English Compound Words Research Articles

Компрессивное словообразование в англоязычном юридическом дискурсе: структурно-семантические характеристики языковых единиц

The aim of the study is to identify the structural and semantic features of linguistic units serving as means of compressive word formation in English legal discourse. The article explores the notion of compression, focusing on the most common means of compression in the form of English compound words and abbreviations at the derivational level. The scientific novelty lies in the comprehensive analysis of means of compressive word formation in English legal discourse, which allowed for the identification and description of productive derivational patterns based on extensive linguistic material, defining the uniqueness of their structure and semantics. The analysis reveals that compound words are the most common means of compression, enabling linguistic economy. Predominant are compound words based on the ‘N + N’ asyntactic model; phrasal compounds with nominal and verbal stem components; derivative compounds created following the agentive model ‘N + V + -er’. Among abbreviations with highly compressive forms of expression, initialisms dominate, based on two-word and three-word nominal models of word formation, as well as syllabic abbreviations retaining the initial part of the original word and hybrid abbreviations formed by contraction.

ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH COMPOUND WORDS IN AN ARTTICLE OF LIFE AND STYLE COLUMN

In a text, the kinds of words are found in many different word-formations. Therefore, every language shows new words such as inflection, derivation, and compounding. However, those methods cannot be used generally when it comes to texts. It can be determined whether a word is a noun or a phrase by a number of factors. As a result, this research will provide precise information about how compounding is used in the text. The research objectives are (1) What kinds of compound words found in the life and style columns of the Jakarta Globe article? (2) How the English compound words described in the life and style columns of the Jakarta Globe article? Further, this research employs a qualitative approach as suggested by Creswell (2014). The data were taken from an article in one of English newspapers in Indonesia entitled "Designers of the Runaway as Jakarta Fashion Weeks Takes off" from the life and style column in Jakarta Globe. The finding of the research showed that there were two types of compound words that found in the article entitled "Designers of the Runaway as Jakarta Fashion Weeks Takes off" from the life and style column in the Jakarta Globe. Those are exocentric and endocentric compound words. Besides, noun compound, verb compound, and adjective compound are the lexical categories that were produced by the process of compounding.

A Study of Consonant Clusters in English Compound Words

Consonant clusters are a group or sequence of consonants that appear together in a syllable without a vowel between them. Consonant2 clusters are commonly found in simple words but they can be recognized also in compound words. Therefore, the present study tries to tackle consonant clusters in compound words. The present study aims at distinguishing consonant clusters in different types of compound words in the English language and studying the frequency of consonant clusters within a compound word. The study employs an eclectic model to achieve the intended aims it. The study concludes that a sequence of two juxtaposed elements can be considered as a compound in English and English compounds can be divided into the following types: nominal, adjectival, verbal, and adverb compounds.

English Compound Words Used in The Jakarta Post’s Health Column on Third Week of June 2020

This study aims to describe the orthographic features, word formation and the meaning of compound words related to COVID-19 pandemics used in The Jakarta Post’s Health Column Article on Third Week of June 2020. There are three research questions in this study: (1) What are orthographic features found in the compound words, (2) What are the type of compound words and their lexical categories, and (3) How do the compound words create meaning. To answer the research question, the writer use the theory of morphology and semantics. The findings showed there are 34 compound words in The Jakarta Post’s Health Column on the third week of June 2020. The compound words found in this study are written mostly in one word. Then, the rest of compound words are written with a hyphen, and separately in two or three words. Based on the type of compound words, there are 82.35% compound noun, 11.75% compound adjective, and 5.9% compound verb. The most dominant lexical category is from compound nouns which are Noun + Noun and Adjective + Noun. Based on the meaning of compound words, there are 85.3% endocentric compounds and 14.7% exocentric compounds.

