Re: New coinage?

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Ben Zimmer's comments are really helpful. Still, I think I can readily make 
up examples, though I also have the intuition that people would find them odd.

1 a. The politician has a passion for baby kissing.
    b. The politicain baby-kissed his way across Kansas
    c. The politican baby-kissed 37 infants in Kansas City.
2. a. The chicken was one of the flu-spreading birds found in rural areas.
     b. The chicken flu-spread throughout a wide area on rural Oz.
     c.   The chicken flu-spread the disease in rural Oz.
3. a. Alvin has a passion for birthday-card sending.
     b. Alvin has been birthday-card sending all his adult life.
     c. Alvin birthday-card-sent me an obscene greeting.

I supppose that one could argue that, unlike my examples (2) and (3), 
"name-call(ing)" is an independent lexical item the meaning of which is greater than 
the sum of its parts. And there are obvious grammatical compexities in the 
differences in the ways that the three sets of sentences work. Still, would any 
speaker of English complain that the "c" sentences are morphosyntactically 
"ungrammatical"?

In a message dated 8/9/05 12:25:46 AM, bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU writes:


> 
> "N-V" back-formations from deverbal compounds "N-Ving" or "N-Ver" are not
> uncommon, but I think they're notable enough to warrant lexicographic
> recognition. And I'd say "name-call" is even more notable, since it
> doesn't fall easily into one of the typical categories of such
> back-formations, e.g.:
> 
> 1) N is the recipient of trans V (bartend, bootlick, copy-edit, housekeep,
> match-make)
> 
> 2) N is the instrument of trans V (bottle-feed, bow-hunt, finger-pick,
> pan-broil, spear-fish)
> 
> 3) N has a locative relationship to intrans V (sky-dive, star-gaze,
> sun-bathe)
> 
> "Name-call" is similar to type #1, except that V is ditransitive-- there's
> an implied indirect object, which becomes the direct object of N-V when
> used transitively (call s.o. a name -> name-call s.o.)  Off the top of my
> head, I can't think of any other back-formations that work this way
> (though I'm sure they're out there).
> 
> 
> --Ben Zimmer
>