Abstract

The paper is concerned with some of the most important semantic characteristics of compound words in adjectival sentence positions in English. Its aim is to study the morphemes and combining elements that make up such compounds, more specifically compound adjectives and noun compounds in attributive and predicative functions. This empirical research is predominantly based on an analysis involving meaning implications of the combinatory elements of adjectival compounds, both the initially and finally positioned ones. The analysis has been conducted on authentic language material collected for the purposes of a larger-scale research into a corpus incorporating several works of different genres totalling around one million words. The number of ACs examined is around 1600 words. More significant conclusions reached in this inquiry would be those concerning the semantic fields these elements most often belong to, the most productive morphemes, as well as the characteristic types of semantic feature bundles