A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§7.2 Morphological operations 283

added to luck, and un· to lucky). Structural diagrams for the four examples are
shown in [31]:

[31]

gentle man ly whistle blow er un couth ness un luck y

7.2 Morphological operations

A wide range of morphological operations are involved in the formation
of lexical bases - considerably more than are used in inflectional morphology. In the
following brief survey, the first three are the most important operations, the others
being relatively minor and small-scale.

(a) Compounding

Compounding forms a complex base from a combination of smaller bases - almost
always two. We illustrate here with compound nouns, adjectives and verbs:

[32]

11

III

NOUNS birdcage gentleman hangman loudmouth outpatient stage-manager

ADJECTIVES dirt-cheap heart-breaking heart-broken skin-deep snow-white stress-free

VERBS baby-sit blow-dry handwash over-react sleepwalk underachieve

Compound nouns constitute by far the largest and most varied category. Most

denote a subset of what is denoted by the second component: a birdcage is a kind

of cage, a gentleman is a kind of man, and so on. But there are certainly a good

number that do not have this interpretation: a loudmouth is not a kind of mouth

(but a person with a loud mouth - one who talks a lot, typically in an offensive

way). The second base is most often a noun, while the first can belong to a range

of categories: bird is a noun, gentle an adjective, hang a verb, out a preposition.

Compound adjectives often similarly have a denotation included in that of the

second element: if something is dirt-cheap, then it must be cheap, and if it's

snow-white, it's white. But there are numerous cases where this is not so. A

stress-free job is not a free job (it's free of stress), and something that is only

skin-deep is not deep. Heart-breaking and heart-broken illustrate a frequent type

where the first base is a noun and the second a gerund-participle or past partici­

ple form of a verb.

There are many compound verbs with a preposition such as over, under, out as

first base, but for the rest compound verbs are far less numerous than compound

nouns and adjectives.

One distinctive type of compound noun combines two normally bound bases

taken from Greek or Latin, as in: osteometry, osteopath, psychopath, pathology,