A syntactic-semantic study of compound nouns in English and Kurdish

Abstract EN

English and Kurdish are two morphologically asymmetrical Indo-European languages.

The former is the most analytic language among all of the European languages and the latter agglutinative, incorporating language.

The paper concerns itself only with the standard dialects of the two languages, which are hypothesized to be different in the process of forming nouns through compounding.

In this paper, an attempt is made to identify how many compound noun-formation patterns occur in each of the languages? Then, the paper aims at examining and contrasting where do English and Kurdish compound nouns resemble semantically and syntactically? And where do they differ? For this study, the data have been collected from over fifty various English and Kurdish sources and re-analysed with reference to compound nouns in the two languages.

It is unveiled that compound nouns in English and Kurdish have five analogous areas in semantics, whereas they differ only in two semantic aspects.

Meanwhile, in syntax, the four points of resemblances are outweighed by the ten points of divergences.