adjective

(1) Rachel is sorting her now-pink clothes. (Friends, 5)

'Not-mine. Not-mine. Not-mine.' (Friends, 3)

This is a highly marginal case, which is even not listed in Bauer (1983). It is represented

only by two examples in the corpus and although it shows similarities with the adjective

+ adjective category, now is definitely an adverb in form as well as in function. Similar

case is not-mine, where not could be theoretically regarded also as particle but

classifying it as adverb is more accurate. These compounds are endocentric.

3.4.5 Noun + noun

(1)…a bulk mail-order feminine hygiene company. (BBT, 4)

(2)…making eine kleine bang-bang music. (BBT, 5)

(3)…run some quarter-inch PVC…(Friends, 2)

From now on, all the adjectival compounds to follow will be exocentric because they

are not headed by an adjective. However, some of them can be semantically

endocentric. This pattern is the second most productive in the corpus with fourteen

examples occurring there. Bauer (1983, p. 210) remarked that a dispute whether these

compounds really are adjectives can occur. This is mainly because of conversion which

turns verbs or adjectives into nouns in many cases. This situation may be also seen as a

noun compound modifying another noun compound and based on this, it can be

misleading to label these compounds as adjectives. However, this would result into a

“three-term noun compounds” (Bauer, 1983, p.210), which would be written as two

words and so they would not be discussed here with respect to 3.1 and that would mean

a contradictory situation.

Due to this ambiguity, only compounds occurring entirely in modifying position

in the corpus will be labelled as compound adjectives. Compounds which function both

46
as nouns and their modifiers will be classified within nominal compounds.

Another argument against not treating them as noun compounds is also proposed by

Bauer (1983) who said that these compounds often involve lexicalization as units,

independent of their elements. Furthermore, they can be used attributively with different

connotation than the same forms used as compounds nouns in non-attributive position

(p. 206). The last problem regarding their classification is connected with their form, as

it is impossible to differ between their nominal or adjectival function without context in

vast majority of cases. Because of this, the noun they modify will be provided in

following examples.

Examples of these compounds include boy-girl party, fleabag motel, tin-foil hat

or workshop production. If they were nouns, these examples would provide a whole

range of exocentric, subordinate and coordinate compounds but this is not the case

when dealing with adjectives. One compound contained linking element in form of

indefinite article, that being workaday lives. The example (2) above illustrates

compound made up of two identical stems, as in bang-bang music. Kavka and Štekauer

(2006, p. 68) referred to this as “complete reduplication of a stem morpheme” and

claimed that it is not very productive in English29. In the corpus, altogether two such

examples were found. The last subgroup of noun + noun compounds include

expressions with numerals (3) which were quite frequent in the corpus. This subgroup

can be exemplified by 32-ounce steak, 80-foot dog or two-inch dowels. All the numerals

found function as nouns and therefore they all fall into this subgroup.

29
For a study regarding this pattern of compounding, see Hohenhaus (2005).

47
 3.4.6 Adjective + noun

(1)…the conversion from short-term to long-term memory? (BBT, 6)

(2) Alright, you madcap gal… (Friends, 6)

This subgroup contains six compounds and so it is rather marginally productive pattern

in the corpus. Bauer (1983, p. 211) suggested that these formations are not compounds

when used attributively, but noun phrases. As opposed to the adjective + adjective

category, left-hand elements clearly function as adjectives and therefore no similar

doubts regarding their classes arise. All of the compounds are exocentric in the sense

that they do not include an adjectival head, but most of them are semantically

endocentric (1). These include easy-pour, high-resolution or high-def. The last one is

also an instance of clipping, as def was clipped from definition. All the compounds

fitting into (1) are written hyphenated. One example which is used for denoting people

and is semantically exocentric (2) was found; madcap.

3.4.7 Particle + noun

(1)...a sluice and an overflow reservoir? (BBT, 2)

And yet you're surprisingly upbeat. (Friends, 1)

This subgroup is also found rather marginally in the corpus with only five examples

recorded. These compounds are all exocentric and are used for denoting people, such as

upbeat, as well as inanimate beings, like upstairs hallway or under-panty things. Most

of them are written as one word and one (upbeat) includes participle. Bauer (1983, p.

