Stress & Juncture in "bad hair day"

[Laurence Horn]

Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

I share Rudy Troike's analysis of the stress pattern for "bad hair day",
and I have another nominee for the paradigm.  An article in yesterday's New
York Times sports section (1/26/2000, D5) on the preparations of Rams star
running back Marshall Faulk for next Sunday's Super Bowl notes Faulk's
reputation with losing teams in the past as "a moody and sometimes gloomy
presence" and quotes Faulk as acknowledging "I'm very moody when I don't do
well and the team is losing.  I think I deserve to be moody.  We're human
beings."  The article continues,

    At St. Louis, where the Rams have lost only three games, there has been
    more time to be jovial, although Faulk maintained today that he still
    has what he calls "bad mood" days.

I would guess that Faulk's "bad mood" days, like our bad hair days, has the
constituent structure [[bad mood] days], and that it has it has the 3 1 2
stress pattern.  Crucially, neither [bad hair] nor [bad mood] is a compound
[N N] nominal (cf. blackbird days, badman days) and is therefore itself
nuclear stressed, but when it combines with a noun it yields an [N N]
structure with compound stress, exactly as Rudy describes.


>Dear dInIs et al.,
>
>        I hate to weigh in on this, but I can't resist. Back in Jurassic
>days, where a few of us come from, structural linguists of the
>Trager-Smith school (bitterly opposed by most "dialectologists") marked
>compounds with not only stresses, but junctures (the transitions between
>words and constructions) as well. Linguists generally have totally lost
>the vocabulary for talking intelligibly about such things (the general
>interest among phonologists having gone to OT constraints).
>        Using the grouping indicated by Dennis, but recognizing that as
>the layers of the onion build up, some word-level stresses get
>successively reduced (as per Chomsky & Halle Sound Patterns of English --
>does anybody remember that?), I have
>
>                ( ( bad  hair ) + ( day ) )
>                  (  2    1   )   (   1 )
>                (    3    1     +     2   )
>