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VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES
DEPARTMENT OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES
 

DƯƠNG THỊ NGỌC ANH ENGLISH COMPOUND NOUNS IN A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS
WITH THE VIETNAMESE EQUIVALENTS
AND SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING
VOCABULARY IN THE TEXTBOOK “ENGLISH FOR THE HOTEL AND
TOURIST INDUSTRY”
(Danh từ ghép tiếng Anh trong sự so sánh đối chiếu với tiếng Việt và một số gợi ý
trong việc dạy và học từ vựng trong giáo trình “English for the Hotel and Tourist
Industry”)

M.A Minor Thesis Field:English Linguistics
Code: 60 22 15

Field:English Linguistics
Code: 60 22 15
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Trần Hữu Mạnh HANOI – 2009
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
DECLARATION i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii
ABSTRACT iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS iv
LIST OF ABBREVIATION vi
PART 1. INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 Rationale 1
1.2. Aims and objectives of the study 2
1.3. Scope of the study 2
1.4. Methods of the study 3
1.5. Design of the study 3
PART 2. DEVELOPMENT 5
CHAPTER 1. THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE ON ENGLISH WORDS AND WORD
FORMATION PROCESSES 5
1.1. Notion of words and word structures 5
1.2. Word formation 7
1.2.1. Affixation 8
1.2.2. Conversion 8
1.2.3. Shortening 8

IN THE TEXTBOOK “ENGLISH FOR THE HOTEL AND TOURIST INDUSTRY” 30
4.1. Introduction 30
4.2. An analysis on the main types of compound nouns in the textbook: “English for the
hotel and tourist industry” 30
4.2.1. An introduction to the textbook: “English for the hotel and tourist industry” 30
4.2.2. The main types of English compound nouns in the textbook 31
4.3. The research 32
4.3.1. Aims of the research 32
4.3.2. Subjects 32
4.3.3. Data collection instruments 33
4.3.4. Findings and discussion 33
4.4. Implications for teaching and learning vocabulary in the textbook: “English for the
hotel and tourist industry” 36
PART 3. CONCLUSION 39
3.1. Recapitulation 39
3.2. Suggestions for further study 40
REFERENCES 41
APPENDIX I I
APPENDIX II III
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONAdj: Adjective
ESP: English for Specific Purpose
-ing: present participle affix
N: Noun
Pre: Preposition
V: Verb


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graduate level but none of the studies have done at post-graduate level. None of them have
given the suggestions for dealing with compound nouns in a professional text, either.
For those reasons, as a learner as well as a teacher of English, I would like to do a research
on this matter with the hope that I would understand properly the features of English
compound nouns and find out an appropriate way to teach them to my students of ESP.
1.2. Aims and objectives of the study
The major aims of this study are:
- To make a comparison of compound nouns in English and Vietnamese. To achieve this
aim, the study will examine the characteristics of compound nouns in terms of syntactic
and semantic features as well as their classifications and types in English and Vietnamese.
From these characteristics, the author will compare English compound nouns and the
Vietnamese equivalents.
- To give the suggestions for teaching vocabulary in ESP textbooks in general and the
textbook “English for the hotel and tourist industry” in particular. The study will examine
the main types of compound nouns used in the textbook, the descriptions of students in
term of English level, learning conditions and how they understand and use compound
nouns in this textbook as well as some common errors they often make. Then the
suggestions for teaching and learning English compound nouns will be given based on the
findings.
Thus, the following research questions are raised for guided research.
1. What are the characteristics of English and Vietnamese compound nouns?
2. What are the differences and similarities of compound nouns in English and
Vietnamese in term of their syntactic, semantic features and their classifications?
3. What are the suggestions for teaching and learning vocabulary in the textbook
“English for the hotel and tourist industry”?
1.3. Scope of the study
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Compounding is a complicated subject matter that received a lot of linguists’ attentions.
They have proposed a number of researches on various interesting aspects, mostly on

