English Hyphenated Compounds

Abstract

Hyphenated compounds are common in English. But compound hyphenation has seldom been thoroughly addressed in the literature on English compounding. This article provides a detailed examination of a corpus of 1,561 English hyphenated compounds collected by the author. Various patterns of English hyphenated compounds and their morphosyntactic behavior are discussed in terms of several existing claims or assumptions about English compounding. The results are that the vast majority of English hyphenated compounds are adjectival rather than nominal, that nouns are the most active class of component stems of English hyphenated compounds, that most English hyphenated compounds are right-headed, that 3-or-more-stem hyphenated compounds, derived from phrases, follow the sequence of the corresponding phrase structure constituents, that hyphenation is not necessarily transitional in the evolution of an English compound, and that English neologistic and nonce compounds display a very strong tendency toward hyphenation.