English Exocentric Compounds†

Most compounds in English are endocentric, that is, one of the elements (typically the right-hand element) is the head of the construction. Headedness is shown most clearly by hyponymy: the compound as a whole is a hyponym of its head. For example, traffic-light is a hyponym of light, but not a hyponym of traffic. In some languages compounds take their declension class or gender from those of the head element, but in English this is not particularly important. An exocentric compound, by contrast, is one which is not a hyponym of one of its elements, and thus appears to lack a head or perhaps to have a head (or ‘centre’) external to the compound itself. English examples such as redhead ‘a person with red hair’, flat-foot ‘policemen (slang)’ and egghead ‘intellectual’ abound. As far as I am aware, the first person to extend the notion of exocentricity from syntax to the morphological form of compounds was Bloomfield (1935: 235). Bloomfield himself links the term ‘exocentric compound’ with the earlier Sanskrit term bahuvrihi, thus establishing the equivalent use of the two terms in the subsequent technical literature. This is unfortunate. First, the original Sanskrit bahuvrihi compounds were adjectives not nouns. Examples are bahuvrīhiitself, literally ‘much rice’ but meaning ‘having much rice’, or gatāyus‘departed life = dead’ (Gonda 1966: 83). Second, as will be shown, bahuvrihis represent a very small proportion of those compounds which may be termed exocentric. In this paper I shall consider some of the different kinds of exocentric compound in English, and suggest that some of them are not exocentric at all.