Team Fill-in-the-Blank

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Feb 20, 2007, at 2:43 PM, Leslie Savan wrote:

>        Does anyone have an idea of when or how this construction
> began to really catch on?: "Team Obama," "Team Macintosh," "Team
> Get er Done" on MySpace, "Team Guido" (not the Guido team or the
> Guidoes) on The Amazing Race. "Team Toyota" is a 1996 book, but
> surely Team X goes much further back...

not quite the same thing, but related, are the postposed modifiers in
"Target America", "Operation Petticoat", "Mission Impossible", etc.
discussed by Geoff Nunberg on Language Log:

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003447.html

Geoff takes the pattern back to World War I and notes that it is
surely borrowed from French.  the pattern was also borrowed in a
handful of (originally) head-first compounds like "attorney general"
and "poet laureate" -- on which, see Geoff Pullum at

   http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003438

the head-first pattern is also found in an assortment of anarthrous
proper names with specific head nouns: "Mount" (vs. "Mountain", which
takes the usual head-final pattern of english), as in "Mount
Tamalpais" and "Mount Pleasant". ("Lake" and "Point" are versatile,
occurring in both the head-final and the head-first pattern.
arthrous proper names -- with heads like "Bridge", "Building",
"Freeway", "Museum", "Ocean", "River", and "Sea" -- are, of course,
obligatorily head-final.)

all of these compounds, regardless of the ordering of head and
modifier and regardless of the part of speech of the modifier, are
accented on the second element; this is general for compounds that
are proper names, and is opposite to the usual accent pattern for
noun compounds in english.  (the exception is for a small set of head
nouns that throw the accent back onto the first element: "Street",
"Town", etc.  my old paper on this stuff is now available at:
http://www.stanford.edu/~zwicky/forestress-and-afterstress.pdf )

while i'm on the subject: the generalization about accent applies as
well to the mock proper names of the form "X City", regardless of the
category of the first element: "Fist City" (N), "Random City" (Adj),
"Weep City" (V).

arnold

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