Though the formation of verbs from N + V combination is a productive process, the nouns involved in the formation of compound verbs with reference to a particular verbalizer appears to be a closed set rather than an open set. This leads to synonymy among compound verbs.

The compounds could be overlapping in their meaning as same nouns can be collocated with overlapping group of verbs. Not all nouns will be added to a verbalizer and conversely not all verbalizers can be added to a noun only a closed set of nouns can be collocated with a particular verbalizer. There are a number of verbs which are used to form verbs from nouns. Only compounding is extensively used in the formation of verbs in Tamil. The verbalizing suffix -i which was in use to form verbs from Sanskrit noun stems is no longer in use. It can be stated that there is no productive verbalizing suffix in Tamil. Even a verb can be compounded with a verbalizing verb to form another verb. The compound verbs are formed from a base by the addition of a verb which function as the verbalizer or whose function is to verbalize the base. Finally, there are often phonological processes that apply to compounds but not to phrases. It is not uncommon for the compounds they form to become so lexicalized that the element loses its status as an independent word and becomes a clitic or an affix. This is generally true of constituents of compounds. One property of words which distinguishes them from phrase is morphological integrity: their elements can not be split up by other words or phrases. Related to this is the fact that non-heads of compounds typically fail to be inflected. The constituents of compounds differ from constituents of sentences. If we look at the non-heads of the compounds, we find that they never refer to specific objects. A further property which links compounds with the words is that of non-referentiality.

In a related fashion, there are often lexical restrictions on which compounds are permitted, resulting in paradigmatic gaps which resemble those found in derivational or inflectional affixation. This type of drift is characteristic of all types of compounding. They are then often subject to semantic shift of a kind associated with stored words, which means that their meaning becomes non-compositional or even totally idiosyncratic. However, compounds also have a number of features which make them resemble words. The head-modifier, predicate-argument, and oppositional relations together with constituent structure all tend to align compounding with syntax. The first set makes compounding resemble syntax and the second set brings compounding closer to word formation. Compounds have two sets of characteristic properties. Compounding represents the interface between morphology and syntax par excellence. A prototypical compound is a word made up of at least two bases which can occur elsewhere as independent words. It raises many issues relating to morphology, syntax and lexicon. If we analyze old Tamil text, we may conclude that it is enough to have the four type of classes to explain the grammar of data of that period.Ĭompounding in an important process in the word-building mechanism in Tamil. Thus traditional grammars identifies four classes of words: noun, verb, particles and modifiers. Traditional grammars consider uriccol as modifier to nouns and verbs. If we analyze closely the word classes of traditional grammarians, it can be interpreted that they recognize noun and verb as major word classes and consider iTaiccol and uriccol as a third class which depend on noun and verb.

The forms which are neither nouns nor verbs but depends on nouns and verbs and which give the meaning mikuti 'more' (similar to intensifiers) are considered as uriccol. The forms which does not occur independently and depend on noun or verb by appearing before or after them which include morphs, suffixes, bound forms of demonstratives and interrogatives, are considered as iTaiccol. The words which does not show tense but inflect form case are grouped as nouns and those which show tense, but do not inflected for case are considered as verbs. It is always assumed that nouns and verbs are the major word categories andiTaiccol and uriccol are treated secondary to nouns and verbs. The traditional grammars in Tamil classifies words into peyar 'noun', vinai 'verb', iTaiccol 'particle', and uriccol.

Conjunctions list with tamil meanings