211) pointed out that prepositional phrases are often turned into modifiers in this

category of adjectival compounds.

48
 3.4.8 Verb + verb

(1)…oh look, they built a new putt-putt course. (BBT, 4).

This pattern is extremely marginal and only the example above is found. It can be

argued whether it really fits into this category, as putt can be both noun and verb.

Maybe also because of this, this pattern is not listed widely. It was not mentioned by

Adams (1973) at all. However, putt-putt course could be glossed as ‘a course where one

putts’ which indicates that putt is indeed better classified as a verb. It is also an instance

of stem reduplication mentioned in Kavka and Štekauer (2006) and in 3.4.5. This

compound is exocentric.

3.4.9 Verb + particle

(1)...picking up a leftover part (Friends, 1)

You have a back-up hypothesis. (BBT, 6)

I mean it's like the stand-up comedian… (Friends, 2)

The last subgrouping of adjectival compounds found is the more frequent of the two

containing verbs, but also highly marginal with three examples. Thus, Bauer’s (1983,

p.211) observation regarding high productivity of this pattern was not confirmed in the

corpus. All of the compounds are exocentric and two occur written hyphenated while

one is spelled solid. Leftover also contains participle. Two of them are converted phrasal

verbs, namely back-up hypothesis and stand-up comedian. The last one, leftover,

includes adverbial particle left and so at least some variability is seen here which

indicates that this pattern may be indeed productive in larger corpora.

All the adjectival patterns are summarized in the following table.

49
 ADJECTIVES Total Subordinate Coordinate Exocentric

N+Adj 20 13 0 7

Adj+Adj 8 7 0 1

Par+Adj 4 2 0 2

Adv+Adj 2 2 0 0

N+N 15 0 0 15

Adj+N 6 5 0 1

Par+N 5 0 0 5

V+V 1 0 0 1

V+Par 3 0 0 3

Total 63 28 0 35

Table 5

3.5 Compound verbs

While there were no disputes regarding the status of nominal and adjectival

compounds, such can arise when dealing with compound verbs. As mentioned by

Kavka and Štekauer (2006, p.69), many linguists argue whether these verbal formations

are really formed by compounding. Adams (1973) discussed three ways which serve to

create verbal compounds – linking two lexemes together, back-formation from nominal

and adjectival compounds and conversion. Plag (2002) remarked that most of

compound verbs with verb as a head are result of conversion or back-formation (p.

197). This leads to a conclusion that verbal compounds created by putting two lexemes

together, which had been the prevalent process so far, are in fact in minority. Thus,

verbal compounds which result from conversion or back-formation are sometimes

labelled pseudocompounds (Kavka and Štekauer, 2006, p.69). However, verbal

compounds in general are rather rare in the corpus and vast majority of them are

50
containing particles. Only three patterns used for creation of compound verbs were

found and despite the facts above, the same classification as for nouns and adjectives

will be maintained.

3.5.1 Particle + verb

(1) You continue to underestimate me... (BBT, 9)

(2) Overdo what? (BBT, 8)

(3) If I don't input those numbers... (Friends, 1)

This is by far the most productive pattern of compound verbs and still, only five

examples were found. As noted by Bauer (1983), most of these compounds are

“genuine verbal formations” (p. 208). Indeed, no instances of back-formation or

conversion are recognized among this pattern. All of these compounds are endocentric,

subordinate and written as one word. The most used particle was under- (1) with three

examples of underestimate, undergone and underline. Over- (2) and in- (3) both

occurred once.

3.5.2 Noun + verb

(1) Sheldon, remember, we role-played this. (BBT, 7)

This subgroup of verbal compounds is exceedingly rare in the corpus as it occurred only

once. It is also the only verbal compound not containing particles. Bauer (1983, p. 208)

mentioned that most of the compounds among this subgroup result from the process of

back-formation. However, the verb role-play is an instance of conversion from the noun

role-play. This compound is endocentric and coordinate.

