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Word Ways

Abstract

Since earliest times, speakers of English, true to the Germanic heritage of their language, have created thousands of new words by joining together two (or more) independent morphemes to form compounds. In the November 1978 Word Ways, Dmitri Borgmann's "Word Relationships" explored the various interactions between the elements in noun-noun compounds, and Maxey Brooke's "A Complex of Compounds" illuminated the complex grammar of compound words by constructing a four-by-four matrix (Noun-Adjective-Adverb-Verb) that yielded sixteen different combinations.

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