Philology

(Short Note)

Free And Fixed Compounds

Nowadays none thinks of "daisy" and "nostril" as compounds of "day's

eye" and "nosu thyrel". Nevertheless, the fixed compounds are felt as independent
units, isolated from the component parts both in sound and in meaning. In English,
compound words are formed freely. On the whole, composition (or compounding)
denotes the growth of the English language from within.

Composition is the process of word - formation that creates compounds. In

this method, a new word is formed by joining together two or more separate words.
The new words thus formed are called compounds. There are two major types of
compounds: free compounds and fixed compounds.

Free Compounds: The commonest of the English compounds are the free
compounds in which two nouns are joined together. In such compounds, the second
element expresses a general meaning, which is modified and limited by the first.
Each part of these compounds can easily be isolated (/separated) with an independent
meaning. Examples include "headmaster", "railway", " rainbow", "schoolboy",
"handwriting", "apple-tree", "newspaper", "weekday", "weekend", "pocket-
money", "bookcase", "table-lamp", "electric-light", etc.
 Even with the free compounds , we may have long strings of words like
"railway refreshment room", "waste-paper basket", "New Year Eve", "Fancy dress
ball", "Republic-day parade", etc.

Fixed Compounds: In the fixed compounds, two parts are fixed, and one
part cannot be separated from the other, e.g., "Daisy" was originally formed by
joining together two words, "day's" and "eye". This later became fixed as "daisy".
Similarly we have "nostril" from O.E. "nosu" and "thyrel" (i.e. "hole"), "woman"
from "wif" and "man", "good-bye" from "God be with you", "Christmas" from
"Christ's muss".

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References

Laurie Bauer (2017) Compounds and Compounding : Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, ¹55

Ralph W. Fasold (2006) An Introduction to LANGUAGE and LINGUISTICS : Cambridge