 Hello. Hello. In this video we will look at compounding, also referred to as composition. It is a word formation process that involves at least two base forms. What are the central questions we should discuss? Well, first it's important to say that compounding is a language specific process and thus we should focus on one language, in our case present-day English. And here the main questions are how can present-day English compounds be classified, how are compounds built in present-day English and how are compounds written? Okay, let's look at the classification first. Like other constituents, compounds can be defined as consisting of a non-head or modifier and a head. Here is an example, school boys. It consists of two base forms and boy is the head, right? That's right. Boy determines the central grammatical properties of the compound, that is the syntactic category or word class. It mostly defines the gender and it specifies the inflection of properties, for example a number or case. And in English, the head normally stands on the right-hand side of the compound. You can see in these examples. But there are left-headed compounds too. Look at these words, mother-in-law, commander-in-chief. If you want to turn them into the plural, the plural affix is attached to the first base form. So we have the head on the left-hand side. So as a first summary, we can say that compounds consist of heads and modifiers. And that there is a tendency towards right-headedness in present-day English. But what about their meaning? Well, in classifying compounds concerning their meaning, the central question is, does the grammatical head define the meaning or not? If the answer is yes, we have an endocentric compound. If it's no, we have an exocentric compound. Let's look at endocentric compounds first, where the grammatical head defines its meaning. A schoolboy is a kind of boy. A boy's school is a kind of school, and so on. So we can construct hyponomy relationships of the following kind. Yes, and in exocentric compounds, the grammatical head does not straightforwardly define its meaning. Take these two examples, red skin and pickpocket. In both cases, the grammatical head, that is, skin and pocket, do not define the meaning. A red skin is not a type of skin, and a pickpocket is not a type of pocket. In both cases, we have types of persons. So the meaning is in both cases a hyponym of some unexpressed semantic head. For this reason, exocentric compounds are normally listed in the lexicon. However, there are variants of exocentricity. Whereas in pickpocket, the unexpressed semantic head refers to a person who picks valuables, and we see an emphasis on the modifier. In red skin, we find an emphasis of the head. That is a person who has this red type of skin. Yes, you're right. There are different types of exocentric compounds. Okay. But let's now look at how compounds are built and how they are written. Normally, compounds consist of two elements, a head and a modifier. We already know that. But if both elements are nouns, we can build successively larger compounds and a recursive fashion. Here's an example. Bathroom, bathroom towel, bathroom towel designer, bathroom towel designer meeting, and so on. As you can see, this is a highly productive process that allows us to enrich the English vocabulary considerably. And finally, let's look at the orthography of compounds. How do we have to spell them? Well, whereas exocentric compounds are normally written in a solid form, that is, as one word, there are three possible ways of writing endocentric nominal compounds. One group is written using the solid or closed form, where the components are written as one word. Here are two examples, housewife and keyboard. Then there is the hyphenated form, where the components are linked by a hyphen, as in word class, mother-in-law, and so on. And finally, we have the open or spaced form with a space between the components, as in distance learning, lawn tennis, and so on and so forth. Even though there is no rule as to how to write compounds, newer combinations of long single items are preferably written using the open form. Thus the spelling may indicate their status. Nominal compounds may begin as open forms, and once they become permanent, they're eventually written as closed forms. Okay, let's summarize. We said that all compounds have a grammatical head, which normally occurs on the right in present day English. If the head defines the meaning, we get endocentric compounds. If not, we get exocentric compounds. And whereas exocentric compounds are normally written in a solid form, endocentric compounds allow three variants, depending on their status. In addition to the compounds discussed in this e-lecture, we have a number of special forms such as corpulative, synthetic, or neoclassical compounds. They are described in our morphological micro lectures. So, thanks for your attention. And see you again soon.