Morphological Analysis of Compound Words Used in Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us and Delia Owens’ Where The Crawdads Sing Novels

This research examined about the compound types and the patterns of compound
words that are written in It Ends with Us and Where the Crawdads Sing novel. This
research employed McCarthy’s (2002) types and patterns of compound words to
determine how the words are formed. This research used a descriptive-quantitative
methodology. The data consists of the compound words found in 35 chapters of the
novel It Ends with Us and 57 chapters of the novel Where the Crawdads Sing. In It
Ends with Us novel, there are 146 compound words, consisting of 11 compound
verbs, 25 compound adjectives, and 110 compound nouns. While in Where the
Crawdads Sing novel, there are 278 compound words, consisting of 21 compound
verbs, 99 compound adjectives, and 158 compound nouns. A compound noun is the
most dominant compound word type in both novels, in which the words are written
to describe something or someone in the stories. The compound words found in
both novels were formed by more patterns than the ones that were proposed by
McCarthy (2002). The authors of both novels write and develop the compound
words by adding hyphen and more words to describe the details of what is being
described in the story. The researcher concluded that the It Ends with Us novel
focuses more on the occurrence of repeated words, whereas the Where the
Crawdads Sing novel focuses more on variations in patterns.