LEXICAL FEATURES OF COMPOUND WORDS IN KARAKALPAK, ENGLISH AND GERMAN

Аннотация

This article deals with the following issues: the lexical features of compound words in three languages: Karakalpak, English and German, their typological analysis and comparison. In the article similarities and differences of the compounds in Karakalpak, English and German are identified from lexical point of view. Keywords: Compound words (CW), word formation, lexical features, lexical point of view, lexicon, correlation, semantic connection, Komposition. Composition is one of most productive ways of word formation in Turkic as well as in Germanic languages. The compound words in Karakalpak, English and German languages have some common features. However, there exist differences between them as well, as they are from grammatical point of view, differently structured. In modern linguistic literature, there is mainly used the term “word formation” in the questions related to word building. By the term of word formation linguists understand formation of new words by means of various word building models in a particular language in a particular period of time. The basic types of word formation are derivation and compounding. Word formation is, on the one hand, closely related to lexicon and, on the other hand, to grammar. The relation between word formation and lexicon is that every new word in the language becomes a unit of the vocabulary of the language. And the relation between word formation and grammar is that every new word in the language is included to the lexical and grammatical category called a part of speech. Word composition is a common type of word formation, that is made by connecting two or more elements into one unit. The way of word building is counted to be one of the most ancient in Karakalpak, English and German languages. The basic way of joining components of the compounds into one whole is to connect stems of different parts of speech without any changes or with some modifications. And this means of composition is widespread in the languages investigated. As it was mentioned above, according to A. Bekbergenov in Karakalpak language compound words are classified into: a) composite words; b) paired words; c) paired-repeated words; d) fused words; e) abbreviated words/shortenings. Consequently, compound words make more than half of the whole lexicon of Karakalpak language. Furthermore, compounds can belong to any part of speech from morphological point of view. If to compare compound words in Karakalpak with the ones in English and in German, it is worthwhile to note that Karakalpak language is richer than English and German languages. Now that Karakalpak compounds are divided into 5 subclasses, they make more than half of the vocabulary of the language, whereas in English they are subdivided into 3 types (Arnold,1986,123), and in German – into 4 subtypes. 135 ResearchBib IF - 11.01, ISSN: 3030-3753, Volume 2 Issue 9 In English and German there don’t exist paired and paired-repeated compounds, while they make a huge part of the spoken and written language in Karakalpak. As for the abbreviated compound words in Karakalpak, the group of words is considered to be a separate type of word formation in English and German languages. I.V. Arnold states that “…Shortening, on the other hand, may be represented as significant subtraction, in which part of the original word or word group is taken away. Moreover, every kind of shortening differs from derivation, composition and conversion in being not a new arrangement of existing morphemes, but often a source of new ones. As a type of word- building shortening of spoken words, also called clipping or curtailment is recorded in the English language as far back as the 15th century.” Thus, Arnold refers shortenings/abbreviated words to a separate type of word formation. Apart from that German linguists also find the word formation means relatively new and exceptional. I.G. Olshanskiy and A.E.Guseva admit that “Kurzwortbildung ist eine relativ neue und außerordentlich produktive Wortbildungsart. Diese Art der Wortbildung entsteht durch die Verkürzung eines längeren Wortes oder mehrerer Ausgangwörter (eines Kompositums: Lastkraftwagen – LKW, einer Wortverbindung: elektronische Datenverarbeitung – EDV).“ However, there is also another point in the classification of the compound words of the three languages. Namely there exist a group of compounds in English and German formed in the result of two linguistic phenomena: derivation and compounding. Such compounds are called “derivational compounds” (‘Zusammenbildungen’ in German). Derivational compounds or compound-derivatives are the words in which the structural integrity of two free stems is ensured by a suffix referring to the combination as a whole, not to one of its elements: kind-hearted, old-timer, schoolboyishness, teenager. In the coining of the derivational compounds two types of word formation are at work1. Accordingly, Arnold refers the group of words to compounds by emphasizing their structural f