COMPOUNDS IN THE SERBIAN ENGINEERING DISCOURSE

Abstract

This paper is aimed at an attempt of revealing the share of compound nouns and adjectives and their productivity in the Serbian language for specific purposes. A corpus of articles is compiled from the issues of magazine Energija and engineering books related to the field of alternative energy sources. Since the presence of numerous nouns and adjectives is one of the
characteristics of the engineering discourse, it is expected to find many nouns and adjectives created in the compounding word-formation process. The analysis of the corpus pointed at the prevalence of compounds with the prefixoids of Greek origin and shortenings. The compounding model that dominates is ‘prefixoid +noun’ (for nouns) and ‘prefixoid+noun+suffix’(for
adjectives).