Name : Naufal Siddiqi Nasrullah

NIM : 20202156

Class : TBI-E

Course : English Morphosyntax

Assignment : Exercises on compound words, blends and phrasal words

Exercises

Chapter 6: Compound words, blends and phrasal words

1. Which of the following are compound words, which are phrases, and which are phrasal
words?

(a)
 moonlight is a NN compound noun (and hence a lexeme) with the expected stress
on the first element.
 Moonscape too, but it is unusual in that -scape is a bound morpheme, found also in
landscape and seascape.
 harvest moon has an institutionalised meaning (the full moon closest to the end of
September in the northern hemisphere), but is nevertheless a phrase rather than a
compound.
 blue moon (as in once in a blue moon) The same goes for blue moon, which is a
phrase inside a phrasal idiom.
(b)
 blueberry, bluebottle, greybeard, are AN compound nouns.
 sky-blue is a NA compound adjective.
 blue-pencil (as in they blue- pencilled the script heavily) meaning ‘censor’ or ‘cut’,
is a verb derived by conversion from a nominal source (see Chapter 5), but the
source is not a word but rather a phrase (blue pencil as a conventional term for
 what a censor uses in crossing out objectionable passages). It is therefore a phrasal
word rather than a compound.
(c)
 pencil case, eyebrow pencil, sharpener are NN compound nouns, eyebrow pencil
also contains the NN compound noun eyebrow.
 pencil-thin is a NA compound adjective.
 thin air (as in they vanished into thin air) is not a word but a phrase (though it is
part of a cliché).
(d)
 airport, air conditioning, are NN compound nouns. (The stress on air rather than
on conditioning supports the analysis as a compound rather than a phrase.)
 Royal Air Force is also a NN compound noun, but Royal Air Force is a phrase
consisting of an adjective and a noun, just like effective air force or royal palace;
the fact that the Royal Air Force is lexicalised as a name for the British air force
does not affect its status as a phrase.
 Air France presents the same analytic dilemma as governor general does.
(e)
 Silkworm, T-shirt are NN compound nouns.
 silk shirt, however, is a phrase consisting of a head noun (shirt) and a modifier
(silk) which also happens to be a noun.
(f)
 stick-in-the-mud All the other examples are nouns, pluralised by adding -s at the
end, but their structure is that of a phrase (e.g. stick in the mud, want to be) rather
than a word, so they are not compounds but phrasal words.
 lady-in-waiting The plural of lady-in-waitingis ladies-in-waiting, not *lady-in-
waitings, which shows that, like brother-in-law, it is a noun phrase, not a word
(despite the hyphens).
 forget-me-not,
 has-been,wannabe

(g)
 overrún (verb), óverrun (noun, as in a big cost overrun), undercoat
(noun),undercoat (verb, as in We undercoated the walls in white), Overrún (verb)
and undercoat (noun) are endocentric. Their derivatives by conversion, óverrun
 and undercoat (verb), are exocentric, as are underhand (an adjective with no
adjectival head) and handover (a noun with no nominal head).

2. Of the compounds (not the phrases or phrasal words) in Exercise 1, which are endocentric
and which are exocentric? Moonlight and moonscape are both endocentric. Blueberry
and sky-blue are endocentric. Bluebottle is also endocentric, because, although a
bluebottle (whether a kind of fly, a kind of plant or a kind of jelly-fish) is not a bottle, its
name likens it metaphorically to one. On the other hand, greybeard is exocentric because it
denotes not a kind of beard nor something that resembles a beard, but rather someone who
typically has a grey beard (an old man). Blue-pencil is also exocentric because, though a
verb, it has no verbal head. (c), (d), (e) All are endocentric. None of these is a compound,
so the question does not apply

3. Of the compound nouns in Exercise 1, which are primary (or root) compounds and which
are secondary (or verbal) compounds? The only secondary compounds are pencil
sharpener and air conditioner, in which pencil and air are interpreted as objects of the
verbal elements sharpen and condition (the latter being a verb derived by conversion from
a noun).

4. Identify (with the help of a dictionary, if necessary) the sources of the following blends or
acronyms: brunch, motel, radar, modem, laser. breakfast plus lunch; motor plus hotel;
radio detecting and ranging; modulator plus demodulator; light amplification by
stimulated emission of radiation.

5. Each of these words is a compound containing at least one bound Graeco-Latin combining
form. With the help of a dictionary if necess- ary, identify a meaning for each such
combining form, and find another word that contains it:

nanosecond, protoplasm, endocentric, polyphony, leucocyte, omnivorous, octahedron

nano- ‘one thousand millionth (or billionth) of ’; also in nanometer

proto- ‘first’; also in protozoon

-plasm ‘predominant substance in living cells’; also in cytoplasm

endo- ‘internal’; also in endogamy

-centric ‘having a centre’; also in polycentric

poly- ‘many’; also in polycentric

-phony ‘sound’; also in telephony

leuco- ‘white’; also (with different spelling) in leukaemia

-cyte ‘cell’; also in cytoplasm and erythrocyte

omni- ‘all’; also in omniscient

-vorous ‘eating’; also in carnivorous

octa- ‘eight’; also in octagon

-hedron ‘surface’; also in polyhedron