No-stopping-zones

Blending is a special type of compounding when two elements are combined into a new word with a particular meaning. The constituent parts are easily identifiable. Such words are called telescopic words, e.g.

A compound vs a word-combination

With the exception of the rare morphological type compounds originate directly from word combinations and are often homonymous to them:

e.g. a tall boy — a tallboy (a high chest of drawers made in two sections and placed one on top of the other; chest-on-chest)

Criteria to distinguish a compound from a word combination are the following:

Ø The graphic criterion. In many cases we cannot wholly rely on it. The spelling of many compounds can be varied even within the same book,

solid: headmaster

with a hyphen: head-master

with a break: head master

Ø The semantic criterion is more reliable. A compound expresses one concept while a word group conveys two or more concepts. E.g. dirty-work "dishonorable proceedings" vs dirty work.

Ø The phonetic criterionis convincingly applicable to many compound nouns. There is a strong tendency for compounds to have a heavy stress on the first syllable,

‘blackboard,‘blackbird, ‘ honeymoon, ‘doorway

But there can be a double stress, e.g. in compound adjectives, gray-green, easy-going

Ø Morphological and syntactic criteria. In word groups each of the constituents is independently open to grammatical changes; between the constituent parts of the word-group other words can be inserted while in compounds it is impossible.

Only several criteria – semantic, morphological, syntactic, phonetic, and graphic can convincingly classify a lexical unit as either a compound word or a word group.