Syntactical Compounds in A.Milne’s "Winnie-the-Pooh"

What is a compound word?

“A common way to build up words in English involves compounding, the combination of lexical categories (nouns, adjectives, verbs or prepositions). With very few exceptions, the resulting compound is a noun, a verb, or an adjective.” ( 1 )

“Compound words are terms made up of two (or more) words that are described as open (meaning they consist of two separate words that are closely associated as one concept, such as real estate, high school, civil rights), hyphenated (ill-favoured, kilowatt-hour, mass-produce), or solid (meaning the two words, which were originally separate, are now spelled as one word, with no hyphen, such as makeup, bookstore, goodwill). “ ( 6 )



What do we understand by syntactical compounds?

Syntactical compounds are also called two-word compounds – the compounds written through a hyphen. The point of the hyphen is to avoid ambiguity for the reader. If a temporary compound is used as an adjective before a noun, it may be unclear what words are modifying what. The tendency for compounds is to begin life as two-word or hyphenated terms and when they have become acceptable in general usage and got into dictionaries, they lose the hyphen and are spelled solid, as one word. In Latvian or Russian, such compounds are used in translated literature, e.g., in R. Kipling’s “Just So Stories”, in A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh”, etc.

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