Dissert Islands, Strew-berry, and noun-noun compounds
This one is about a blog entry by Sally Greene
on her dislike of the increasing popularity of noun-noun compounding in
English, particularly when there are existing adj-noun alternatives
available. Examples include "law department" instead of "legal
department", although I have never seen "Psychological dept" in my
whole life. I think this particular one has to do with keep in sync
with the oft-used alternative — "dept. of Law" — in which case you
can never say "dept of legal."
What’s really interesting is not the post itself, but the comments. For one, mj commented that "All
these compound nouns could be considered the Germanification of
English. 
". Well, I have long speculated that English is gratually
becoming Chinese — the apparent increase popularity of zero-derivation
in English is a proof. So is noun-noun compounding. Of course all these
won’t be news to you if you, like sufergirl, believe that English is an
isolating language. But then, you would have to give up the
Germanification idea, as German is isolating not.
Another is a thread of comments on using the stress test for the headedness of compounds. Lal Zimman heard people say "desert island",
which suggests that it’s a NP with island as the head. If it’s a
compound, Zimman argues, the stress would have been on the first item.
Then Noetica had a discussion on "Chinese question" but offers no "Chinese solution."
Unrelated:
And I, for one, am especially interested in fossilised constructions
such as "desert island": there are lots of such examples of at the
morpheme level: eg, "straw" in "strawberry" was cognate with "strew",
but is long since cranberrified and also at the lexical/syntactic
level: I do not know what it is to be "spick", nor what it is to be
"span", but I know very well what it is to be "spick and span". (Anyone
planning to tell me what the terms mean individually is warned that
they just plain don’t, incidentally. They are synchronously opaque and
that’s that.)Posted by: des von bladet at January 3, 2005 07:02 AM
Aha! Does this account for variations in how "ice cream" is
pronounced? Different folk might construe it differently. In Australia
it’s nearly always "ice cream", but:
ice cream (SOED; etymology: iced cream)
ice cream, ice cream (Webster’s 3rd Int)
(Collins and American Heritage give no ruling)
Of course, the situation would be complicated when "ice cream"
occurs in a compound: pronunciations of "ice-cream parlour"? Cf. also:
Chinese
The Chinese question-marking particles
The Chinese question [as in "the immigrant question"]
Chinese checkers
"The Chinese question" is interesting. Suppose there were also a "Chinese solution" to be mentioned:
The Chinese solution
But the following is quite plausible:
"I’m not interested in the Chinese question; I’m after the Chinese solution."
Is all this accounted for adequately by the relative weights of stresses in whole phrases, clauses, or sentences? Possibly.
Posted by: Noetica at January 2, 2005 12:13 AM