🐅 🐅 🐅 three tigers for ultimate February; for Leap Day, the US is having wild weather (four days of cold rain predicted here on the SF peninsula, where the first flowering fruit trees are already in bloom)
An old One Big Happy strip that turned up in my comics feed recently. The linguistic point is a familiar one on this blog, the enormous potential for ambiguity in N + N compounds in English:
(#1) baby back ribs, baby snow peas, baby green beans, with N1 baby ‘young, immature; small, insignificant (in comparison with others of its type)’ (the sense on the menu) versus baby food, baby carriage, baby book, with N1 baby ‘intended for (use by) a baby’ (the sense Ruthie understands)
The contrast is between two semantic interpretations of the relationship between the modifier N1 and the head N2 in these N1 + N2 compounds.
On the one hand, baby food ‘food for a baby’ is what I’ve called a Use compound; Use compounds (‘N2 for (use by/on/in) N1’) are very common, and sometimes present a pesky ambiguity with also very common Source compounds (‘N2 made from N1’) — some contrasts: Use compound saddle oil ‘oil for (use on) saddles’ vs. Source compound mink oil ‘oil made from minks’ (ugh, but true); Use compound snow tire ‘tire for (use in) snow’ vs. Source compound snowman ‘(simulacrum of a) man made of snow’. The snow examples come from my 1/25/23 posting “Snow tires” on Use vs. Source compounds, taking off from
a classic Don Martin Mad magazine cartoon for the winter season, illustrating the utility and flexibility of N + N compounds in English — and also their enormous potential for ambiguity, which has to be resolved in context
… [with] four examples of N1 + N2 compounds in English, all four highly conventionalized to very culture-specific referents. In these conventionalized uses, two (snow tire, snowshoe) are use compounds …, two (snowman, snowball) are source compounds … But N + N combinations are potentially ambiguous in multiple ways; this lack of clarity is the price you pay for the great brevity of these combinations (which lack any indications of the semantic relationship between the two elements).
So: [in the cartoon] we get snow tire and snowshoe understood as source compounds …: ‘(simulacrum of a) tire made of snow’, ‘(simulacrum of a) shoe made of snow’.
On the other hand, baby back ribs ‘back ribs (of pork) that are smaller than the usual (spareribs)’ is what I will now label an Attributive compound, in which some characteristic that’s metaphorically associated with N1 is attributed to N2. Only a few Ns have been conventionalized for use in Attributive compounds: baby for attributing relative smallness (in baby back ribs) or immaturity (in baby peas); giant and monster ‘gigantic, huge’ for attributing (relative) great size (in giant marigold and monster truck); killer ‘exceptional, impressive’ for attributing excellence (in killer abs and killer idea). Since only a few Ns have been conventionalized in this way, Attributive compounds are not very common. But there’s another compound type that’s fairly common and superficially resembles Attributives: what I’ll call the Predicative type, conveying ‘N2 that’s a N1’: baby prodigy ‘baby who’s a prodigy’, killer clown ‘clown that’s a killer’, cowboy poet ‘poet who’s a cowboy’. (The compound killer clown is then ambiguous as between Attributive and Predicative: someone who’s really good as a clown vs. a clown that kills.)
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