Every morning and every evening I send a brief e-mail to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, to reassure her that I’m still functioning. In the G’MORNIN bulletins I report my sleep times and summarize my morning vitals — my morning vital signs (always blood pressure and pulse rate, occasionally more tests if they seem to be called for). It was only this morning that I realized that morning vitals ‘morning vital signs’ was an especially nice example of a subtype of what I’ve called beheadings. To go along with, from previous postings, examples like chewables ‘chewable vitamins’ and squares ‘square meals’ (in three squares a day ‘three square meals a day’).
The relevant subentry in NOAD just says:
noun vitals: short for vital signs.
Well, yes, but short in a very specific way:
— it is, first of all, a beheading, missing the head element of vital signs, the noun signs
— it is, further, a nouning by truncation, with the modifying adjective vital converted to a noun vital
— and finally, it exhibits property inheritance: the syntactic properties of the missing head noun, signs (in this case, being a count noun and having plural number) are shared by the nouning, which then appears in the form vitals
Beheading. From my 12/3/17 posting “Off with their heads!”:
Beheading is a word-formation process with
input: a 2-part expression-type Z = X + Y, where X is modifier and Y is head, so Z shares various syntactic properties with Y (in particular, syntactic category and subcategories)
output: a new expression-type X, with the syntactic properties and semantics of Z
Intuitively, Z has its head Y deleted — Z is “beheaded” — with its syntactic properties (including category) and its semantics inherited by the remainder/remnant X.
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my beheading postings)
The inputs are of several types, but two types make up the bulk of the examples I’ve collected:
the modifier and head are nouns in a N1 + N2 compound, as in the simple example graveyard shift > graveyard (I’m working (the) graveyard tonight)
the modifier is an adjective in a Adj + N nominal, as in the simple example commemorative stamp > commemorative (a new commemorative was issued by the USPS today)
The second type is nouning by truncation.
If the beheaded noun is a count noun, then of course it can be pluralized: graveyards are hard on shift workers; two new commemoratives were issued by the USPS).
On the other hand, sometimes the head noun in an input is (already) a plural in a conventionalized expression (which will usually be listed in dictionaries) — as in vital signs; and then the plurality is inherited by the nouning: vitals.
Note the entry from NOAD:
plural noun vital signs: clinical measurements, specifically pulse rate, temperature, respiration rate, and blood pressure, that indicate the state of a patient’s essential body functions: check vital signs half-hourly at first | figurative: students could start coordinated efforts to monitor the earth’s vital signs.
Bonus. On another plural vitals. The beheading vitals ‘vital signs’ is recent enough that, though it’s in NOAD, it’s not in OED2 from 1920. But both OED2 and NOAD have another plural noun vitals (attested since the 17th century): vitals ‘vital parts / organs’:
(OED2) plural noun vitals: those parts or organs of the body, esp. the human body, essential to life, or upon which life depends; the vital parts.
(NOAD): plural noun vitals: the body’s important internal organs, especially the gut or the genitalia: he felt the familiar knot contract in his vitals.
This looks like a beheading from centuries ago.
October 4, 2024 at 10:36 am |
Great sadness. I will post this on Facebook.