Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 Compound A-Comz

COMPOUND ANALYSIS

  1. (Morphology) Noun-noun compound analysis in natural language processing (NLP) is a compound problem consisting of several tasks that collectively deal with the syntax and semantics of this linguistic construction. Past work on compound analysis has typically focused—to varying degrees—on five tasks, namely:

    1. Compound identification: Identify compounds in written text or speech.
    2. Compound bracketing: Analyze the internal syntactic structure of compounds. For example, snake oil product is analyzed as a left-branching compound, i.e. [[snake oil] product].
    3. Compound compositionality prediction: Determine the degree of compositionality through relating the meaning of the compound as a whole to the meaning of its constituents. For example, the predominant contemporary use of snake oil product is non-compositional because its meaning cannot be immediately derived from the individual meanings of its constituents.
    4. Compound sense disambituation: Disambiguate the meaning of polysemous constituents in compounds. For example, the constituent product in dot product refers to the mathematical concept of multiplication, but in consumer product it refers to an article or substance for sale.
    5. Compound interpretation: Determine the thematic relations holding between the constituent parts of compounds. In layman's terms, this task amounts to determining that meat product is a food product that contains meat whereas hair product does not contain hair but is used for hair care.
     | Murhaf Fares, 2019
  2. (Example)
     ○ In analyzing the data collected for this paper, the scope for compound analysis was restricted, focusing only on compound nouns as one category of compound words. Firstly, the compound nominals were identified and selected from the news article. Then followed their organization in a separate table, analysis and classification according to the theory on compound words and compound nouns. The selected words were further discussed in terms of their internal structure with an examination of specific cases.
    Compound
    Word     		Type of
    Compound
    Word     		Constituents
    (Parts of Speech)     		Relations
    funfair compound noun noun+noun
    (adjective+noun)     		endocentric compound
    Ferris wheel compound noun noun+noun endocentric compound
    rap star compound noun noun+noun endocentric compound
    fun dome compound noun noun+noun
    (adjective+noun)     		endocentric compound
    artwork compound noun noun+noun endocentric compound
    handlebar compound noun noun+noun endocentric compound
    floorboards compound noun noun+noun endocentric compound
    biography compound noun prefix+suffix neo-classical compound
    carnival technician compound noun noun+noun endocentric compound
    art lovers compound noun noun+noun endocentric compound
    exhibition-goers compound noun noun+noun endocentric compound
    popcorn compound noun verb+noun endocentric compound
    soundtrack compound noun noun+noun endocentric compound
    swing ride compound noun noun+noun
    (verb+noun)     		endocentric compound
    microphones compound noun prefix+suffix neo-classical compound
    performance artists compound noun noun+noun endocentric compound
    weekend compound noun noun+noun endocentric compound
     | Nadica Aleksandrova, 2025
     ○ In some cases these "prefixes" seem to have category-changing power, however, which would be a problem for linking them to the compound schema of Dutch. This is, for instance, the case for the examples ondertitelen and overbruggen in (1).

    1. Noun
      titel 'title'
      brug 'bridge'
      Verb
      onder-titel 'to subtitle'
      over-brug 'to bridge

     These verbs cannot be linked to existing base verbs titelen and bruggen, and hence they look like cases of category-changing prefixation applied to nominal bases. However, we can maintain a compound analysis by making use of the idea of conflation. This term is used here to denote the unification of two schemas for complex words. | Geert Booij, 2005
     ○ The analysis will henceforth be referred to as the syntactic compound analysis in view of its two central hypotheses:


     | C. le Roux, 1989

COMPOUND DIPHTHONG

  1. (Examples)
     ○ We (Hangul: ㅞ; Korean name: 웨) is a compound vowel in Hangul, the alphabetic writing system for the Korean language, pronounced as /we/ in modern Standard Korean, akin to the initial sound in the English word wet (90-Day Korean 2026). It is constructed by combining the basic horizontal vowel ㅜ (u) with the vertical vowel ㅔ (e), forming a diphthong that glides from a 'w' sound to 'e' (How to Study Korean ?). ㅞ is a compound diphthong vowel in Hangul, developed shortly after its creation by King Sejong the Great in 1443–1446, combining ㅜ (u) and ㅔ (e). | Grokipedia, 2026
     ○ The assessment of visual features of the production of compound diphthongs, the importance of accent as an essential criterion for their classification into separate visemes has been determined. In the production of the Lithuanian compound diphthongs, due to the falling accent (acute) the first element of the diphthong is considered to be visually dominant over the second element, and vice versa, the rising accent (circumflex) determines the visual dominance of the second element over the first one. An exception is observed with the close central compound diphthong /ʊɪ̯̌/ which is characterized by the visual dominance of the first element because of the prevailing feature of rounding despite the circumflex accent. | Indrė Koverienė, 2015
     ○ Analysis of the implosion of onomatopoeic refrains in the Lithuanian Folk Songbook has shown that the structure of the syllabic ending group can vary. The implosion of onomatopoeic refrains is dominated by open syllables, which count 92.1 per cent across the material studied. As often as not, syllables end in a vowel (79.5 per cent); endings consisting of a compound diphthong occur much less frequently (9.3 per cent). Closed syllables only total 7.9 per cent. | Jurga Trimonytė Bikelienė, 2013
     ○ There exist two types of diphthongs in Lithuanian language (Indo-European > Baltic; Lithuania) that are made of two vowels: compound diphthongs (ai, au, ei, ui, eu, oi, ou) and complex diphthongs (ie, uo). | Gražina Pyž, Virginija Šimonytė, Vytautas Slivinskas, 2011

