The first comprehensive study of the use of compound words in Old English poetry, homilies, and philosophy, Joinings explores the effect of compounds on style, pace, clarity, and genre in Anglo-Saxon vernacular literature. Jonathan Davis-Secord demonstrates how compounds affect the pacing of passages in Beowulf, creating slow-motion narrative at moments of significant violence; how their structural complexity gives rhetorical emphasis to phrases in the homilies of Wulfstan; and how they help to mix quotidian and elevated diction in Cynewulf's Juliana and the Old English translations of Boethius. His work demonstrates that compound words were the epitome of Anglo-Saxon vernacular verbal art, combining grammar, style, and culture in a manner unlike any other feature of Old English.

This controversial new book addresses the linguistic problems around compounds: words which sit on the borderline of syntax and morphology.

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: none, Qassim University (Science and Arts, Community College, Unaizah), language: English, abstract: This paper deals with the compounding words in Urdu language. Formation of Compound word is an important aspect of morphological operation to produce new words in languages with a linear morphological structure. It is extensively used as one of the ways to generate new words and word forms in Urdu language. Urdu language has borrowed a large number of compounds from a variety of sources from other Indian languages, Perso-Arabic and English. The present paper attempts to discuss Indic sources and Perso-Arabic compounds, English compounds, some ‘hybrid’ compounds, etc. These compounds are frequently used in Urdu language. The present paper explores and describes the various compounding phenomena in Urdu and their implication.

This book presents a comprehensive review of theoretical work on the linguistics and psycholinguistics of compound words and combines it with a series of surveys of compounding in a variety of languages from a wide range of language families. Compounding is an effective way to create and express new meanings. Compound words are segmentable into their constituents so that new items can often be understood on first presentation. However, as keystone, keynote, and keyboard, and breadboard, sandwich-board, and mortarboard show, the relation between components is often far from straightforward. The question then arises, as to how far compound sequences are analysed at each encounter and how far they are stored in the brain as single lexical items? The nature and processing of compounds thus offer an unusually direct route to how language operates in the mind, as well as providing the means of investigating important aspects of morphology, and lexical semantics, and insights to child language acquisition and the organization of the mental lexicon. This book is the first to report on the state of the art on these and other central topics, including the classification and typology of compounds, and cross-linguistic research on the subject in different frameworks and from synchronic and diachronic perspectives.

This is the first book devoted entirely to the history of compound words in Spanish. Based on data obtained from Spanish dictionaries and databases of the past thousand years, it documents the evolution of the major compounding patterns of the language. It analyzes the structural, semantic, and orthographic features of each compound type, and also provides a description of its Latin antecedents, early attestations, and relative frequency and productivity over the centuries. The combination of qualitative and quantitative data shows that although most compound types have survived, they have undergone changes in word order and relative frequency. Moreover, the book shows that the evolution of compounding in Spanish may be accounted for by processes of language acquisition in children. This book, which includes all the data in chronological and alphabetical order, will be a valuable resource for morphologists, Romance linguists, and historical linguists more generally.