Who is Rosetta Stone?

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jan 23, 2006, at 12:17 PM, Larry Horn wrote:

>> On Jan 23, 2006, at 10:12 AM, Larry Horn asks:
>>
>>> OK, but is it "the RoSETta Stone" or "the Rosetta STONE"?
>>
>> for me, clearly the former.  it's like "the BRILL Building" (not "the
>> Brill BUILDing").
>>
>> as far as i know, the arthrous/anarthrous (i *so* rarely get to use
>> those wonderful terms) choice is pretty much independent of the
>> forestress/afterstress choice.
>>
> Indeed, "Building", as in "the BRILL Building" or "the Empire STATE
> Building", definitely retracts stress, the way "Street" but not
> "Avenue" does.  Again, this is (for me) because Street is the
> unmarked member of its category while Avenue/Road/Way/... are not...

this is more-or-less right, but there are some subtleties here, which
you can see by noticing that "city" gets the stress, but "town"
retracts it: Johnson CITy, JOHNson Town.  i find it hard to think of
"town" as (these days) the unmarked locality name.

the big generalization is that compound proper names have
afterstress, but that certain second elements retract stress.  my
guess is that people just learn these facts.  they do, however, have
a historical explanation, having to do with the backgrounding of
default labels in some domain.  the difference between "city" and
"town" probably reflects the role these two sorts of localities had a
hundred or more years ago.

there are domains in which no label has gotten established as the
default, so all second elements are stressed ("University",
"College", "Institution", "Institute", "Tech", etc.; "School"
retracts stress, but isn't generally available for reference to
institutions of higher learning, though on the occasions where it is,
as in the New School, it retracts stress).  there are also domains
where one label is very much the predominant one, but still maintains
stress, while a much less frequent alternative retracts stress: most
campus buildings are Halls, but "Hall" nevertheless keeps its stress,
while "Building" -- the Administration Building, the Engineering
Building -- retracts stress.

what i'm saying is that the system is (to a large degree) rational,
but that it's probably learned as a conventionalized system.  which
actually makes things easier on learners, who don't have to keep
trying to work things out from first principles, but can just pick up
easy rules from what they hear.

arnold

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