Tvorba složenica u hrvatskom jeziku

Abstract

Compounding in Croatian

The enrichment of the lexicon with new words is necessary to keep a language lively, in its constant search for dynamic means of expression. Thus, the inventory of neologisms is made up both of semantic neologisms, i.e. neo-semantisms which enable a language to keep its peculiar identity on the expression plane by adding meaning to existing lexical units, i.e. growing semantic-ally richer, and of newly coined native units as results of creative word formation, by testing its own expressive resources. The topic of this paper, compounds, fall into the second category. Although compounding, as a word formation process is not typical of the Croatian language, a corpus of compounds extracted from contemporary post-1990 dictionaries of the Croatian language calls for areevaluation of traditional views on the word formation process. The paper thus describes the structure of novel compounds in Croatian, looking for divergencies from the treatment in Croatian grammar books and examining the ratio of words formed by pure compounding, as opposed to the combination of compounding and suffixation. Moreover, it presents new subtypes of compounds and discusses their influence on the word formation system of Croatian in general.