COMPOUND PAST

  1. (Grammar) A term used for the Spanish verb tense Preterito Perfecto Compuesto. The English equivalent is normally the Present Perfect, but I prefer the term Compound Past when dealing with this Spanish verb tense. There are two reasons for this:

    1. It maintains a certain logic with another verb tense that is of interest here, namely the Simple Past.
    2. Since it has been argued that time of speech is less crucial for the choice of the compound or the simple past form in several dialects (see De Mello 1994, Rodríguez Louro 2009), there is no reason to keep "Present" in the term used.

     | Carlos Henderson, 2017
  2. (Examples)
     ○ In English, the Present Perfect temporally locates an event prior to the moment of speech, but what remains is a general, abstract notion of "presentness". This is made more obvious upon comparing examples of the same event using the simple (1a) and compound past (1b):

    1. a. Jake drank a Miller High Life. (Preterit)
      b. Jake has drunk a Miller High Life. (Present Perfect)

     | Bethany D. Bateman, 2022
     ○ The status of simple and compound past tenses has long been a widely debated topic in Romance linguistics. Sentences like (1) and (2) below both mark past situations, but the first sentence in each example views the action as being related to the present, while the second sentence views the action as a single point in the past, expressing perfective value (all examples, unless otherwise noted, are this author's):

    1.  Spanish (Whitley 2002)
      a. Lo han vendido. (Compound Past)
        'They have sold it.'
      b. Lo vendieron. (Simple)
        'They sold it.'
    2.  French
      a. Il s'est lavé les mains. (Compound Past)
        'He (has) washed his hands.'
      b. Il se lava les mains. (Simple)
        'He washed his hands.'

     | Gloria Beth Surber, 2008

COMPOUND TENSE

  1. (Grammar) A structure formed with at least two verbs: the auxiliary and the main verb.
     The participle constitutes the main verb in compound tenses. In contrast to auxiliaries, participles form an open class of lexical items to which new members may be added, and are as rich in their semantic content as other lexical verbs. However, their categorial status is far from clear.
     I will assume that in Slavic, compound tense constructions are uniformly monoclausal, with the participle projecting the lexical head Part, which is dominated by several functional projections up to TP. The perfect auxiliaries in Slavic are often clitics, and their phonological requirements are reflected in the syntactic patterns of compound tenses. | Krzysztof Marek Migdalski, 1975
  2. (Grammar) In English, the compound tenses are a combination of present or past tense (shown through an auxiliary verb) with continuous or perfect aspect.


     The modal auxiliaries can be used in compound tenses:


     | Collins Grammar, 2026
    (Examples)
     ○ In Xhosa (Niger-Congo; South Africa), the BE gram has never been defined as a serial verb construction, but rather as a compound tense built around an auxiliary (the verb ba 'be') and another lexical verb (McLaren and Welsh 1955, Louw and Jubase 1963, Riordan, Mathiso and Davey 1969, Du Plessis 1978, Du Plessis and Malinga 1978, Visser 2005, 2015, Oosthuysen 2016). An analogous analysis may be found in research dedicated to the Zulu (Niger-Congo; South Africa) language (Van Eeden 1956, Doke 1981, Posthumus 1982, 1983, 1990, 2006, 2008, Taljaard and Bosch 1988, Poulos and Msimang 1998, Hall 2005, Groenewald 2014), as well as Swati (Niger-Congo; Eswatini; Taljaard, Khumalo, and Bosch 1991) and Ndebele (Niger-Congo, South Africa; Pelling and Pelling 1974, Ziervogel 1959). The understanding of the Nguni (Niger-Congo; Cameroon) BE gram in terms of a periphrasis composed of an auxiliary and a lexical verb also appears in comparative studies devoted to the (Southern) Bantu family (Gowlet 2003, Nurse 2008). | Alexander Andrason, 2018
     ○ Classification of compound tense forms in Egyptian Arabic:
    T. Mitchell (1962) C. Holes (1995/2004)
    kān fa‘al He had done kān fa‘al He had done
    yikūn fa‘al He will have done bi-ykūn fa‘al He will have done
    kān bi-yif‘al He used to do / was doing kān bi-yif‘al He was doing
    kān ḥa-yif‘al He was going to do kān ḥa-yif‘al He was going to do
    yikūn bi-yif‘al He will be doing ḥa-ykūn bi-yif‘al He will be doing
        ḥa-ykūn fa‘al He will have done
     | Yulia Petrova, 2014

 

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