Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In my posting on contagious countries as a classical malapropism (for contiguous countries), I noted that there was another, quite different, use of this expression, with the sense ‘countries where some contagious disease  has spread’. Some examples:

[with reference to SARS] Major transportation routes were limited, and the movement of people from contagious countries to others was restricted. (link)

[with reference to hoof-and-mouth disease] If Britain continues to import food and farm animals from contagious countries, the virus could slip back in. (link)

and, with reference to swine flu, a tag here.

There are also hits for references to financial contagion, for instance:

Traditionally, dependence methods are adopted to verify the existence of financial contagion, which can only reflect partial characteristics of the relation between contagious countries and fail to offer a satisfactory determination of the contagious degree. (link)

Now, contagious countries here doesn’t mean ‘countries that are contagious’, as it would if the Adj contagious were understood as a predicating modifier. Instead, it’s a “non-predicating” Adj + N combination in which the Adj serves as a covert reference to a related N (contagion, in this case),  so it works pretty much like a N + N compound (and in a Language Log posting, I’ve suggested that the category of such combinations is N, as it is for N + N compounds like country house, and not Nom, as it is for predicating combinations like large country). In fact, financial contagion and contagious degree are also non-predicating combinations.

Some previous Language Log postings on other non-predicating combinations: on non-dual citizen here and indigenous nudity here. Both of these postings have lists of other examples, of various subtypes, and the second notes that some non-predicating combinations follow productive patterns, but others are novel, requiring the use of context, prior experience with the combination, or background knowledge for their interpretation. Contagious countries, in either the disease or the finance sense, is of course a novel non-predicating combination.

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