bad-hair day OR bad hair-day?

[Lynne Murphy]

nobody's called me on my homophonous typo below, but i think it's kinda cute.

and I think Ron's right/write about the stress.  stress speaks louder than
metalinguistic cogitating...

lynne


Ron Butters said:
>
> In a message dated 1/26/2000 4:29:05 AM, lynnem at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK writes:
>
> << The argument seems to be what kind of evidence we can use to prove the
> constituency of 'bad hair day', but I think Bob Haas might be write (if he's
> suggesting as I think he is) that there's some idiolectal variation here.
> Perhaps some people have parsed it one way and others the other way and so
> the phrase means different things to different people.  (Hey, but my way is
> the correct way!  Ha!) >>
>
> This makes good sense to me. It is clear from this seemingly endless thread
> that a minority of people think of "bad hair" as a genuine compound and a
> majority see  "hair day" as just a noun preceded by a noun adjunct. Since the
> semantic consequences are virtually identical, there are rarely if ever any
> envronments in which the competing analyses would come into conflict (the way
> that, say "good-time man" and "good time-man" could).
>
> All I have been suggesting all along is that stress patterns tend to indicate
> how people parse such constructions. Take, for example, "good time man". To
> indicate "good-time man," people tend to say (1 = primary stress, etc.)
> "1good 2time 3man" or "2good 2time 1man." To indicate "good time-man" people
> tend to say "3good 1time 2man". I have never heard anything but "3good 1hair
> 2day", which suggest to me that most people parse it "bad hair-day" and not
> "bad-hair day". Of course, stress in English is enormously complex--and
> varies dialectally.
>