What is a phrasal compound.?

Answer 1

A phrasal compound is a group of words that express a complex meaning, but are not formed through the usual noun or verb modification. They may be idiomatic phrases, such as "middle of the road." Or they may, because of the varied uses of the words, have more than one meaning.

Examples of phrasal adjectives:

• accident prone (prone to accidents)
• bad-faith (done dishonestly, "in bad faith")

Examples of phrasal verbs:

• put on (to wear, or to trick)
• put off (3 different meanings - delay, ignore, or remove)
• held up (3 different meanings - suspended, delayed, or robbed)

Phrases as adjectives

These explaining-a-phrasal-compound questions can be confusing.

A phrasal compound is a compound of a phrase (i.e., a number of words) and another lexical element such as a noun. You have just encountered one in my first sentence: In this case, it consists of a phrase and the inflected noun "questions."

Phrasal compounds are sometimes regarded as a severe challenge to derivational theories of grammar (such as Chomskyan theories) which claim that forming a sentence consists of just two steps: first, retrieving the lexical items out of the lexicon (semantics), and, secoapex-nd, by adapting them and putting them in the correct structures (morphology, which means the creation of apt word forms, & syntax, which means sentence structure creation).

Obviously, the sentence above entails (1) lexical retrieval of words that are in the domain of the quotation, (2) adapting them and putting them in a correct syntax, (3) transforming this whole phrase into a word-like item at the level of the rest of the words (i.e. some sort of lexical retrieval again), and (4) performing morpho-syntactic operations at the next level. So the basic process of sentence formation has been passed through two times at least with phrasal compounds, in a nested way.

Two or more words put together to create a single, complex idea