Fixity and English compounds

We all know that English ‘has’ ‘compounds’, so why don’t we know what counts as a compound in English? Could we have been asking the wrong question? One of the striking things about English word-formation is how productive compounds are. Yet definitions of a compound in English are extremely varied, and tests for whether or not something is a compound give very different results. It is suggested that the reason for this is that the so-called tests for compoundhood are really tests for something else – here called ‘fixity’. If we accept that, we may not need a category of ‘compound’ in English at all.