Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy: Word formation constraints (reply to Dan Everett)

[Martha McGinnis]

Dan said, in reply to me:

>Back to Andrew C-M's proposal [that e.g. _couldn't-care-less_ in _a
>couldn't-care-less attitude_ should be classified as a phrasal word,
>i.e. not some kind of compound but a phrase, yet functioning as a
>word]. ... I am not sure how a new category of 'phrasal word' would
>help at all. The concept needs to be formalized. Perhaps this is
>done in Andrew's forthcoming book. I look forward to reading it.

Well, I feel a bit sheepish now at having put in such a shameless
plug for my forthcomingy book.  It is an *introductory* book, and is
aimed at English majors and trainee language teachers rather than
budding linguists, so, although it is 'formal' in the sense that I
aim for a clear and coherent set of definitions of technical terms,
it is not theoretically adventurous.  I merely use contrasts like
_halfbrother_ vs _brother-in-law_ vs _jack-in-the-box_ to justify a
distinction between compounds, phrases and phrasal words, this
distinction being independent of that between idioms and non-idioms
...

>The problem seems
>to be the need to recognize exocentric constructions motivated directly by
>the semantics, both requirements hard to state in formal theories (like
>DM). Well, anyway, that is what the paper claims. More on that when it is
>available.

... but I do venture into controversy, perhaps, when I discuss such
expressions as _American history teacher_ with its two
interpretations.  Are there two constructions, each one motivated by
its own semantics (as Dan might put it), or is there just one
construction, with two interpretations nevertheless available?

A traditional view is that there are two structures:
(1) [[American history] teacher]  'teacher of Am hist'
(2) [American [history teacher]]  'American teacher of hist'
But if this is correct, then the structure at (1) ought also to be
available for e.g. (3) and (4):
(3) [[interesting history] teacher] 'teacher of interesting history'
(4) [[suburban history] teacher] 'teacher of suburban history'
But this seems incorrect.  (3) and (4) can only mean
'interesting/suburban teacher of history'.  That suggests to me that
what makes the interpretation at (1) possible is not that the
bracketing at (1) is made available by the syntax/morphology (with a
N-bar inside a N -- a bit unwelcome!), but rather that the status of
American history as an *institutionalized* subfield of history can
force the interpretation at (1) on to the structure at (2).  This
analysis is heavily influenced by Andy Spencer's (in my view)
excellent article on bracketing paradoxes in Language 1988.

None of the structures at (1)-(4) is exocentric, under any plausible
bracketing, so they may seem irrelevant to Dan's point.  But I think
they are relevant to the wider issue of the extent to which 'formal'
grammatical (morphological or syntactic) structure determines
interpretation, even with expressions such as (1) and (2) that most
of us would hesitate to call idiomatic.
--
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
Professor and Acting Head of Department
Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag
4800, Christchurch, New Zealand
phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108
fax +64-3-364 2969
e-mail a.c-mcc at ling.canterbury.ac.nz
http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html