3.5.3 Particle + noun

(1) And Ross, with his over-pronouncing every single word? (Friends, 3)

This pattern could be also perhaps labelled as particle + verb pattern, as the status of

pronouncing as gerund is not ultimately clear. However, Bauer (1983) tended to classify

51
gerunds as nouns30. Furthermore, pronouncing is used possessively in the sentence

above which is more characteristic of nouns than verbs. Nevertheless, this is the only

example found throughout the transcripts. Over-pronouncing is an exocentric

compound since it does not contain any verb, but semantically it can be felt as being

endocentric and subordinate.

These observations are confirmed by the following table which suggests that

verbal compounds are indeed a marginal case of compounding in the corpus.

VERBS Total Subordinate Coordinate Exocentric

Par+V 5 5 0 0

N+V 2 1 1 0

Par+N 1 0 0 1

Total 7 5 1 1

Table 6

3.6 Compound Adverbs

Adverbial compounds receive very scant attention in literature and they are also

very rare in the corpus. Only two patterns are recognized and just one out of six

compound adverbs does not contain particles. They are not classified by either Bauer

(1983) or Adams (1973) as well as many other linguists. Therefore, they will be

discussed very briefly, but the classification based on word classes used above will be

continued here as well. All the examples will be provided with context this time in order

to illustrate their adverbial function.

3.6.1. Particle + noun

(1) … speaking to someone off-screen… (BBT, 6)

But it was straight downhill from there. (BBT, 9)

30
See the discussion in 3.3.1.

52
 Jack from downstairs? (Friends, 4)

…I tried to watch that online… (BBT, 8)

We don’t chat. At least not offline. (BBT, 1)

Most of the adverbial compounds fall into this subgroup and all of them are exocentric

because of the absence of adverbial head. Semantically, they can be considered

endocentric. This pattern is quite rare in the corpus. These compounds seem to be

formed quite freely and therefore it is sometimes difficult to distinguish them from free

phrases, as discussed by Adams (1973, p. 122). All of them refer to a certain place, but

can also give specific information about people, as in “Jack from downstairs”.

3.6.2 Noun + adjective

(1)…what a great day. ...What? Weather-wise! (Friends, 8)

Only one example is found within this subgroup. Its form is the same as in noun +

adjective adjectival compounds, but as it functions rather adverbially it is classed into

this subgroup. This compound can be also considered to be endocentric semantically,

but is exocentric in form due to absence of adverbial element. This pattern is extremely

marginal.

The both adverbial patterns are illustrated in the chart below.

ADVERBS Total Subordinate Coordinate Exocentric

Par+N 5 0 0 5

N+Adj 1 0 0 1

Total 6 0 0 6

Table 7

3.7 Phrasal Compounds

Compounds with phrasal structure were already mentioned in 2.1.1 and 2.1.2

and unlike other formations on the borderline with phrases, they were included in this

53
analysis. As stated by Kavka and Štekauer (2006), these compounds make use of

conjunctions and prepositions, “conjugated verb forms and articles, that is to say, words

and word-forms typical of syntax” (p.70). Therefore, they can bring more variety into

written as well as oral utterances, in this case into the studied TV series. This was also

the main reason for their inclusion. Bauer (1983, p. 207) noted that these formations

could be also treated as lexicalizations of syntactic structures. Because of the remarks

above, these compounds will not be classified according to lexical classes of all their

elements, but only based on semantic criteria. Altogether, seven phrasal compounds

were found. This number is probably surprisingly low, but it is to be noted that only

compounds written hyphenated were taken into account. Some of them function as

nouns while the rest as adjectives. Therefore, they will be split into two groups.

3.7.1 Phrasal nouns

(1)…and I saw these children on a merry-go-round… (BBT, 9)

(2)…I was just wondering about the mother-to-be… (Friends, 2)

…we'd be like friends-in-law! (Friends, 5)

These phrasal compounds clearly function as nouns but they are very rare in the

transcripts. The example (1) is exocentric, while the two examples in (2) are endocentric

and subordinate. It may seem rather strange, as their head is the initial element, but they

are treated as endocentric in Bauer (1983). He also stated that endocentric compounds

having final element as their head are far less established (p. 207) which seems to be

true in the corpus, as none such example was recognized.

