E-kompozita czy e-zestawienia? (na materiale słowacko-polskim)

The paper’s objective is to define a word-formative status of derivatives composed of the initial part reduced to the phoneme e-, such as e-obchod ‘e-commerce’ or e-platba ‘e-payment’ in Slovak and e-dziekanat ‘e-registrar’ or e-zakupy ‘e-shopping’ in Polish. Their structure – written with a hyphen and the reduction of the initial part to a single phoneme – makes it difficult to assign them with an unambiguous status of derivatives such as composites or compounds. In the literature on the subject they are characterised as a class of composites, though they are referred to as compound words. Based on the analysis of their word-formative and semantic structures, confronted with compound derivatives written with or without a hyphen, this paper classifies them into a class of composites that are referred to as e-composites.