NON-CANONICAL COMPOUNDS IN THE DISCOURSE OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

Abstract

Taking into account some general definitions of compounds found in the pertinent linguistic literature and their frequent syntactic features (such as fixed order and recursiveness) we have analysed and investigated semantic compositionality and some other features pertaining to these linguistic items. Furthermore, we have drawn attention to the possibility of implementing certain criteria in connection with the distribution of non-canonical compound constituents. It has been pointed out that distributional evidence is applicable for English non-canonical compounds in electrical engineering discourse. Moreover, distribution is used as an indicator of lexical integrity of these linguistic items. Apart from fairly clear cases, different examples of English non-canonical compounds taken from the specialised discourse of electrical engineering have been examined by way of illustration and certain results of our analysis have been presented.