Complex words and phrases: syntax and semantics

The author, following the concept of E. Benveniste, considers complex words as a product not only of word-formation derivation, but also of syntactic trans-formation (condensation) of phrases. The object of the transformation is phrases as composite syntactic and semantic constructions, but the derivation itself, i.e. the formation of complex words is carried out in the language according to the same rules as the derivation of simple (not complex) words, and with the same formal techniques as word formation in general, i.e. by affixation and transformation of components of complex words (truncation, interfixation, accent shifts, etc.). At the same time, the syntactic and semantic relations between components that are characteristic of generating phrases retain their meaning in the structure of derived complex words, no matter what models of derivation (semantic and word-forming) they may relate to. Complex words of the same type in their word-formation structure can have completely different semantics, depending on the syntactic and semantic relations that link the components of the original phrases. The article offers a typology of complex words in the Russian language in terms of their "internal" syntactic and semantic structure. In composites derived from predicative phrases, there are subject, object, locative, temporal, and other semantic models of relations between a predicate and a dependent word. Composites with a supporting noun can be derived both from phrases with a com-positional connection, and from phrases with a subordinate connection (with relations of functional, comparative, and attributive dependence in a broad sense). Similarly, composites with a reference adjective, numeral, and counting words are analyzed. The article contains a criticism of some provisions of the academic "Russian grammar" (1980).