Abstract:

Word building systems of the English, German and Russian languages are thoroughly investigated first of all in terms of grammar. The relationship between grammar and word-building is reflected in the relationship between the latter and syntax which is clearly illustrated in word-building. The purpose of the paper presented is to describe the ways of teaching word-building in the context of grammatical approach in teaching foreign languages, specifically English and German to future linguists whose major is Modern Linguistics and who have to know the theory of the language as well as to be able to communicate in a foreign language.

The relevance of the investigation lies in the complex character of compound words and in the importance of the development of lexical skills with young researchers. The stems of the majority of compound words are syntactic structures or phrases. The parallel lines “phrase – compound word” allow some linguists to take the relation between a phrase and a compound word as the basic feature of a compound word in the given languages. But not all compound words have this feature. And it is worthy to give the description of how to teach word-building and word-composition regarding the merging of several words or word-stems into one compound word.

The methods of our investigation implied the study of the theoretical base of compounding in different languages, continuous sampling of English and German compound words, their classification on the basis of the relations between the base words and their compound derivatives and study of the ways to teach young researchers to trace and adequately interpret the peculiar features of compound words. Modern researchers of linguistics clearly specify two ways of investigations of word-composition of the English and German languages. The first focus area deals with the syntactic approaches developed in 1970s. The basic statements here are the ones like Germ. Waschmaschine Engl. washing machine“х washes with the machine” or “the machine washes”. And the periphrases linguists suggest for the compound word Germ.Malerpinsel, Engl. paint-brush are the following ones: “the brush that is used by a painter”, “the brush that some painter uses for painting”, “the brush belonging to some painter” (Fandrych Christian, Thurmair Maria). Even though the suggested periphrases are quite synonymous we can’t still single out the basic relations between the components of the compound word. As opposed to the syntactic approach E.Coseriu and H.J.Heringer come to the conclusion that the formation of compound words cannot be limited by particular rules. The interpretation of any compound word is carried out under the only rule: in the compound word AB “A is somehow connected with B”. The described difficulty brings the foreign language teachers to the point of thorough analysis of compound words and consequently the ways of teaching students and young researches how to make compound words and how to teach the features of their functioning.

In the paper we give a brief overview of the most significant researches of compound words in terms of grammar and syntax, and also describe the stages of investigation of compound words. The paper can be relevant to English and German teachers, linguists and young researchers making investigations in teaching linguistics.

Keywords:

Education, teaching foreign languages, grammatical approach, word-building, young researchers.