3.7.2 Phrasal adjectives

(1)...is raising glow-in-the-dark fish and weaving sarapes. (BBT, 4)

…your Luke Skywalker no-more-tears shampoo? (BBT, 1)

And this from the cry-for-help department. (Friends, 9)

54
 …that whole "You're-not-up-to-this" thing again? (Friends, 5)

This subgroup is just slightly more frequent with one example more. Similarly to noun

+ noun adjectival compounds, their status of adjectives can be disputed but the

conclusion here is the same as in 3.4.5. As seen in these examples, a large variety of

word classes is used in these compounds. All of them serve to modify nouns and are

exocentric.

3.8 Neo-classical Compounds

Neo-classical formations were already described and defined in 2.1.4.4. This

section will not provide detailed classification of those compounds for two reasons. The

first one is that there has not been any consistent classification proposed by any of the

linguists cited so far. This is also due to the fact (which is simultaneously the second

reason) that they are not a clearly defined word-formation process and therefore behave

very ambiguously (Kavka and Štekauer, 2006, p. 66-67). Therefore, they will be

mentioned here rather for illustration. The basic division can be easily proposed

according to type of combining form(s) they are made of. Interestingly, only neo-

classical compounds with initial combining forms (ICF) were found in the corpus. Neo-

classical formations were quite common in the corpus and occurred as nouns, adjectives

and verbs.

Neo-classical nouns include some well-established examples like grandmother

or photograph. An instance of clipping is also found here in intercom (from

communication) as well as blending in photocell (photograph cell). Some of the

compounds found, like sonogram, also include so-called medial vowel –o-which was

said to be a common feature of neo-classical formations by Huddleston and Pullum

(2002, p. 1662). Most of the neo-classical compounds in the corpus are nouns. The most

frequent ICF are grand- (grandfather, grandchildren), inter- (intercom, interview),

55
photo- (photographs, photocell) and tele- (telephone, television). A few other examples

are also found, like cardio-funk, hemisphere, minivan or multivitamin. They often refer

to quantities or sizes of things.

Neo-classical adjectives are much rarer and each of them include a different

ICF: extra-large, homosexual, infrared, omnipotent, super-solid and transsexual. As

seen in these examples, compounds written hyphenated as well as solid formations

occur in the corpus. Only one verb is found; to teleport.

3.9 Comparing Friends and The Big Bang Theory

After providing joint classification of compounds found in Friends and BBT,

question may arise whether there is any difference of compound patterns and usage

between these TV series. And even further, whether the main characters show any

tendency to use compounds predictably, or not. In order to answer this, classification

was initially separate and was merged into a common one afterwards. All the episodes

last about twenty minutes and therefore the series are comparable. Taken into account

were only the major characters for each series who appeared in all of the ten episodes.

They are Chandler Bing, Joey Tribbiani, Monica Geller Phoebe Buffay, Rachel Green

and Ross Geller for the Friends series. As for the BBT, major characters are Howard

Wolowitz, Leonard Hofstadter, Penny31, Raj Koothrappali and Sheldon Cooper. In

further text, they will be referred to by using their first names only. The comparison will

be done in two steps. Firstly, the series will be compared generally disregarding the

characters which will be discussed in the next step.

3.9.1 General comparison of the series

From the numerical point of view, compounds are distributed almost equally in

both Friends and BBT, with the difference of compound count being really marginal.

31
Her last name was not mentioned so far in the series.

56
Still, BBT manages to produce slightly more compounds. It may seem that in BBT,

compounds are distributed more ‘symmetrical’ and in Friends they tend to occur

frequently in two or three subsequent utterances while not appearing for a long time

afterwards. However, this is very difficult to measure precisely, so it will have to remain

more of a feeling than a fact. Furthermore, compound classes found are the same for

both series. In both of them, compound nouns were highly dominant, especially the

noun + noun subgroup. Also the frequency occurrence of the other classes is

proportionally about the same in both Friends and BBT. Difference of quantity within

each compound class never exceeds four when the series are compared. Nonetheless,

BBT would have contained much more neoclassical compounds if they had not been

excluded, this being thanks to its scientific background. These observations are

illustrated in the following table.

