Compound words are composed of multiple words that together mean one idea. Examples of compound words are phrasal verbs, compound nouns and compound adjectives. Compound words are fixed expressions since they always occur together to mean something quite different from their constituents. That is, frequently, their meaning cannot be inferred from the sum of the meaning of each individual word of the compound. Since they have one meaning, compound words work like one word and have their own intrinsic stress patterns. Compound words need to be contrasted with descriptive expressions, whose meaning is indeed the sum of the constituent words of the expressions. These descriptive expressions follow the normal stress pattern of English sentences, the details of which we learn in chapter 3 of this book, Rhythmic Stress . The main idea though is that, normally, words that are stressed in sentences are content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and unstressed words are functio
