So let’s talk about chemistry.
In the lab of language, there are lots of recipes to use when concocting new words.
Want to verb-ify that old noun you’ve got lying around?
Just stick on an “i-f-y”, and you’re good to go!
Looking to add a bit of concrete-ness to your adjectives?
All you’ve got to do is toss a little “-ness” in there!
But what happens when we’ve used up all our ingredients and still haven’t managed
to cook up what we need?
When all we’ve got left are full-fledged words, which formula will fit?
I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space.
One surefire way to build a new word is to take a simpler, smaller one as your root and then
tack on a suffix.
So, a verb like “evaporate” becomes the noun “evaporation,” while the noun “crystal”
can “crystallize” into a verb.
As we touched on in a previous episode, this kind of process is known as derivation, and
its defining characteristic is that every new addition to the word not only makes it
longer, but also switches up its category, adding a dash of meaning along the way.
Because these kinds of affixes produce new words in systematic and predictable ways,
we say they’re productive.
And that applies just as well to words you've never seen before!
Like, even if you didn’t know what iodine was, you could make a pretty good guess that
“iodizing” something means adding whatever iodine is to it.
It’s a pretty reliable strategy.
But other productive word-making methods exist, besides sticking a bunch of little bits at the ends.
One especially convenient way to do this is by taking two or more roots, and then gluing them together.
In other words, we can create compounds! Take a phrase like "bathtub leak".
You might think of it as just another chunk of a sentence, and in a way, you’d be right.
After all, every sentence can be broken up into its constituent parts, with each potentially
being made up of multiple words.
But in another way, this phrase is really its own thing.
For one, its stress pattern is different from your typical noun phrase: while the adjective-noun
pair “LEAKy BATHtub” definitely has two clear, standout syllables — at the beginning
of each word — ‘“BATHtub leak” really only has one, at the very beginning.
Even though it’s got three roots which can all stand on their own in the right context,
the pronunciation suggests they’ve formed a tight-knit trio.
And this prosodic tell is actually really useful: when words bond together to become
a compound, they get treated differently than when they’re floating around on their own.
That’s how you know when I talk about a black board, I mean a piece of wood that’s
been painted black; but when I say blackboard, you know it’s something I can write on in
a classroom, and… it’s actually probably green, most of the time.
That’s our other big clue that we’ve got a compound on our hands!
Even though its meaning is obviously related to its parts, the relationships are a lot
more loose than what you'd find in your average noun phrase.
So, while our “leaky bathtub” from before really only has one definition, “bathtub
leak” can be used to mean a bunch of different things.
Like, it could be a leak coming from the tub, for sure.
But it could also be a leak right over your bathtub.
Or maybe there’s a leaky stain in your ceiling, and it just happens to be kind of shaped like a tub.
Or the top secret plans for a brand new kind of bathtub have been leaked to the public.
You’ve got to get more and more creative as you go, but there’s no real upper limit.
And some of the more common compounds in English are even less connected to their parts.
Like, a “greenhouse” is sort of a house, but it definitely doesn’t have to be green.
And a “birdbrain” is neither a bird nor a brain, in any literal sense.
If you’re still not sure you’re dealing with a compound, just try modifying part of
it, pointing something at just that one bit.
Since a compound word really is a complete unit, trying to attach something to only
a piece of it won’t really work.
So, while you can pick some “berries” and mix in some “blue” to make “blueberries,”
adding in an adverb and calling them “very blueberries” sounds strange, even if they
are very blue.
Phrases like “very blue car” or “very blue book” are fine, because in those
“blue” is a separate word so that “very” can easily latch onto it.
But “blueberry” is a compound, so once it’s been put together, you can’t really
get at that “blue” part anymore.
Now compounds come in all shapes and sizes.
We can combine a preposition and a noun to make an “overdose,” a verb and a noun
to make a “swear word,” or we can hook up two live adjectives and make things “white-hot.”
But while languages differ in how much compounding they’ll allow, one of the most productive
types of compounding in Germanic languages like English and German is noun-noun compounding.
In English, we can pretty much slap any two nouns together and get something useful out of it.
We’ve already got compounds like “airplane crash” and “breakfast cereal,” or “bathtub
leak” from before.
But I can just as easily say “roof pizza” or “chicken brothers,” and you’ve probably
already got an image in your head of what those mean.
These kinds of “noun piles” are so useful that they can often be found in headlines,
and routinely lead to pretty ridiculous results, including “Brighton cockroach curry house fine",
and “fish foot spa virus bombshell.”
