color<>structure

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Oct 29, 2010, at 12:42 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

>
> A bizarre little twist in sentence structure from Politico:
>
> http://politi.co/cDEPbz
>> The Commission, finding *the color's white structure* a bit tacky, did
>> insist that it be bronze colored.
>
> It took me several tries to figure out what happened. And I am still not
> positive, but, it seems, they simply flipped the words "color" and
> "structure".  The question remains as to how this might have been
> accomplished. It could not be a mere accident--the possessive structure
> has been retained and the words are not next to each other. So the
> change must have been deliberate. So I am stuck scratching my head,
> asking, "What were they thinking?"

this is reversal/exchange/transposition of two words with phrasal accent, preserving inflectional morphology. two exx from my files:

I’m beginning to lose faith that the walls on the clock [for "the clocks on the wall"] are correct.
  (Walt Wolfram, chairing NWAV section, 10/21/05) [note preservation of plural inflection in situ]

"We, again, have a very difficult bridge to gap here, because I know that this is something that we don't want to look at."
  (Republican House Whip Eric Cantor, during President Obama’s health care summit in late February 2010)

more in Fromkin's materials. my impression is that it's more common in speech than in writing, but it does happen in writing too.

arnold

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