Friends BBT Total

Nouns (N) 100 102 202

Adjectives (Adj) 32 36 67

Verbs (V) 2 6 8

Adverbs (Adv) 2 4 6

Phrasal compounds 4 3 7

Total 140 151 291

Table 8

As for the compounding patterns, Friends reaches slightly higher variability of

them since it contains two patterns more. Nevertheless, they are generally represented

by only one or two compounds and therefore they have to be regarded as highly

marginal cases. Based on the facts above, it can be thus said that distribution of

compound words is rather similar in the analyzed TV series. As for the individual

57
words, the most frequently occurring compounds are boyfriend, not-mine and bathroom

in Friends and bedroom, hallway and hamburger in BBT. They also share considerable

similarity, as most of them are names of the rooms or indoor locations which are usually

mentioned outside the characters’ utterances in the notes. Very common are compounds

concerned with lifestyle, such as boyfriend, girlfriend or hamburger. The only

unexpected compound from the listing is probably not-mine which comes as a result of

its repeating several times in one sentence. This suggests that also the individual

compounds used are usually very similar.

3.9.2 Comparison of characters

While it was perfectly possible to compare compound words used as well as

their classes across the series, the same is not practicable with the characters, as the

background of their utterances is highly different. Therefore, comparison of the

individual characters is to be done for each series separately. Compounds which were

not used by the main characters listed above were discarded for purposes of this section.

In Friends, Chandler produces the most compounds (33) while Rachel is the

least productive with 16. Furthermore, Chandler also contributes to two of the patterns

which are exclusive for Friends. Compounds he utters are not present in only two of the

compound subtypes, which makes him also the most variable character in terms of use

of compounding. Together with Monica, he also uses most of the neoclassical

formations. However, Ross produced most exocentric compounds, e.g. crapweasel. As

mentioned above, Rachel utters the lowest number of compounds, but also two out of

four phrasal compounds found. Monica and Rachel use lowest number of adjectives,

which is the only category with noticeable differences. However, characters in Friends

contribute more or less equally to compounding. Altogether, no tendencies of character-

58
specific patterns were found. In order to present these ideas more clearly, a table

summarizing them is provided below.

Friends Nouns Adjectives Verbs Adverbs Phrases

N+N V+N Adj+N Par+N V+Par

Chandler 15 1 1 3 2 8 2 0 1

Joey 13 0 0 2 1 2 0 0 0

Monica 12 0 2 0 1 2 0 0 0

Phoebe 15 2 2 0 2 9 0 1 0

Rachel 10 0 0 0 2 1 0 1 2

Ross 16 0 5 0 1 8 0 0 0

Table 9

However, this is not the case with BBT. There, one dominant character can be

found, namely Sheldon with 81 compounds which covers more than a half of the total

number of compounds. Other characters are left behind, mainly Raj (10 compounds

found) and Howard (21). Sheldon outscores the rest of the characters in usage of

neoclassical and phrasal compounds as well as in number of patterns involved. He also

utters exocentric compounds such as corn-husker and is generally the central point of

many entertaining situations. However, Leonard is the only one to use big bang which

also appears in the title of the series. He also produces unusual compound adjectives as

flash-frozen banana or date-like component. Generally, Sheldon utters most of the rarer

compounds and the vast majority of neoclassical formations. Similarly to Friends, no

tendency of certain characters preferring specific compounding patterns is observed.

This can be caused by a relatively low amount of episodes studied (10 for each series),

but it is certainly enough for a general image of the situation. These statements are once

again illustrated in the table below.

59
 BBT Nouns Adjectives Verbs Adverbs Phrases

N+N V+N Adj+N Par+N V+Par

Howard 11 0 4 0 0 5 1 1 0

Leonard 27 5 3 2 1 9 4 0 1

Penny 26 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0

Raj 6 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0

Sheldon 40 5 5 3 1 15 1 4 2

Table 10

3.10 Summary

This chapter serves as a summarization and illustration of the findings described

above. In order to do this properly, a series of tables will be provided as well as brief

comments suggesting the general tendencies observed in the corpus. Most of them will

discuss the two TV series, Friends and BBT, in general while the patterns of individual

characters will be illustrated only briefly. Afterwards, compound usage of the individual

characters will be the matter of concern. In the tables, the number of compounds fitting

into the corresponding classes or patterns will be included instead of listing examples

which had been done throughout the analysis. Abbreviations provided in the brackets

will be used in the following tables; particles will be abbreviated ‘Par’.)