And if you think English has big compounds, German is especially notorious for how many
nouns it can cram into a single word.
Take this infamous compound, which gets roughly translated as “Danube-steam-ship-driving-company-captain-cabin-door-key.”
German kind of lets you noun up whatever you want.
Now, all these compounds — even the really big ones — aren’t just flat strings of words.
Just like we were able to draw word structure trees for their derivationally complex cousins
in a previous episode, we can also group the pieces of compounds together in meaningful ways.
For instance, shorter words like “high school” or “headstrong” look like this, where
you can see the categories of each word, and the category of the whole thing at the very top.
The structure for “bathtub leak” is more involved, with “bath” and “tub” getting
together first, so they form a semantic unit.
After all, the word refers more to a kind of leak related to bathtubs in some
way, and not so much to a tub leak related to baths . . . whatever that might mean.
Of course, the branches in our trees can swing in either direction, depending on what we’re trying to say.
So a compound like “organic chemistry teacher” can refer to someone who teaches organic chemistry,
but also to someone who teaches plain old chemistry, and they just happen to be organic,
and not, like, a robot.
The structure of each word, then, reflects the meaning that we get out of it.
And while with derivational morphology, the last prefix or suffix to attach to a word
is what usually gets to determine the category of the overall result, the category of an
English compound always matches up with the part that’s furthest to the right.
That’s because English compounds, along with compounds in many other languages, are
right-headed. That’s why blueberries are nouns like berries, and not adjectives like blue.
German is right-headed too, and it has grammatical gender, which means that super long word from
before ends up being masculine entirely because that word at the end is.
Finally, compound words can help us better understand what speakers pay attention to
when they form new words.
If you remember back to when we talked about theta roles, we said that verbs come packaged
with a kind of list of everything they need to form a complete sentence, like an AGENT
to do things, or a LOCATION for something to happen.
Then a rule like the Theta Criterion makes sure that the verb gets the right things to fill those roles.
As it turns out, this list can actually hang around, even when the verb gets turned into a noun.
Let’s check this with derivation first: the word “manage” usually needs an AGENT
to do the managing and a THEME to be managed, like when we build the sentence “Walter
managed the problem”.
But if we throw in a “-ment,” giving us “management,” we can tap into those same
relationships and build a noun phrase around it instead.
If we just make “Walter” possessive and put “the problem” inside a prepositional
phrase, we get “Walter’s management of the problem”, with that possessor and prepositional
phrase filling the role of AGENT and THEME, respectively.
So, it looks like nouns can inherit the theta roles of the verbs they’re derived from,
which suggests speakers have at least some knowledge of how word formation affects these roles.
In the case of a suffix like “-ment,” there doesn’t seem to be much of a change
at all; the theta roles just kind of stick around.
But we can know for sure that we pay attention to these relationships by considering compounds.
The kinds of compounds we’ve looked at so far tend to smoosh a couple words together,
without there being any real deep connection between them.
But there’s another way we can do it.
If we take the “problem” from out of our noun phrase and put it in front of “management,”
forming the compound word “problem-management,” we still end up interpreting “problem” as the THEME.
In fact, even if we put something else there in its place that could potentially act like
an AGENT -- say, the word “people” -- we get “people-management.”
That sounds like it’s about people being managed, and not about people doing any managing.
It looks theme-y, not agent-like.
So it looks like when we’re doing this other kind of compounding, we sort of “use up”
the original verb’s THEME.
And if that's what's really happening, we should see the effect when we try to build
a phrase around it, like we did before.
Sure enough, we can’t really say something like “Walter’s problem-management of the problem".
It just gets really redundant, like there's two different THEMEs in there, so our noun phrase gets too crowded.
Because theta roles matter so much when we build what we’re going to say, we have to
keep track of which ones go where when we’re forging new words.
So whether you’re mixing up a batch of new words, or running experiments on the elements
of language, when you’re playing with the chemistry of compounds, the Blue Sky’s the limit!
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week.
If you figured out the formula, you learned that compounding gives us a productive way
to expand our vocabulary by sticking whole words together; that it’s a different process
from building full sentences, with its own stress patterns and semantic rules; that compound
words have their own structures related to their meaning, just like other words do; and that we can
use them to explore what changes and what stays the same when we make up new words.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman, and directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost.
This week’s episode was written by Stephan Hurtubise.
Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team
is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we’ll have some extra material on this topic.
Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, and try dropping by our store!
And if you want to keep expanding your own personal Ling Space, please subscribe.
And we’ll see you in two weeks. Do zobaczenia!