and differences between English and Vietnamese compound nouns.
Chapter 4 entitled “Implications for teaching and learning vocabulary in the
textbook “English for the hotel and tourist industry” consists of following sections:
- An analysis on the common types of compound nouns in the textbook.
- The research
- Pedagogical implications for teaching vocabulary in the textbook: “English for the
hotel and tourist industry”.
Part 3 is the conclusion. This part briefly presents review of the major findings,
conclusions remarked and suggestions for further study.
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PART 2. DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1. THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE ON ENGLISH
WORDS AND WORD FORMATION PROCESSES
1.1. Notion of words and word structures
Word is a fundamental unit of language. The term “word” seems to be a simple concept
but in fact it is very difficult to define. For decades, many linguists have attempted to
propose different definitions of word in different approaches. Some considered it on the
semantic point of view; others looked at it from the morphology or phonology sides.
However, none of the definitions appear to be totally satisfied in all aspects. Famous
scholars as Palmer (1976), Arnold (1986), Bauer (1983), Plag (2003) etc. have discussed
thoroughly about this issue. In this section, I would like to mention some of them.
When talking about the notion of word, most of us may think of the word as a unit in the
writing system, namely, orthographic word, then we may say that a word is an
uninterrupted string of letters which is marked by blank spaces or punctuation. Hence, it is
clear that the sentence “English is an interesting language” consists of five words.
However, in some cases, it is impossible to apply this rule to count the number of words in
a sentence. For example, it is not easy to decide how many words there are in the sentence
“Benjamin’s girlfriend lives in a high-rise apartment building” (Plag, 2003). ‘Benjamin’s
may be one or two words. It depends on our consideration for apostrophes to be a
punctuation mark or not. Besides, girlfriend can be attested with spellings as <girlfriend>

after it but cannot insert anything inside. It is different from the word-group consists of
identical constituents ‘black bird’ in which each constituent black and bird can acquire
grammatical forms of its own: The blackest birds. And other words can be inserted in
between the constituents as in ‘a black night bird’. Besides, the word ‘blackbird’ has only
one meaning or one concept: a type of bird. Thus, it possesses a semantic unity whereas in
the word-group ‘black bird’, each component conveys a separate concept: bird – a kind of
living creature; black-a colour. Thus, the definition from him seems to be reliable in all
aspects.
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Regarding the structure of a word, grammarians divide it into smaller units called
‘morphemes’. They are considered as smallest meaningful constituents of word.
Morphemes are subdivided into roots and affixes. While a root morpheme is the basic
form, and it is often called a free morpheme, an affix or a bound morpheme is the one that
attached to the root. There are two kinds of affixes; prefixes are the ones that attached
before the root (as re-do, un-happy); suffixes are morphemes that are put after the root as –
er and -dom in teach-er and free-dom.
Besides, grammarians also try to classify words into subclasses. According to Quirk et. al.
(1972), there are two groups of words: ‘open-class items’ consisting of nouns, verbs,
adjectives, and adverbs and ‘close-system items’ with pronouns, prepositions,
conjunctions, articles, demonstratives, and interjections. These word classes are also
named ‘parts of speech’.
1.2. Word formation
As word is a speech unit used for the purpose of communication, it is a social
phenomenon. And lexicon is one of the most dynamic components of the language system.
It reflects the changes in the social conditions of a society. It develops along with changes
and development of the society. Everyday new words are created to express new ideas,
new concepts, and new desires. New words or new meanings of old words appear while
others are not used any more. New words may be made by borrowing from another
language and assimilating to that language. Another way to make a new word is from the
resource of the language and we often call this word-formation. Together with borrowing,

is to make a new word from a syllable of the original word in which a part of the stem is
retained. It is called clipping. New word may retain the beginning stem (ad from
advertisement), the end as in phone (from telephone), or the middle (flu from influenza).
Another way is coining a new word from the initial letters of a word group (e.g. GMT is
stand for Greenwich Mean Time). This process is often called initial shortenings or
initialism. There are two man types, abbreviations and acronyms. Abbreviations are
pronounced as sequence of letters as in TV, CIA, GPRS, SMS. Meanwhile, acronyms are
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pronounced like ordinary words, with the letters having their characteristic phonological
value (e.g. NATO, AID, UNESCO).
Apart form three major processes of word formation above, there are some other minors
processes which help to make English vocabulary abundant such as back formation,
blending, sound imitation, reduplication which are not discussed in this minor thesis.
1.3. Compounding
1.3.1. Definition
Together with affixation and conversion, compounding is one of the three most productive
types of modern English word building. Compounding is considered to be universal as it
occurs in many other languages such as Thai, German and Vietnamese as well. It possesses
the most typical and specific characteristics of word structures. Therefore, it has been
received a lot of concern from linguistic scholars such as Arnold (1986), Bloomfield
(1933), Bauer (1998) etc. They have proposed a number of different definitions on
compounding. In this study the definition of Quirk et al. (1985) is considered to be of
appropriate, sufficient and easy one to understand: “Compound is a lexical unit consisting
of more than one base and functioning both grammatically and semantically as a single
word” (1985:1567).
1.3.2. Structure of compound words
The structure of compound words is characterized by the so-called ‘modifier-head’
structure. Heads of compounds are typically the rightmost constituents and are modified by
the other members of compound. A compound, as a whole, usually possesses most of
semantic and syntactic features of their head. In blackbird, for example, the head is bird

