Arnold Zwicky's Blog

A cartoon for the weekend, from Hilary Price’s Rhymes With Orange:

Noun-noun compounds are sometimes hard to interpret because the semantic relationship between the two nouns is so distant (canoe wife, for instance); you have to know a lot to supply the connection. Both Language Log and this blog frequently remark on such “distant” N+N compounds, especially (but not only) in headlines, where they’re a useful device for headline writers struggling to convey whole situations in a few words — but are baffling to readers who aren’t in the know.

Looking ahead to future postings, I’ll refer to distant N+N compounds as constituting a subtype of Type X composites. Ordinary N+N compounds are, in contrast, Type O composites, and the semantic relation between their parts is drawn from a relatively small set of relationships.

Particular examples can be ambiguous as between Type O and Type X. The famous example pumpkin bus (well, famous if you’re into N+N compounds) can be understood as Type O, in which case there are several sub-ambiguities, depending on which of the canonical semantic relationship is intended (‘bus that looks like a pumpkin, is in the shape of a pumpkin’, ‘bus containing pumpkins, bus that is full of pumpkins’, ‘bus for (transporting) pumpkins’, ‘bus made out of pumpkins’); there’s even a non-compound interpretation in which pumpkin is an adjective referring to a color).

But then there are Type X interpretations, no end of them, all involving buses somehow or another connected to pumpkins, or a pumpkin. In the famous example, the bus in question was the one that went past a pumpkin patch. You had to have been there.

Poodle skirt in the cartoon is just a Type O compound, but there are still several possible interpretations. The conventionalized sense is historically a resemblance compound (‘skirt that looks like a poodle’), but there are other possibilities: in particular, it could be a composition compound (‘a skirt made from poodles’), which is what Cruella de Vil, with her antipathy to dogs, was hoping for. Too bad, Cruella.

This entry was posted on April 30, 2010 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Compounds, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.