Comparative Investigation of English and Armenian Compound Patterns

(based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Novel “The Great Gatsby” and Its Armenian Translation)

Abstract

The novel “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald published in 1925 is one of the timeless classics of world literature which was investigated from different linguistic perspectives. Its vocabulary is abundant in compound words with a variety of morphological, syntactic, semantic peculiarities. In this paper, we aim at studying compound words in “The Great Gatsby” to illustrate their patterns in English and Armenian. We have investigated the compounds from the morphological-categorial point of view, from the perspective of the syntactic relations between their constituent parts. We have also briefly touched upon some of their semantic features. At the same time, a close attention was paid to the different ways in which compound patterns were translated into Armenian. The study of the main target of the paper is based on Sona Seferyan's translation of the novel “The Great Gatsby” into Armenian. A lot of examples of both synthetic (closed) and analytical (juxtaposed) compounds have been picked out. In Armenian within synthetic compounds we differentiate between those with a linking element, e. g. “աշխարհամարտ” (where “ա” is the linking element) and the ones without а linking element, e. g. “արևելք”. We assume that the peculiarities of compounds revealed in this paper will have significance not only for the description of their characteristic features but also for the general typological characterization of the languages under study.