seems to have been irretrievably lost. Ladybird is not a bird but an insect; tallboy is a piece
of furniture not a person. So it’s impossible to define the meaning of the whole from its
constituents. Such compounds as football, lady-killer, or ladybird, tallboy are said to have
idiomatic meanings.
There are different ways of classifying compounds basing on different criteria. And most
of us are familiar with the classification based on the parts of speech categories of the
head. Thus, we have compound nouns, compound adjectives, compound verbs if the head
is a noun, an adjective, a verb respectively.
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CHAPTER 2. AN INVESTIGATION INTO ENGLISH
COMPOUND NOUNS
2.1. An introduction to English compound nouns
Compound constructions are widely used and common in everyday speech in many
languages. In addition to this, they are widespread in written texts, especially professional
texts. And compound nouns, which are also known as nominal compounds, are considered
to be the largest in number and variety among others such as compound adjectives and
compound verbs.
Compound nouns are usually compounds which have nouns as heads and involve nouns,
verbs or adjectives, prepositions as modifiers. However, there are some rare cases where
the noun head does not exist. The table below will illustrate how other word classes
combine to make a compound noun:
Noun + Noun toothpaste
Adjective + Noun monthly ticket
Verb + Noun swimming pool
Preposition + Noun underground
Noun + Verb haircut
Noun + Preposition hanger on
Adjective + Verb dry- cleaning
Preposition + Verb output
A compound noun usually consists of two components and most of them include a noun

on the first element meanwhile a phrase often has stress on the last. Consider the following
examples:
Compound nouns Noun phrases
`blackboard a black `board
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`green house a green `house
Syntactically, Jackson (2000) considers the specific syntactic features to make a compound
noun different from a noun phrase, namely, word order, interruptibility, modification and
inflectibility. By word order, he refers to the position of the different elements of a
compound in relation to one another. Some compounds have ungrammatical or unusual
word order in English. For example, dry-cleaning, output, haircut etc.
Compound nouns have non-interruptible characteristic, i.e. their constituents are not
interrupted by extraneous elements. This again confirms the assumption that a compound
is indeed a single lexical unit. For example, the compound blackbird cannot be inserted
extra elements as in the black night bird which is a noun phrase.
By modifications he means the use of other words to modify the meaning of a compound.
As a compound is a single unit, it can only be modified by other words as a whole but
cannot be modified independently each of its constituents.
Inflectibility is the use of inflections to present the grammatical function of compound. To
make the compound noun bottle-neck plural, for example, its constituents cannot be
inflected as bottles-necks. Instead, bottle-necks must be used. Similarly, we have the other
compound nouns in plural as ash-trays, dishwashers, water paper baskets.
Semantically, most compounds tend to acquire special meanings like idiom. And some
authors take this special characteristic as their defining feature: “If the meaning of the
whole cannot be deduced from the meaning of the element separately, then we have a
compound” (Jesperson 1942:137). Each compound conveys only one concept even though
it may consist of more than two stems. Take the word tallboy as an example; it does not
denote a person, but a piece of furniture, a chest of drawers supported by a low stand.
Tallboy expresses only one concept whereas a tall boy, a noun phrase, conveys two
concepts: a young male person and big in size.

Appositional compound nouns, whose first constituent includes man or woman, will
pluralize both the first and the last element as in the following compounds, for instance,
gentlemen farmers, menservants, women doctors.
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The possessive of a hyphenated compound is created by attaching an apostrophe -s to the
end of the compound itself: my daughter-in-law's car, a friend of mine's car.
To create the possessive of pluralized of compounded forms, most writers avoid the
apostrophe -s form and use an "of" phrase (the "post genitive") instead: the meeting of the
daughters-in-law, the schedule of half-moons. Otherwise, the possessive form becomes
downright weird: the daughters-in-law's meeting, friends of mine's cars.
In addition to the functional potential and inflection characteristics, compound nouns share
syntactic structure relation with sentences in using the same lexical categories of nouns,
verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The head and modifier of compounds are involved in
complex grammatical function of subject, verb, object, complement, and adverbial like in
clauses and sentences. Quirk et al. (1972, 1985) points out five types of the relationship
between their constituents which bear to each other when the meaning of the compound is
expressed as a sentence:
(1) subject and verb: sunrise (the sun rises)
(2) verb and object: blood test (X tests blood)
(3) verb and adverbial: swimming pool (X swim in the pool)
(4) subject and object: motorcycle
(5) subject and complement: girlfriend (the friend is a girl)
2.4.2 Semantic features
Semantically, constituents of a compound noun are often meaningful and independent.
And the meaning of a compound noun as a whole can be either the sum of its constituents
or not.
In many cases, the meaning compound noun is a specialization of the meaning of its head.
The modifier limits the head. It is used in an attributive or appositional manner. And the
compound noun as a whole denotes person, thing or some kinds of action characterized by
the modifier. For example, blackboard is a kind of board; office manager is the manager of