A Phonological Study of the Influence of Arabic Stress on the Pronunciation of English Words by Saudi ESL Learners

Stress plays a profound role in languageintelligibility and comprehensibility. However, stress is considered a problematic area by ESL learners. Many studies have examined L2 acquisition of suprasegmmental elements such as pitch, tone and intonation, but few have focused on stress in relation to Arabic language transfer. For example, Guion(2003) has studies the influence of the  factors of syllable structure and word class on stress assignment by ESL learners. Kelley (1992) has studied the influence of language stress properties on the second language acquisition of primary word stress. This paper investigates English word stresspronunciation errors by of Saudi learners of ESL. Itintends to examine the transference of Arabic on the learning of English word stress by Saudi learners of ESL.It explores the relation between language interference and stress assignmentin disyllable words(including compound words) and word-class pairs. It also examines if knowledge of noun/verb grammatical class could influence the production of stress. Moreover, it aims to explore thecorrelation between misplacement of stressand vowel change by Saudi ESL learners. Thirty three Saudi advanced learners of ESL participated in three experiments to produce 20 English disyllable words, 20 English compound words, and 20 English disyllabic word-class pairs. The errors in stress placement were inversely not proportional to the level of proficiency in English as students continued to incorrectly assign stress in disyllable words, compound words and word-class pairs.  Most Saudi students placed initial stress on disyllabic words and final stress on compound words, a rule that is used with SA words. There is a correlation between stress misplacement and vowel change  in disyllable words and word-class pairs but not in compound words. Errors occur more frequently with word-class pairs regardless of the students' knowledge of grammatical class stress assignment rules.

ПЛЕЙЛИСТ, ПЛЕЙЛИСТОВЕ OR ПЛЕЙЛИСТА, ПЛЕЙЛИСТИ?

The article discusses formal features of borrowed English compound words with -list (‘a simple series of words’) and suggests synonyms for these. These recent loans are compared with the older лѝста and ранглиста.

Textual Effects in Compound Processing: A Window on Words in the World

We sought to move beyond single word and sentence processing experiments in order to examine textual effects on the processing of compound words in English. We developed minimal texts (sentences pairs that together constitute a story) that had neutral, semantic or lexical relations between the last word of the first sentence and the second word of the second sentence (which was always a compound noun). This generated minimal text triplets that differed only in the last word of the first sentence (e.g., “She walked down to the path/river/water. The waterfall roared in the distance”). Four experiments were conducted with a total 143 native speakers of English. Experiment 1 employed a Modified Maze Task to identify cross-sentence effects on compound processing. Sentence pairs with lexical links differed from those with semantic links, which, in turn differed from neutral pairs, providing evidence of cross-sentence influence on compound processing. In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 2c, we examined compound production using typing tasks. Results indicated that morphological effects found in single word typing persisted in text typing. In addition, constituent priming effects on typing were seen in both single word typing and sentence typing. Finally, morphological effects were correlated with overall story ratings. We thus conclude that morphological effects are not restricted to single word processing, but rather reflect the dynamics of real-world language processing.

The role of information theory for compound words in Mandarin Chinese and English

We investigate the role of information-theoretic measures for compound word reading in two languages: Mandarin Chinese and English. For each language, we report the results of two analyses: a time-to-event analysis using piece-wise additive mixed models (PAMMs) and a causal inference analysis with causal additive models (CAMs). We use the PAMM analyses to gain insight into the temporal profile of the effects of information-theoretic measures in the word naming task. For both English and Mandarin Chinese, we report early effects of the entropy of both constituents, as well as temporally widespread effects of point-wise mutual information (PMI). The CAM analyses provide further insight into the relations between lexical-distributional variables. The image that emerges from the CAM analyses is that the information-theoretic measures entropy and PMI are embedded in a carefully balanced system in which lexical-distributional properties that lead to processing difficulties are offset by lexical-distributional properties that guarantee successful communication. The information-theoretic measures have a central position in this system, and are causally influenced not only by frequency, but also by the effects of other lower-level lexical-distributional variables such as visual complexity, and phonology to orthography consistency.