60
 Friends BBT Total

Nouns (N) 100 102 202

Adjectives (Adj) 32 36 67

Verbs (V) 2 6 8

Adverbs (Adv) 2 4 6

Phrasal compounds 4 3 7

Total 140 151 291

Table 8 (cf. p. 57, repeated here for convenience)

Table 8 clearly demonstrates that distribution of compounds is almost equal in

both series. Altogether, 291 compounds are recognized including 12 distinct

compounding patterns. However, some of them appear in both TV series, so 273

distinct compounds are found. Therefore, occurrence of compounds in the corpus is

very frequent. As also seen above, vast majority of compounds from the corpus are

nouns, followed by adjectives. The other classes are already marginal. Altogether,

occurrence of compounds in the corpus is rather high. Corresponding to the analysis,

phrasal compounds will not be further classified. Neo-classical compounds are not

included here because they function as either noun, adjective or verb, so they were

assigned to the corresponding classes. Therefore, both of them will be omitted from the

next table illustrating distribution of compounds among individual compounding

patterns. These tables would once again suggest that distribution of compounds is

highly equal across the series, so they will not be distinguished from now on and all the

compounds will be discussed together. Comparison of the series was done in 3.9.1.

61
 NOUNS Total Subordinate Coordinate Exocentric

N+N 122 94 9 19

V+N 8 5 0 3

Adj+N 17 15 0 2

Par+N 11 7 0 4

V+Par 11 0 0 11

Total 168 120 9 39

Table 3 (cf. p. 42, repeated here for convenience)

Among the nouns, most of the compounds fall into the noun + noun category.

Only here, endocentric coordinate compounds are found. All the other classes are

similarly represented. Endocentric compounds cover majority of nouns in general, all

the nouns from verb + particle are considered exocentric, as they do not contain any

noun.

ADJECTIVES Total Subordinate Coordinate Exocentric

N+Adj 20 13 0 7

Adj+Adj 8 7 0 1

Par+Adj 4 2 0 2

Adv+Adj 2 2 0 0

N+N 15 0 0 15

Adj+N 6 5 0 1

Par+N 5 0 0 5

V+V 1 0 0 1

V+Par 3 0 0 3

Total 63 28 0 35

Table 5 (cf. p. 50, repeated here for convenience)

62
 As for the adjectives, it is apparent that more compounding patterns are

recognized in the corpus in comparison to nouns. However, most of them are marginal.

There is no such dominating pattern as in nouns, maybe because of a much lower

occurrence of compound adjectives. As in Bauer (1983), all the adjectives not including

adjectival head were recognized exocentric, although some of them may be regarded as

being semantically endocentric. Because of this, exocentric compounds were in slight

majority. No clear instances of endocentric coordinate compounds were found among

the adjectives.

VERBS Total Subordinate Coordinate Exocentric

Par+V 5 5 0 0

N+V 2 1 1 0

Par+N 1 0 0 1

Total 7 5 1 1

Table 6 (cf. p. 52, repeated here for convenience)

ADVERBS Total Subordinate Coordinate Exocentric

Par+N 5 0 0 5

N+Adj 1 0 0 1

Total 6 0 0 6

Table 7 (cf. p. 53, repeated here for convenience)

As seen in tables 6 and 7, both verbal and adverbial compounds represent a

marginal case of compounding in the corpus. They were neither productive, nor

included many patterns. Most of the verbal compounds are endocentric, with one

coordinate as well as exocentric example recognized. All of the adverbs are exocentric

due to absence of adverbial element.

The last two tables contain compound usage of the characters. The first one is

concerned with Friends, while the latter one with BBT. They are included mainly as a
63
matter of interest and cover only the initial division into classes as depicted in table 4.