nouns in particular is in the state of flux. They base on different criteria to classify
compounds. This study introduces three common ways of classify compound nouns as
below.
2.5.1. According to the meaning
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A compound noun can be idiomatic or non-idiomatic according to its meaning. Meaning of
idiomatic compound is hardly deduced from the constituents’ meaning. For example,
blackbird, minute steak, butter-finger, etc.
Meanwhile, non-idiomatic compound nouns are compound nouns of which meaning can
be deduced from the constituents, i.e. the meaning is the sum of its part and it can be
guessed even they are out of context. E.g. doorkeeper, working man, dining table.
2.5.2. According to componential relationship.
In terms of componential relationship, compound nouns can be coordinative or
subordinative. Coordinative compound nouns are compounds whose constituents are both
semantically and structurally independent. The constituents are often of the same part of
speech or of the same semantic group.
There are three subtypes of coordinative: additive which denotes a person or an object as
two things at the same time such as actor-manager, secretary-typist. Reduplicative
compounds created by repetition of the same stem: bye bye, hush-hush. Ablaut and rhythm
compound are the third subtypes. E.g. zigzag, chitchat, walkie-talkie.
On the other hand, subordinative compounds are those that characterized by the
domination of one component over the other semantically or structurally. The second
component, which is also called the determenatum, is the structural center and the
dominant part of the word. The first component is called the determinant which modifies
the second. Subordinative compound nouns account for a great part of compounds in
modern English. In subordinative compound nouns, the semantic relations between the
components can be interpreted differently. E.g:
- honey-bee, oil well (2 produces/yields 1)
- air-brake, hydrogen bomb (1 powers/operates 2)
- doorknob, table leg, piano keys (has 2)

as vocative; e.g. Hey, birdbrain!
2.7. Types of English compound nouns
Considering the types of English compound nouns, many linguistic scholars give different
types based on different criteria. Bauer (1983) pays attention to the part of speech of the
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constituents’ combination, meanwhile Quirk et. al (1972, 1985) classifies compound nouns
based on the underlying structure. In the latest publication, Huddleston et. al (2002) divide
compound nouns into two distinguish groups, namely noun-centred compound nouns and
verb-centred compound nouns in which he describes both the elements’ combination and
the semantic relation analyzing underlying structure. In each group of compounds, he
divides them into subtypes. In this study the author gives the priority to Huddleston’s view.
According to Huddleston et al (2002), a noun-centred compound noun (or verbless
compound noun as called by other linguists) is a compound in which the head is purely or
at least primarily a noun. For example, in girlfriend the head friend can only be a noun.
A compound, by contrast, is a verb-centred compound noun in that the head is the lexical
base of a verb or else formed from one by suffixation or conversion. For example, in bus-
driver, life-guard, take-away, driver are formed by suffixation, guard is form by
conversion and take is, of course, a verb. We will look at these types in turn in the
following sections.
2.7.1. Noun-centred compound nouns
These compounds have a noun as the final base. Usually, the first constituent is the
modifier and the second one is the head. However, there are some cases as in coordinative,
dvandva the two elements are equal. In noun-centred compound nouns, the first element
(the dependent) may be a noun, adjective, verb or some other categories. We will look at it
in turn in the following parts.
2.7.1.1. Noun + noun compound nouns
Examples of this type are: ashtray, bedtime, beehive, birdcage, life raft, motorcycle,
steamboat, bulldog, goldfish, handbag etc. Clearly, this type is not only the most
productive kind of compounding but also the most productive kind of word-formation.
This type is often used to denote a new concept. Their semantic relationships compound

denote a purposive meaning.
E.g. chewing gum ~ gum for chewing
frying pan ~ pan for frying