Conceptualizing semantic transparency: A systematic analysis of semantic transparency measures in English compound words

Semantic transparency refers to the extent to which the meaning of a multimorphemic word can be determined from the meaning of its constituents. In terms of compounds, semantic transparency has been operationally defined in multiple ways, and research has sometimes produced conflicting results concerning its effect on processing. This study explored a potential source of these experimental conflicts by examining the methodology and measures used to operationalize semantic transparency. First, we used factor analysis to investigate whether common measures of semantic transparency truly inform the same underlying construct and found that there were at least four factors represented by eleven common semantic transparency variables. After extracting predicted values from these factors, we found that different aspects of semantic transparency are not equally predictive of behavioural data from lexical decision and naming tasks. Moreover, the various aspects represented by the different measures appear to interact and influence each other when predicting this behavioural data. We conclude that different measures of semantic transparency reflect different constructs, and that this should be considered when investigating the effect of semantic transparency.

CompLex: an eye-movement database of compound word reading in English.

The CompLex database presents a large-scale collection of eye-movement studies on English compound-word processing. A combined total of 440 participants completed eye-tracking experiments in which they silently read unspaced English compound words (e.g., goalpost) embedded in sentence contexts (e.g., Dylan hit the goalpost when he was aiming for the net.). Three studies were conducted using participants representing the non-college-bound population (300 participants), and four studies included participants recruited from the student population (140 participants). The database comprises trial-level eye-movement data (47,763 trials), participant data (including a measure of reading experience estimated via the Author Recognition Test), and lexical characteristics for the set of 931 English compound words used as critical stimuli in the studies. One contribution of the present paper is a set of regression analyses conducted on the full database and individual experiments. We report that the most reliable and consistent main effects were those elicited by compound word length, left constituent frequency, right constituent frequency, compound frequency and semantic transparency. Separately, we also found that the effect of left frequency and compound word length is weaker among more frequent compounds. Another contribution is a power analysis, in which we determined the sample sizes required to reliably detect effect sizes that are comparable to those observed in our regression models. These sample size estimates serve as a recommendation for researchers wishing to either collect eye-movement data for compound word reading, or use the current database as a resource for the study of English compound word processing.

Indonesian-English Compound Word Equivalence

This study discussed the equivalence of Indonesian-English compound word translation since both had different classifications and characteristics to be investigated. By implementing the descriptive-qualitative method, it was expected to elaborate on the distinctions of Indonesian-English compound words. There is 84 data analysis considered counting percentage of changing form and word-class either Indonesian or English. Equivalently, the English compound words as the target language met the meaning of Indonesian compound words as the source language even though the shift occurred mostly in structure shift, but those represented the meaning and had the same lexical features. It matched with the concept of equivalence that covered aspects as accuracy, acceptability, readability and fidelity. They are not only meaning but also style.

Is buttercup a kind of cup? Hyponymy and semantic transparency in compound words

Abstract Hyponymy is a semantic relation of class inclusion (e.g., a cat is an animal; a wildcat is a cat). Compound words are often, but not always, in a hyponymic relationship with the second constituent of the compound, as in wildcat and cat. This paper introduces a set of human ratings of hyponymy for over 2500 English compound words, which will facilitate research on the role of hyponymy in compound word processing and related areas. In the compound word processing literature, the semantic transparency of the compound (i.e., the extent to which the meaning of the constituents is maintained in the compound) is a critical theoretical construct. We investigate the role that hyponymy plays in the semantic transparency of compound words, as well as in the processing of compound words. We find that hyponymy is a critical component of the semantic transparency of both the second constituent (e.g., cat) and the compound as a whole (e.g., wildcat) and somewhat surprisingly also of the first constituent (e.g., wild). Hyponymy also affects the speed of processing of compound words in both lexical decision and naming.

