Comment on the following groups of words to illustrate semantic features and grammaticalfeatures of compounds.
Group 1 “a green hand”, “flowerpot”
Group 2 “bad-mouth”, “new-borns”
Group I tells us that every compound should express a single idea just as one word, which is one of the semantic features of compounds For example, "a green hand means" an inexperienced person". The meanings of such examples cannot be easily inferred from the two components of the compounds. However, a lot of compounds are transparent, that is, the meaning can be inferred from the separate elements of compounds-another semantic feature of compounds. And the elements are inseparable and the change of the element would result in the loss of the original identity. For instance, "flowerpot"means "pot for growing plants".
Group 2 reveals the grammatical features of compounds playing a single grammatical role in a sentence, for example, a verb, a noun, or an adjective. Bad-mouth used as a verb can take the third person singular -s and the past terse marker -ed, e.g. "He bad-mouthed me. New-bors is a compound showing its plural form by taking inflectional -s at the end.