However, due to large number of noun compounds, individual patterns are also

recognized in their case.

Friends Nouns Adjectives Verbs Adverbs Phrases

N+N V+N Adj+N Par+N V+Par

Chandler 15 1 1 3 2 8 2 0 1

Joey 13 0 0 2 1 2 0 0 0

Monica 12 0 2 0 1 2 0 0 0

Phoebe 15 2 2 0 2 9 0 1 0

Rachel 10 0 0 0 2 1 0 1 2

Ross 16 0 5 0 1 8 0 0 0

Table 9 (cf. p. 59, repeated here for convenience)

BBT Nouns Adjectives Verbs Adverbs Phrases

N+N V+N Adj+N Par+N V+Par

Howard 11 0 4 0 0 5 1 1 0

Leonard 27 5 3 2 1 9 4 0 1

Penny 26 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0

Raj 6 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 0

Sheldon 40 5 5 3 1 15 1 4 2

Table 10 (cf. p. 60, repeated here for convenience)

As seen in table 9, differences between characters in Friends are highly

negligible, as all the not marginal patterns are used similarly by all of them. The only

exception may be adjectival compounds where there is difference of up to eight

compounds. As for BBT, which is depicted in table 10, compound usage differs much

more. In general, Sheldon uttered vast majority of compounds, while Howard and Raj

64
used only a small amount of compounds. As seen above, the scale is much wider in BBT

but the number of compounds is proportionally similar for the characters in all patterns

in Friends as well as BBT. Therefore, it can be said that no tendencies for characters to

use specific patterns were found in either series.

65
 Conclusion

This thesis dealt with word-formation processes in TV series. The greatest

attention was devoted to compounding which is the considered to be the most

productive English word-formation process. Enormous productivity of compounding

also appeared to be the case in a corpus which was created for the purposes of this

thesis. The corpus was created using transcripts of two famous American TV series.

They are Friends and The Big Bang Theory. The first ten episodes of each series were

taken into account, which proved to be a satisfactory sample. Not only compounding in

general was taken into account but also compound usage of individual characters of

both series which consequently allowed for comparison of both series.

The main goal of this thesis was to classify the compound words found in the

corpus. For this purpose, Laurie Bauer’s classification as presented in his book English

Word-Formation (1983) was adopted. It relies mainly on words classes (nouns,

adjectives, verbs…) of compound constituents and also semantic relationships between

them. The analysis also considers the status of compound’s head, which is inspired by

the book Words, Meaning, and Vocabulary: An Introduction to Modern English

lexicology by Jackson and Amvela (2007).

In order to back the analysis with facts, two theoretical chapters were included at

the beginning of the thesis. The first one discussed the basic notions of English word-

formation and also the definition of word-formation. The next chapter was focused on

selected English word-formation processes. Compounding was described in most detail

although not much space was devoted to the definition of compounding. The main focus

of this chapter was the problem of unclear distinction between compounds and phrases

which causes various kinds of problems in English. Therefore, multiple criteria for

differentiating compound from phrases were presented. The second chapter also

66
introduced the basic types of compounds, which are then used in the analysis. On that

account, the terms endocentric, exocentric and copulative compounds were defined.

Endocentric compounds were further split into coordinate and subordinate according to

their head and these were the main compound properties discussed in the analysis.

After dealing with compounding, other English word-formation processes were

mentioned as well. They were affixation, conversion, clipping, blending and back-

formation. All of them were represented in the analysis, as borderlines between the

processes are not always clear.

The third chapter was concerned with analysis of the corpus. In the beginning,

the criteria for classification of compounds were described. This was followed by

clarification regarding borderline cases of compounding and all the compound types

that were not taken into account were emphasized. Afterwards, all the categories and

compounding patterns found were presented. The most productive and frequent patterns

received the biggest attention while the more marginal cases were commented only

briefly. The analysis was accompanied by tables for better orientation. Also two special

types of compounds, phrasal and neo-classical compounds, were recognized but not

further analyzed due to their ambiguous status.