Comparision of linguacultural aspects of english and uzbek endocentric compound words

The present article elucidates endocentric compound words and their types. In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in the study of different types of compound words in the material of different languages. Consequently, several approaches have been developed. It is noteworthy to say that conceptualization of compound words is understood by English and Uzbek scholars differently. The author reckons that analysis of endocentric compound words in Uzbek and English is essential. However, this theme hasn't been learnt thoroughly so far and doing research on them, comparing with those in English are the tasks that awaiting their fulfilment. Topicality of the research is conditioned by the necessity of defining the criteria of differentiating compound words from free word combinations and comparative study of endocentric compound words in the English and Uzbek languages for the first time and investigating the semantic, syntactic relations between the constituents of endocentric compound words, and linguocultural properties of the endocentric words in both languages as well. To study and compare endocentric compound words in the English and Uzbek languages taking into consideration their semantic, syntactic and linguocultural properties in order to reveal their isomorphic an allomorphic features in both languages could be the main purpose of this research. While doing the research there are used different methods, such as: comparative method, immediate constituents analysis of the word structure, distributional analysis and componential analysis of the word meaning as well. The results obtained: new date concerning semantic, syntactic properties of endocentric compound words in the English and Uzbek languages, and linguocultural peculiarities of endocentric compound words are distinguished. General summary and recommendations: the research on the various properties of endocentric compound words on the material of related and non-related languages should be appropriate to continue including their cognitive and linguocultural properties.

Analysis of word-formation processes in the English and Russian thematic groups “insectophones”

The article is devoted to the consideration of derivative processes in the English and Russian thematic groups “insectophones” / «инсектофоны». Due to the diversity of the compared languages, the features of word formation in the studied groups are revealed and the processes of occurrence of insectophones in the language are described. For the English language, the key methods are derivation methods such as stem composition, suffixation, back derivation and conversion. The most productive is the stem composition. For the Russian language within the framework of the studied thematic group, the leading methods can be called the same as in English with the exception of conversion. In Russian, the most common way of forming insectophones is suffixation. In both languages, insectophones formed using diminutive suffixes, which subsequently lost the meaning of subjective assessment, are identified. In compound words in English and Russian, the place of the repeating element is different (in English - in the second place, in Russian - in the first one).

영어 동사합성어와 관련성 이론

The purpose of this paper is to point out some limits in the English compound verbs’ classifications of previous studies and to propose an alternative approach to English compound verbs based on Relevance Theory. In the previous works of analyzing the relations between the constituents consisting of the compound verbs, English compounds verbs were generally classified according to their forms, functions, and meanings. In terms of functional relations between constituents, English compound words were classified as subordinative, determinative, or coordinative. And in terms of meanings between constituents, they were classified as endocentric and exocentric. However, those classifications cannot explicitly demonstrate why the same compound verb in the same classification can have different meanings in different contexts. Thus this paper argues that in Relevance Theory, English compound verbs are to be understood based on contextual information, and the meaning of English compound verbs should be understood through the process based on the ad hoc concept. (Chungnam National University)

A paradox of apparent brainless behavior: The time-course of compound word recognition

A review of the behavioral and neurophysiological estimates of the time-course of compound word recognition brings to light a paradox whereby temporal activity associated with lexical variables in behavioral studies predates temporal activity of seemingly comparable lexical processing in neuroimaging studies. However, under the assumption that brain activity is a cause of behavior, the earliest reliable behavioral effect of a lexical variable must represent an upper temporal bound for the origin of that effect in the neural record. The present research provides these behavioral bounds for lexical variables involved in compound word processing. We report data from five naturalistic reading studies in which participants read sentences containing English compound words, and apply a distributional technique of survival analysis to resulting eye-movement fixation durations (Reingold & Sheridan, 2014). The results of the survival analysis of the eye-movement record place a majority of the earliest discernible onsets of orthographic, morphological, and semantic effects at less than 200 ms (with a range of 138–269 ms). Our results place constraints on the absolute time-course of effects reported in the neurolinguistic literature, and support theories of complex word recognition which posit early simultaneous access of form and meaning.

Language experience shapes relational knowledge of compound words.

