Motivation in English Compound Nouns [2]
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关键词:MotivationEnglishCompound Nounsmeaninglanguage
falling into this type have the nominalized verb plus its object. For instance, 'haircut' is paraphrased as "X cuts the hair", and 'pickpocket', "X picks the pocket". Other examples are: 'scarecrow' (X scares the crow) ,'neck-shave' (X shaves the neck), 'birth-control' (X controls the birth),etc.
1.1.3 Verb plus Adverbial
While the last two types are highly transparent, the syntactic relation in this one, due to the involvement of different kinds of adverbials, is not so easy to detect. There are altogether five forms as illustrated below:
'swimming pool' (pool for swimming)
'daydreaming' (X dreams during the day)
'homework' (X works at home)
'city-dweller' (X dwells in city)
'searchlight' (X searches with light)
1.2 Verbless compounds
After a detailed discussion of the syntactic motivation in compounds containing a verb, now we have come to those verbless ones. Lees (1960) derives noun +noun compounds like 'windmill' and 'flour mill' from underlying NP + VP strings like 'wind powers the mill' and 'the mill grinds the flour' respectively. This means that an indefinite number of verbs, a number which is potentially unlimited, can be deleted on the way to the surface structure in the grammar of any language that has compounds of this form.
The problem is that the deletion involved in moving from the deep to the surface structure in compounds like those mentioned above is non-recoverable if they are generated in this fashion, because a set of verbs, not one verb unambiguously, may have been deleted. For instance, 'police-dog' could be derived from an underlying 'the dog serves the police', 'the police uses the dog', 'the dog works with the police', or some other structure entirely.
Leaving the disputes aside, we assume that an underlying syntactic relation does exist in these compounds, whatever the possible verb could be. This point of view explains motivation in a large collection of verbless compounds. There are some more examples:
'steam engine' (steam powers the engine)
'sugar cane' (cane yields sugar)
'shirt-sleeves' (shirt contains sleeves)
'shopassistant' (shop provides (a job) for assistant)
'human experiment' (experiment is made on human)
'homeletter ' (letter is sent from home)
To sum up, a certain syntactic relation can be built between the two bases of a compound , which labels those compounds as motivated ,and thus transparent, linguistic sign. However, in some cases, it is hard to find such a syntactic motivation. Instead, the meaning can be inferred from a deeper semantic level involving psychological association.
2.Semantic motivation in noun compounds
2.0A second type of motivation is due to semantic factors, based upon the most peculiar trait of changes of meaning: the co-existence of old sense and new within the same synchronous system. (Ullmann, 1957) As long as the figurative--metaphoric, analogical, metonymic, etc.-- character of such transfer is present to the speaker's mind, motivation exists. 'Foot' continues to denote the human limb while at the same time it is used metaphorically to refer to the lowest part of hills or other objects. It is again a case for "relative arbitrariness ": the ' foot of the hill ' is called that way because of its similarity to the human organ, but the name of the latter is purely arbitrary. So is the case with some compounds, whose motivation can be interpreted into different semantic relations between the signifier, as a whol
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