THE UNDERLYING STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH NOMINAL COMPOUNDS WITHOUT A VERBAL ELEMENT AND THEIR SERBIAN TRANSLATION EQUIVALENTS

Apstrakt

The paper presents the most significant results of a broader corpus-based research of English nominal compounds without a verbal element and their Serbian translation equivalents. Considering the underlying clausal nature of compound lexemes as well as the low productivity of compounding in Serbian, the goal of the research is twofold: firstly, to explore the linguistic means employed in the translation of English verbless nominal compounds into Serbian; and secondly, to examine if there is a relation between the underlying structures of the English compounds in question and their Serbian translation patterns. In addition to the fact that Serbian translation equivalents primarily correspond to noun phrases with different types of modification, the results of the research also point to a considerable correspondence between the underlying structures of the analyzed English compounds and surface realizations of their Serbian equivalents.