Arnold Zwicky's Blog

🎁 Boxing Day 🎁 — also St. Stephen, with his feets uneven — coming a day late, because life has been very difficult for me, and postings have piled up so high I’m not sure I can ever get to them, so I’ve picked something I know I can get done, so that this dark, rainy, and excruciatingly painful low-air-pressure day will not be a total loss

I bring you an e-mail message from Victor Steinbok on 12/25, about this ad for Spice Tribe (website here), a San Francisco-based on-line spice store dedicated to mindful cooking:

(#1) VS wrote: Facebook has offered another example of what I used to refer to as parenthetical ambiguity. Is it [aged anchovy] [salt] or [aged] [anchovy salt]. From a culinary perspective, the latter makes no sense (aging salt doesn’t change it). But that doesn’t mean there’s no built-in ambiguity.

On Boxing Day, I responded. An elaborated version of my reply:

A nice example of structural ambiguity, with two different parsings for an expression; a textbook example is:

OLD MEN AND WOMEN
[ OLD ] [ MEN AND WOMEN ] vs. [ OLD MEN ] [ AND WOMEN ]

And I posted recently on:

GREAT PUMPKIN PIE
[GREAT ] [ PUMPKIN PIE ] vs. [ GREAT PUMPKIN ] [ PIE ]

which has a lot of lexical ambiguity going on in it too.

I’m happy to see AGED ANCHOVY SALT, as an illustration of the general principal of ubiquity — (potential) ambiguity is everywhere. But listeners and readers mostly sort through things rapidly, using background knowledge, the context of discourse, and their assessments of the intentions of those who produced the discourse. This process isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t have to be; for ordinary human purposes, it merely has to be good enough most of the time.

So people live happily with the possibility of [aged] [anchovy salt] — because they don’t even notice it. Well, yes, Victor and I notice it, because we’re approaching the ad in #1 as linguistic data for analysis rather than as ordinary language for use.

But what is anchovy salt?  The expression anchovy salt is a N + N compound, and clearly subsective: anchovy salt is a kind of salt. But what’s the semantic relationship between the modifier N anchovy and the head N salt? Anchovies are small fish customarily preserved in salt and oil, so anchovy salt could be a Use compound — referring to the salt used in the production of commercial anchovies — or possibly a Source compound — referring to salt extracted from anchovies. In fact, it is neither, but an Ingredient compound, referring to salt infused with the flavor of anchovy sauce: it’s flavored salt, like flavored water, the parallel in the taste world to scented items, like scented candles:

(#2) From the Spice Tribe catalog

This entry was posted on December 27, 2024 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Ambiguity, Compounds, Constituency, Holidays, Language and food, Parsing, Semantics of compounds, Taste. 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.