Altogether, compounds functioned as nouns, adjectives, verbs or adverbs in the

corpus. The latter two were rather marginal cases and usually contained particles. The

vast majority of compounds were nouns and therefore the greatest space is devoted to

them. Adjectives were significantly rarer, but included a wider range of compounding

patterns. That was because almost every nominal compound included a noun as the

right-hand element. Most of the compounds were endocentric and subordinate, while

exocentric compounds occurred mainly among adjectives. Some of the compounds were

67
semantically endocentric, but formally exocentric and therefore considered exocentric in

the end.

The two TV series were compared as well as language of their main characters.

However, no significant differences were found. All the findings were then summarized

in tables which illustrated productivity and frequency of all compounding patterns and

also suggested, which compounding patterns were prevailing in the corpus.

68
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 The One With The Monkey. [Television program] [Transcript]. Retrieved 17

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73
 Resumé in English

This bachelor’s thesis deals with word-formation processes in two American TV

series. These are Friends and The Big Bang Theory. They have become famous all over

the world and have a large fan base. Therefore, numerous transcripts of these series can

be found on the internet. Transcripts of the first ten episodes of each series are analysed

and serve as a basis for this thesis. The transcripts are used to create a corpus, which is

enclosed on a CD. The thesis is focused on compounding, mainly because of its

productivity and diversity. The main aim is to classify compound words found in the

corpus.

The first two chapters of this thesis are mostly theoretical. They provide

definitions not only of word-formation and compounding, but also other terms which

are essential for understanding the following text. The greatest attention is devoted to

compounding and different types of compound words. The theoretical chapters are

concluded with an overview of various English word-formations processes. They are

often closely tied to compounding.

The third chapter is the main part of this thesis. The chapter is concerned with

analysis of the corpus and classification of compound words. The classification was

done according to multiple criteria. The main criteria are word classes of compound’s

elements and semantic relationships between them. All the criteria are explained at the

beginning of the analysis. Mainly compounds consisting of two elements are discussed.

However, compounds having three or more constituents are briefly mentioned as well as

compounds including elements of Greek or Latin origin. This chapter also examines

utterances of the main characters and compares their manner of using compound words.

Tables are often included to illustrate all the observations in a clear way.

74
 Resumé in Czech

Tato bakalářská práce pojednává o slovotvorných procesech ve dvou amerických

televizních seriálech. Těmi jsou Přátelé a Teorie velkého třesku. Tyto seriály se staly

známými po celém světě a mají velkou fanouškovskou základnu. Díky tomu je na

internetu možno nalézt mnoho přepisů jednotlivých dílů. Analyzovány byly přepisy

prvních deseti epizod každého seriálu, přepisy zároveň slouží jako základ pro tuto práci,

a tak byly použity k vytvoření korpusu, který je k práci přiložen na CD. Za hlavní téma

této práce bylo vybráno skládání slov, a to především kvůli jeho produktivitě a

různorodosti. Hlavním cílem je klasifikace složených slov nalezených v korpusu.

První dvě kapitoly této práce mají především teoretický ráz. Obsahují definice

nejen slovotvorby či skládání slov, ale také jiných pojmů, které jsou nezbytné pro

pochopení dalšího textu. Největší pozornost je věnována skládání slov a nejrůznějším

typům složených slov. Teoretické kapitoly jsou zakončeny stručným přehledem

ostatních anglických slovotvorných procesů, které jsou často úzce spjaty se skládáním

slov.

Třetí kapitola tvoří hlavní část této práce. Zabývá se analýzou korpusu a

klasifikací složených slov. Tato klasifikace je prováděna podle několika kritérií.

Hlavními kritérii jsou slovní druhy částí složených slov a jejich vzájemné sémantické

vztahy. Všechna tato kritéria jsou popsána na začátku analýzy. Zmiňována jsou

především složená slova skládající se ze dvou částí. Opomenuta však nejsou ani slova

skládající se z tří a více prvků, ani jako složená slova obsahující části řeckého či

latinského původu. Tato kapitola také zkoumá výroky hlavních postav obou seriálů a

porovnává, jakým způsobem tyto postavy užívají složených slov. Pro ilustraci jsou

v této analýze často obsaženy tabulky.

75