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A compound is a word composed of more than one free morpheme. English compounds may be classified in several ways, such as the word classes or the semantic relationship of their components. ==Compound nouns== Most English compound nouns are noun phrases (= nominal phrases) that include a noun modified by adjectives or noun adjuncts. Due to the English tendency towards conversion, the two classes are not always easily distinguished. Most English compound nouns that consist of more than two words can be constructed recursively by combining two words at a time. Combining "science" and "fiction", and then combining the resulting compound with "writer", for example, can construct the compound "science fiction writer". Some compounds, such as ''salt and pepper'' or ''mother-of-pearl'', cannot be constructed in this way, ===Types of compound nouns=== Since English is a mostly analytic language, unlike most other Germanic languages, it creates compounds by concatenating words without case markers. As in other Germanic languages, the compounds may be arbitrarily long.〔Plag, Ingo. ""Word-formation in English"". Cambridge University Press, 2003, p.172. "There is no structural limitation on the recursivity of compounding, but the longer a compound becomes the more difficult it is for the speakers/listeners to process, i.e. produce and understand correctly. Extremely long compounds are therefore disfavored not for structural but for processing reasons." 〕 However, this is obscured by the fact that the written representation of long compounds always contains spaces. Short compounds may be written in three different ways, which do not correspond to different pronunciations, however: *The "solid" or "closed" forms in which two usually moderately short words appear together as one. Solid compounds most likely consist of short (monosyllabic) units that often have been established in the language for a long time. Examples are ''housewife'', ''lawsuit'', ''wallpaper'', ''basketball'', etc. *The ''hyphenated'' form in which two or more words are connected by a hyphen. Compounds that contain affixes, such as ''house-build(er)'' and ''single-mind(ed)(ness)'', as well as adjective-adjective compounds and verb-verb compounds, such as ''blue-green'' and ''freeze-dried'', are often hyphenated. Compounds that contain articles, prepositions or conjunctions, such as ''rent-a-cop'', ''mother-of-pearl'' and ''salt-and-pepper'', are also often hyphenated. *The ''open'' or ''spaced'' form consisting of newer combinations of usually longer words, such as ''distance learning'', ''player piano'', ''lawn tennis'', etc. Usage in the US and in the UK differs and often depends on the individual choice of the writer rather than on a hard-and-fast rule; therefore, open, hyphenated, and closed forms may be encountered for the same compound noun, such as the triplets ''container ship''/''container-ship''/''containership'' and ''particle board''/''particle-board''/''particleboard''. In addition to this native English compounding, there is the ''classical'' type, which consists of words derived from Latin, as ''horticulture'', and those of Greek origin, such as ''photography'', the components of which are in bound form (connected by connecting vowels, which are most often ''-i-'' and ''-o-'' in Latin and Greek respectively) and cannot stand alone. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「English compound」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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