Thomas Edison, how could you?

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:35 PM -0400 8/22/02, James A. Landau wrote:
>
>Now for a serious question.  English has a number of nouns that consist of
>verb+direct object, e.g. turnpike (the toll collector, once you have paid,
>turns the pike barring the road so that you may proceed), cutthroat,
>pickpocket, turncoat, turnkey, pinchpenny, cutpurse or snatchpurse.  This
>seems a very productive means of generating new nouns, but all the ones I
>listed go back to Georgian times or earlier.  Does anyone know why this
>particular means of word formation has been abandoned in English?
>
>And is it significant that most of the ones I cited refer to criminals?  Is
>this technique peculiar to English criminal argot of a certain period?
>
>Joanne "J. K." Rowlings used this technique in "The Prisoner of Azkaban" to
generate the name for a bus driver: "Stan Shunpike".  ...

I've come across many a "shunpike", used as Mark mentioned.

As for the theoretical issue, this actually came up earlier today
with a query about whether the British are more into the "exocentric"
kind (which "shunpike" and the others above would illustrate) than
U.S. speakers.  In any case, they are relatively rare in modern
English, compared say to French:  cf. "skyscraper" vs. "gratte-ciel",
"toothpick" vs. "cure-dent".  The facts in English have typically
been attributed to the strong head-final or right-hand headed
tendency in our language, the fact that the head of a lexical
construction tends to show up on the right.  One additional
consequence of this is that suffixes are much more likely to affect
the category of the stem they attach to than prefixes are.  It's not
that class-changing prefixes are non-existent but they are extremely
rare*, while class-changing suffixes are easy to find:  -ness (forms
deverbal nouns), -able (deverbal adjectives), -ly (deadjectival
adverbs), -ify/-ize (denominal verbs), etc.  Since the head of the
item is what determines its category, these are examples of what
Edwin Williams calls the Righthand Head Rule.  So are endocentric
compounds of the form AB, where the meaning is 'an A kind of B' or 'B
that has some relation to A'.   As to why English is more
right-headed (in lexical items) than, say, French, that's something
that has to be answered by more of a theoretician than I am.

larry

*If anyone's curious, possible counterexamples include
semi-productive en- or be- (encircle, belittle), while clear
counterexamples involve negative or privative prefixes:  denominal
verbs like "destem", "deball", "unman", "unpeel" and newer deverbal
formations like "no-fly", "no-skid", "no-lose", "non-stop", and so
on.  I have a story about this, but I'll spare you.