Syntactic-Semantic Characteristics of Exocentric Compound Words in English

The article deals with syntactic-semantic, linguistic-cognitive and national-cultural characteristics of exocentric compound words in English. the problem of semantic exocentricity of compound words in English, an analogy is drawn between exocomposites and idiomatic expressions; a mechanism is proposed to assess the level of idiomaticity of an exocentric compound word based on the degree of manifestation of metaphorical and metonymic meaning.