compound stress
Here's an interesting and timely article from Language Log: Chinese takeout and Watergate: Discuss. (Language Log should really go in my links section, but it'll have to wait till my next bout of updating.) It's about the way that words in a phrase can sometimes combine into a single compound word, which is a syntactic change that's associated with a change in stress pattern.
The article mentions the textbook example of the phrase black bird, which refers to any bird that's black, versus the compound blackbird, which is the name of one type of bird in particular, like sparrow or eagle (and the females can actually be brown, I think). If you'll excuse the boldface attempt to represent stress, you'd pronounce the compound something like blackbird, and the phrase something like black bird.
It intially sounds like a neat and tidy process of lexicalisation (things are lexicalised when they enter the vocabulary/lexicon) - the phrases become compounds and get kitted out with the appropriate stress pattern to match their new status. But inevitably it's slightly more complicated than that - there can be compounds with mismatched stress. Eg some people would say that things like red herring are compounds, but they don't have so-called compound stress (kudos if you can spot a possible flaw in that argument btw) and again you don't have the expected stress pattern in words like player-manager either. Stress is arguably only a rough guide to compound-hood, in other words.
The article mentions the textbook example of the phrase black bird, which refers to any bird that's black, versus the compound blackbird, which is the name of one type of bird in particular, like sparrow or eagle (and the females can actually be brown, I think). If you'll excuse the boldface attempt to represent stress, you'd pronounce the compound something like blackbird, and the phrase something like black bird.
It intially sounds like a neat and tidy process of lexicalisation (things are lexicalised when they enter the vocabulary/lexicon) - the phrases become compounds and get kitted out with the appropriate stress pattern to match their new status. But inevitably it's slightly more complicated than that - there can be compounds with mismatched stress. Eg some people would say that things like red herring are compounds, but they don't have so-called compound stress (kudos if you can spot a possible flaw in that argument btw) and again you don't have the expected stress pattern in words like player-manager either. Stress is arguably only a rough guide to compound-hood, in other words.
posted by cath at
10:57 pm
2 Comments:
Re. red herring, that's not a compound really, is it? It's never used as a single word, and the "red" continues to be an adjective applied to the noun "herring". In the case of 'blackbird', the "black" ceases to be an adjective, and the whole becomes a noun. Right?
By
Anonymous, at 9:58 pm
Nice one! Your first sentence is bang on!
"Red herring" isn't a compound, although it IS used as a single word, all the time (whenever you talk about red herrings, you're not talking about herrings which are red - eg you don't talk about a "reddish herring" or a "very red herring") - what it is, is an idiom. Like "kick the bucket" and "wet behind the ears" - fixed constructions, but not compounds.
By
cath, at 1:56 pm
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