Compound vs. Phrase

Compound vs. Phrase

a. Stress: first and second word

b. Semantic: a compound tends to have a meaning that is more or less idiosyncratic or unpredictable.

How to distinguish compound and phrase?

§  Compounds are often said to have a name-giving function, to be representative of a category .

§  Phrases are often argued to have a primarily descriptive function.

Compound                 Phrase

- greenhouse             - green house

Compound are words which are formed by combining roots and the much smaller category of phrasal words. There are 3 kinds of compounds:

1.      Compound Verbs

            Verbs formed by compounding are much less usual than verbs derived by affixation. A variety of types exist which may be distinguished according to their structure:

a.      Verb-verb (VV) : stir-fry, freeze-dry

b.      Noun-verb (NV) : hair-wash, air-condition

c.      Adjective-verb (AV) : dry-clean, whitewash

d.      Preposition-verb (PV) : underestimate, outrun

2.      Compound Adjectives

            Two or more words are combined to describe a noun. Here are some examples of right-headed compound adjectives:

a.      Noun-adjective (NA) : sky-high, oil-rich

b.      Adjective-adjective (AA) : grey-green, red-hot

c.      Preposition-adjective (PA) : overactive

d.      A phrase containing a compound adjectives is formed as such : article (a, an, the)+ a number - a noun in the singular noun. Examples; a five-window,  a four-wheel

3.      Compound Nouns

Made of at least two words to form a new word. The examples can be found with each of the other main words classes supplying the left-hand element:

a.      Verb-noun (VN): swearword, playtime

b.      Noun-noun (NN): hairnet, butterfly net

c.      Adjective-noun (AN): greenstone, faintheart

d.      Preposition-nous (PN): outpost, overcoat

Headed and Headless Compounds

            The AN compounds included faintheart alongside blackboard and greenstone and headless NN compounds are stickleback ( a kind of fish with spines on its back. A few VN-type compound nouns included pickpocket, killjoy , cutpurse. Some nouns consist of a verb and preposition or adverb like take-off, sell-out, wrap-up.

Blends and Acronyms

            Blends is encounter a kind of compound where at least one component is reproduced only partially. A straightforward example is smog, blended from smoke and fog, a more elaborate one is chortle, blended from chuckle and snort. The most extreme kind of truncation that a component of a blend can undergo is reduction to just one sound or letter, usually the first. Blends made up of initial letters are known as acronyms, of which well-known examples are NATO, ANZAC, RAM, SCSI, and AIDS.

Compounds Containing Bound Combining Forms

            Special in scientific and technical areas, includes a huge repertoire of compounds that are made up of bound root, known as combining forms. Here are just a few: anthropology, sociology, cardiogram, plantigrade.

Phrasal Words

There is a clear difference between compound word structure and sentence structure here. But there are also complex items that function as words, yet whose internal structure is that of a clause or phrase rather than of a compound. There is no standard term for these items to introduce the term of phrasal words.          An example of a phrasal words is the noun jack-in-the-box. Structurally this has the appearance of a noun phrase in which the head noun, jack, is phrases people in the street or (a) book on the shelf. However, it forms its plural by suffixing –s not to the head noun (as in book on the shelf) but to the whole expression: not ‘jack-in-the-box’ but jack-in-the-boxes, as in They jumped up and down like jack-in-the-boxes. Though structurally a phrase, then, it behaves as a word.

Reference :

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, An Introduction to English Morphology, Edinburgh University Press.