'word' words

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:40 AM -0700 4/28/08, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Apr 28, 2008, at 9:06 AM, Larry Horn wrote about "collie dog" and
>the like.
>
>i'm trying to keep score here.  i *think* we've looked at four
>different phenomena:
>
>1. contrastive focus reduplication ("It's wasn't a DATE-date")
>
>2. subtype + type ("collie dog", "borscht soup", "kimono robe", etc.);
>is there a name for these things?
>
>3. bilingual redundancy ("Mount Fujiyama")
>
>4. abbreviation redundancy ("ATM machine')
>
>have i missed anything (beyond subtypes of these four)?
>
>arnold
>
In a sense, 2, 3, and 4 might be called subtypes of a supertype of
"creeping opacity" or "lost transparency", while 1 is different (and
arguably doesn't involve semantic redundancy at all, since it yields
a hyponym of the reduplicated category).  "Mount Fujiyama" denotes
'Fujiyama', "collie dog" denotes 'dog', and "ATM machine" denotes
'ATM', but "DATE date" doesn't denote 'date'.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org