Headed and headless compounds

The AN compounds given at (15) included faintheart alongside blackboard and greenstone. However, whereas a greenstone is a kind of stone and a blackboard is a kind of board, a faintheart is not a kind of heart but a kind of person – someone who has a faint heart, metaphorically. So, although heart is a noun, it is not appropriate to call heart the head of the compound. Rather, faintheart is headless, in the sense that its status as a noun is not determined by either of its two components. Similar headless AN compounds are loudmouth and redshank (a kind of bird that has red legs), and headless NN compounds are stickleback (a kind of fish with spines on its back) and sabretooth.

A few VN-type compound nouns resemble secondary compounds in that the noun at the right is interpreted as the object of the verb:

(18) pickpocket, killjoy, cutpurse

These too are headless, in that a pickpocket is not a kind of pocket, for example. An implication of these analyses is as follows: if the fact that heart and pocket are nouns is really irrelevant to the fact that faintheart and pickpocket are nouns too, we should expect there to be some headless nouns in which the second element is not a noun at all – and likewise, perhaps, headless adjectives in which the second element is not an adjective. Both expectations turn out to be correct. Some nouns consist of a verb and a preposition or adverb:

(19) take-off, sell-out, wrap-up, sit-in

We saw that nouns are sometimes formed from verbs by conversion, that is with no affix. The nouns at (19) can be seen as a special case of this, where the base is a verb plus another word (sometimes constituting a lexical item), as illustrated in (20):

(20) a. The plane took off at noon.

        b. The chairman wrapped the meeting up.

        c. The students sat in during the discussion.

As for headless adjectives, there are quite a number consisting of a preposition and a noun:

(21) overland, in-house, with-profits, offshore, downmarket, upscale, underweight, over-budget

The adjectival status of these compounds can often be confirmed by their appropriateness in comparative contexts and with the modifier very:

(22) a. They live in a very downmarket neighbourhood.

b. This year’s expenditure is even more over-budget than last year’s.

The fact that the word class of these headless compounds is not determined by any element inside them (that they have no internal ‘centre’, one might say) has led some grammarians to call them exocentric – that is, having a ‘centre’ outside themselves, figuratively speaking. According to this approach, headed compounds would be regarded as having an internal ‘centre’; and, sure enough, they are sometimes called endocentric.