Composition

Abstract

A compound is a morphological unit which consists of two or more words. In a compound like bagpipe the second member pipe is the grammatically dominant one; this means that it is the part to which inflectional suffixes, which determine the relations of the compound to the other parts of the sentence (or clause), are added. The second member is also semantically the most important part: a bagpipe is a pipe. The first member tells us what sort of a pipe we are to think of. It can limit the meaning of the second member considerably. When the second member is thus determined by the first it is called the determinatum; the first member is then referred to as the determinant; such compounds are determinatives. Most compounds in Gmc. languages are of this kind. In some combinations the determinatum is not formally expressed; thus a scare-crow is neither a scare nor a crow. Since the determinatum, in this case, lies outside the combination, such words are referred to as “exocentric compounds” and are said to have a “zero determinatum.”