Prior studies of noun-noun compound word processing have provided insight into the human capacity for conceptual combination (Gagné and Shoben Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23(1), 71 1997; Spalding, Gagné, Mullaly & Ji Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft, 17, 283-315 2010). These studies conclude that relational interpretations of compound words are proposed and appraised by the language system during online word recognition. However, little is known about how the capacity for creating new meanings from existing conceptual units develops within an individual mind. Though current theories imply that individual relational knowledge about the combinability of concepts develops as language experience accumulates, this hypothesis has not been previously tested experimentally. Here, we addressed this hypothesis in a task that assesses individual relational knowledge of English compound words. We report that greater experience with printed language shapes relational knowledge of compound words in two ways. Firstly, individuals with more experience with printed language were able to select a greater number of possible relational meanings for individual compound words. Secondly, individuals with greater experience with printed language were also more precise about which relational meaning was the most semantically plausible out of all possible meanings. Our results confirm that language experience affects an individual's ability to use relational knowledge in order to combine conceptual units. Our findings offer further support for the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti, 2007), which states that lexical representations of words become simultaneously more flexible and precise as a result of repeated exposure to their orthographic forms in language usage.

Individual variability in the semantic processing of English compound words.

Semantic transparency effects during compound word recognition provide critical insight into the organization of semantic knowledge and the nature of semantic processing. The past 25 years of psycholinguistic research on compound semantic transparency has produced discrepant effects, leaving the existence and nature of its influence unresolved. In the present study, we examined the influence of semantic transparency and individual reading experience on eye-movement behavior during sentence reading. Eye-movement data were collected from 138 non-college-bound 16- to 26-year-old speakers of English in a sentence-reading task representing a total of 455 different compound words. Measures of individual differences in reading experience were collected from the same participants and consisted of standardized assessments of exposure to printed materials, vocabulary size, and word recognition skill. Statistical analyses revealed facilitatory effects of both Modifier-Compound and Head-Compound transparency throughout the eye-movement record. Moreover, the study reports interactions between Head-Compound transparency and measures of reading experience. Readers with a small amount exposure to printed materials and a limited vocabulary size exhibited slower processing in late eye-movement measures when reading highly transparent compounds relative to opaque compounds. The opposite effect was observed for readers with a relatively large amount of exposure to printed materials and a relatively larger vocabulary size, such that highly transparent compounds facilitated lexical processing. To account for the results, the authors posit a trade-off between 2 cognitive mechanisms, which is modulated by individual reading experience; that is, the benefit of semantic coactivation of closely related concepts, and the cost of discriminating between those concepts. (PsycINFO Database Record

Conceptual relations compete during auditory and visual compound word recognition

ABSTRACTPrevious research has shown that compound word recognition involves selecting a relational meaning (e.g. “box for letters” for letterbox) out of a set of competing relational meanings for the same compound. We conducted five experiments to investigate the role of competition between relational meanings across visual and auditory compound word processing. In Experiment 1 conceptual relations judgments were collected for 604 English compound words. From this database we computed an information-theoretic measure of competition between conceptual relations – entropy of conceptual relations. Experiments 2 and 3 report that greater entropy (i.e. increased competition) among a set of conceptual relations leads to longer latencies for compounds in auditory lexical decision. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrate the same result in two visual lexical decision studies. These findings provide evidence that relational meanings are constructed and evaluated during compound recognition, regardless of whether compounds are recognised via auditory or visual input.

Experience with compound words influences their processing: An eye movement investigation with English compound words.

Recording eye movements provides information on the time-course of word recognition during reading. Juhasz and Rayner [Juhasz, B. J., & Rayner, K. (2003). Investigating the effects of a set of intercorrelated variables on eye fixation durations in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 29, 1312-1318] examined the impact of five word recognition variables, including familiarity and age-of-acquisition (AoA), on fixation durations. All variables impacted fixation durations, but the time-course differed. However, the study focused on relatively short, morphologically simple words. Eye movements are also informative for examining the processing of morphologically complex words such as compound words. The present study further examined the time-course of lexical and semantic variables during morphological processing. A total of 120 English compound words that varied in familiarity, AoA, semantic transparency, lexeme meaning dominance, sensory experience rating (SER), and imageability were selected. The impact of these variables on fixation durations was examined when length, word frequency, and lexeme frequencies were controlled in a regression model. The most robust effects were found for familiarity and AoA, indicating that a reader's experience with compound words significantly impacts compound recognition. These results provide insight into semantic processing of morphologically complex words during reading.