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[bwald]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Isidore Dyen writes with respect to such constructions as "workaholic":
 
>I think that it might be important to add to the discussion that these
>forms are artificialloy constructed and in that respect fall in with words
>like AIDS or is it AIDs and CIA and G-man and the gamut that have
>sprung up in at least a partial connection with writing and thus
>differ from the types of analogical phenomena that appear in comparative
>studies.
 
I think ID raises a very interesting issue, but one which is more
problematic than he suggests.  To begin with, he no less than any other
reader recognises that the examples he has given above are different from
any of the examples we had been previously discussing, in that his examples
make reference in one way or another to spelling.  That is not true of the
examples, call them "condensed compounds" for the moment, that we have been
discussing.  Nevertheless, an interesting *burden of proof* issue arises
between those like ID who suggest that the types of condensations that give
rise to "workaholic" and other examples -- indeed what ARE other examples
and what are NOT? -- can only arise from some kind of literate perception
of the condensed words (this is certainly NOT obvious), and those like me,
who might say: PROVE IT! or at least, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK SO?
 
For example, take "workaholic".  ID's idea seems to be that the -aholic is
abstracted by some literate means.  I can't really follow this, and even
the variation in spelling of the unstressed vowel *a*holic vs.
(alc)*o*holic seems to argue against this.  But I don't insist this is a
strong argument against his assumption.  A stronger argument against, I
think, has to do with such diminutive derivatives as "alkie" for
"alcoholic" (= a person who drinks too much), which, without any hint of
literacy, abstracts, "back-clips" (thanks, Jim Rader and Hans Marchand) or
"stumps" the first "syllable", leaving -oholic free by implication.  OK.
Why do I say -oholic is free by implication?  Well, I haven't totally
thought this through, but I think the stumping technique and its residual
can be compared to the Romance (and more generally learned) stratum in
English where speakers, whether literate or not, can generally perceive
multi-morpheme combinations that recombine, but do not have the slightest
idea what the constituent morphemes "mean" -- and indeed that poses a
problem for us linguists to decide how to deal with them, cf. defect,
perfect (say the verb), effect, detain, pertain, retain, etc etc.  Again, I
think people are quite clear about the constituent parts but quite unclear
(and unconcerned) about their meanings in a great many Romance formations
in English.  (malaprops also show perception of constituent parts of
Romance formations, e.g., defuse for diffuse, prevert for pervert, or
whatever ones actually occur).  Thus, such Romance forms provide a
precedent (if that's historically relevant) to splitting things like
"alcoholic" into constituents morphemes "alc+oholic".  In fact, the latter
are much more motivated than the Romance forms, since "alkie" gives the
"alcohol content" of the alc-, and leaves -oholic for "addict", etc.  I
agree with ID that many forms like "workaholic" might have been coined by
literate users for literate purposes (cf. the journalese proliferation of
"-gate" forms for political scandals), but not that the technique
presupposes literacy and could not happen/start without literacy.
 
"cheeseburger" might be quite different from "workaholic", in that "burger"
alone "fore-clips" "hamburger".  No literacy seems necessary, certainly no
more than in "gator" for "alligator" (cf. "gatorade", wherever that came
from -- Florida?  And NB "telephone" > "phone" does not presuppose the
morphological independence of "tele", why not also for "microphone",
"megaphone" and what-not, whoops "phone" also means "allophone" in one
obscure jargon.)  Thus, "cheeseburger" seems to be simply a convenience for
"cheese hamburger", and not as complex as "workaholic" in its origin.  All
of this, of course, depends somewhat on whether "burger" as an independent
word came into existence BEFORE OR AFTER "hamburger" (something we may
never know, though it might seem almost within our reach to know, ESP, and
NOTE THIS, if the origins of the two were ORAL, and their order of written
appearance is relatively close -- as is probable -- and arbitrary. In fact,
except for "dialect representation", we might expect "burger", like
"gator", to be suppressed in written language until it had spread quite
widely, leaving doubt about its true chronological relationship to the
emergence of "cheeseburger" and the rest of the (-)burger family. EG one
abridged 1994 dictionary gives "cheeseburger" from 1938 but does not
acknowledge "burger" EXCEPT as a combined = dependent form, ignoring that
"burger" has been short for "hamburger" to my ears for
I-don't-know-how-long, many decades at least.  Surprisingly, this
dictionary, despite its intentional incompleteness, does list "gator" from
1844, no initial apostrophe or hyphen.)
 
A final comment on this matter, which may be relevant to the "literacy"
issue, but I'm not sure how, is that "workaholic" and many such structures
have a certain humor or cleverness about them that suggests conscious
manipulation.  That in itself does not suggest literacy to me.  But it
contrasts the technique with the stump compound, which seems to be most
often just a convenience which reduces or *abbreviates* -- something also
done by such uncontroversially literate techniques as those which produce
AIDS (acronyms) or CIA, LA etc.(crude initial abbreviations), without any
humor and, in fact, often with a *bureaucratic tediousness* about them (but
there is something humourous to me, at least, in referring to people by the
initials of their names, e.g., BW and ID etc etc, so immediate context is
important too -- similarly, humour or cleverness was a feature of many
acronyms in 1960s-80s political discourse, cf. NOW!, and a crude kind of
rhyming humour in things like "high fi" and "sci fi", the long vowel of
"fi" in both cases also depending on spelling).  But, in general, stump
compounds and the spelling-reference types are relatively boring,
convenient for users and opaque to non-users.  Not so for either the
"workaholic" or "cheeseburger" type (with regard to opacity), or for the
"monokini" and "glitterati" types (with respect to specialised humour)
about which more could be said.    It may be that ID is confusing ALL (or
TOO MANY) condensation techniques involving multi-word expressions with
those which have a transparent literate base, though I find it hard to
believe that he might have no more basis for his claim.  As I said above,
if he has more of a basis, WHAT IS IT?
 
In a separate matter, ID replied to my comments on GG (or UG) and
historical ling with:
 
>How about contemplating whether language change is inevitable. If it is
>not, theren should be some stable languages somewhere, If it is, then it
>must be inherent in all languages and thus a universal.
 
To which Jan Terje Faarlund replied:
 
>..Change in itself cannot be part of
>the system. The only interesting connection between universals and change
>is the fact that no change can lead to a result which violates UG.
 
I had been tempted to respond in a similar way, but I thought that ID was
writing this tongue-in-cheek, and also that he might escape by insisting
that "universal" does not necessarily mean "linguistic universal", since he
might deny, like many, that there are specific linguistic universals
unrelated to some more general cognitive or whatever universals, and that
"change" is one of them ("linguistic change" being part of "change", as
Faarlund observed with regard to social and biological change, i.e., life
and death, in his longer reply).  In view of this, I would agree with
Faarlund's use of "interesting" in the above passage as keeping comments
about LINGUISTIC change *on track*, but experience suggests to me that ID
would object to the adjective and say that "interesting" is not an argument
but an expression of taste.  I'll leave it at that.