Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is a little treasure chest of interesting morphosemantics, all from a pun on marine biologist, whose everyday use is to refer to a scientist specializing in marine biology:

But instead we get, unexpectedly,  a biologist who is a marine, assigned to duty monitoring aquatic animals (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)

The pun has the USMC noun marine; its base has the sea adjective marine. But that’s just the beginning of the fun.

The ambiguity. The expression marine biologist is ambiguous, as between

a conventionalized sense ‘scientist specializing in marine biology’, with Adj + N marine biologist, based on Adj + N marine biology ‘the scientific study of the biology of marine life, organisms in the sea’ (Wikipedia), in which marine is an Adj of a special type (see below), such that marine biology ≈ sea biology and marine biologist ≈ sea biologist;

and a coinage, a N + N compound marine biologist meaning ‘biologist who is a marine’ (compare the compounds child prodigy, ape-man, and boyfriend)

So: two different constructions combining a word marine and the noun biologist ‘the study or science of living organisms’ — and also two distinct items marine. From NOAD:

Adj marine: [a] of, found in, or produced by the sea: marine plants | marine biology. [b] relating to shipping or naval matters: marine insurance. [c] (of artists or painting) depicting scenes at sea: marine painters.

N marine: a member of a body of troops trained to serve on land or at sea, in particular a member of the US Marine Corps: a contingent of 2,000 marines.

Pseudo-adjectives. A pseudo-adjective is a type of non-predicating (and non-gradable) Adj interpreted by reference to a N (so that Adj + N is understood in the same way as a N + N compound); see my Language Log posting of 8/13/08, “Indigenous nudity”.

The Adj marine ≈ the N sea (or ocean); the Adj is non-predicating (*Our top biologist is marine); and it is non-gradable (*She’s a very marine biologist, the most marine one I’ve ever seen) — compare the predicating and gradable Adj clever (Our top biologist is clever. She’s a very clever biologist, the most clever one I’ve ever seen). But it has the morphology of an Adj (the derivational suffix –ine) and doesn’t allow the modifiers of N1 in N1 + N2 compounds: the N1 + N2 compounds sea biologist and ocean biologist are possible in English, and they allow N1 to be modified by an Adj: northern sea biologist (studying the organisms of the northern seas) and warm ocean biologist (studying the organisms of warm oceans) — but the Adj marine and its ilk do not of course allow such modification: *northern / warm marine biologist (disallowed in the relevant senses),

Sweetly, the cartoon has another pseudo-adjective example in it: aquatic animal ‘water animal’. From NOAD:

Adj aquatic: [a] relating to water: animals have eyes adapted to the hues of their aquatic home | those who favor cycling or various aquatic sports. [b] (of a plant or animal) growing or living in or near water: the bay could support aquatic life.

Bracketing paradoxes. The expression marine biologist also involves a “bracketing paradox” in Adj + N, in which a suffix within N is understood as applying to Adj plus the stem of N. That is, marine biologist is understood as

[ marine + biology ] + –ist

rather than in accordance with its syntactic constituency:

marine + [ biology + –ist ]

See further discussion in the Language Log posting linked to above, and the earlier discussion in my paper “Transformational grammarians and their ilk” (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 1987), available on-line here.

This entry was posted on May 25, 2024 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Ambiguity, Compounds, Constructions, Derivation, Linguistics in the comics, Modification, Morphology and syntax, Puns. 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.