Comparing Morpho-lexical Operation of Compounds in C’lela and English

International audience This paper examines and compares the processes of compounding in C’lela and English It investigates the morphological and lexical properties of compounds in the two languages. The objective of the study is to provide an overview of the C’lela compound patterns and to significantly describe how C’lela is unlike or similar to English in the extent and nature of their compounding phenomena. The phrase ‘morpho-lexical operation’ designates a particular linguistic activity that invokes a kind of morphological phenomenon. C’lela and English like in many other languages have distinctive but vibrant compound properties that create new words with a high degree of transparency in which a compound structure correlates consistently with the semantic interpretation of the compound constituents. The paper examines the structure, classification as well as the semantic relations between compound constituents and also the semantic interpretation of the derived compounds in the two languages. The different types of compound-formations described in this paper are: noun-noun, noun-adjective, and verb-noun compounds. The paper finds that C’lela has an elaborate compounding structure comparable to English compounds systems. It realizes that C’lela and English compound constituents contain both lexical and semantic information in the derived compounds. The study discovers that most C’lela compounds are endocentric and left-headed, while English compounds are generally endocentric but right-headed. The study is a contribution to the documentation of morphological and lexical structures of C’lela.