Compound words, blends and phrasal words Conclusion

I will have more to say about a fact that I have not emphasized so far: one or both of the component words in a compound may itself be a compound, so there is in principle no upper limit to the size of compounds. We have also seen that at least one syntactic relationship can be expressed within compounds just as well as within sentences, namely the verb–object relationship (or perhaps one should say the action–goal relationship), as in hair restorer. One might ask, then, why English, or any language, needs both compound word-structure and clause-structure side by side: could not just one do the work performed in actual English by both? That is an important question, but unfortunately one for which there is no generally agreed answer. Further discussion of it is therefore a task for research papers, rather than for an introductory textbook such as this.