The Structure of Compound Words in Sylvia Plath's Selected Poems

Abstract

The process of compounding is very creative in modern life as it is circulated in different fields including technology, internet, computer, and politics due to the persistent need to new words which should cope with the running technological invention, new products, language development, unexpected situations that need maneuver and justifications for launching wars. Compounding a new word must follow an appropriate syntactic pattern which makes its meaning easily predictable. Morphologically, sculpturing any compound takes either simple or complex frame which is occasionally encapsulated with ephemeral metaphoric implications where the reader should dig out in order to excogitate its intended meaning. Hiring certain colors and parts of the human body in Sylvia Plath's compounding to incorporate certain concepts and ideas is her prime hallmark. This paper seeks to cast Sylvia Plath's compounds into appropriate syntactic patterns by adopting Plag's Model (2003) of categorizing compound words. Plath's method of configurating any compound is judicative shown up in the exocentric device which led to high fertility of compound words in her poems–especially the five selected poems taken for the purpose of analysis.