STRUCTURAL AND SEMANTIC PECULIARITIES OF ENGLISH COMPOUND NOUNS

Abstract

The article is devoted to the investigation of the structural and semantic peculiarities of the English compound nouns in D. Eggers’ novel “Sphere”. The studied units have the morphological properties and perform the syntactic functions of a noun. In a sentence, they can perform the functions of subject, object, adverbial modifier, and the nominal part of a compound predicate. The compound nouns consisting of two stems prevail in the studied sample. The author has identified compound nouns containing three stems and a lexicalized syntactic unit. The part of speech analysis of the constituent components of the investigated noun compounds has shown that they are formed mainly by means of affixless word formation according to various structural models, the first component of which can be a noun, verb, adjective, preposition, adverb and Participle I. However, quantitatively, these structural types are represented differently, the [N+N]=N model prevails. The examples of compound nouns formed by derivation have been identified, namely the combination of stems with the formant -er [N+V+er]=N. The author has proposed a thematic classification of English compound nouns in D. Eggers’ novel “Sphere”. The studied compound nouns have been divided into 13 thematic groups, among which the names of objects dominate. A separate thematic group is made up of the units that D. Eggers invented in his novel for a better representation of the company’s image. According to the principle of the relation between the compound noun and its components, the endocentric, exocentric and appositional compound nouns have been distinguished. Only one example of a copulative compound noun has been identified, the elements of which complement each other, but at the same time are independent and equal semantic cores.