Comparative Study of Compound Lexemes in “If Cats Disappeared From the World” by Genki Kawamura and “Will” by Will Smith

The paper is concerned with the use of compound words in two stylistically and culturally distinct literary works: bestselling novel “If cats disappeared from the world” originally written by Genki Kawamura and “Will” by Will Smith. The purpose of the paper is to determine the innovative potential of the English word-formation system and to conduct a comparative analysis of the use of compound lexemes in translation of the philosophical novel “If cats disappeared from the world” by Eric Selland and a celebrity memoir in a conversational tone “Will”. The material under investigation, which is a corpus of approximately 45000 words from each text. This corpus was analyzed using the descriptive method in linguistics and the methods of continuous sampling, qualitative and comparative analysis. Morphological, syntactic, and orthographic aspects of the compounds are examined. The results of the study indicate that in the memoirs “Will” significantly more compound formations are used, with 254 compounds compared to 108 in “If cats disappeared from the world”. Conclusions: the American memoir demonstrates a higher frequency of noun (146), adjective (77) and verb (18) compounding, including phrasal compounds (9), rhyme-motivated (1) and ablaut-motivated (3) compounds. In contrast, the Japanese novel presents fewer compounds and limited structural variation: compound nouns — 72, adjectives — 33, and 3 phrasal compounds.