Re: Question about a grammatical term

En réponse à David Peterson <DigitalScream@...>:

>
>      I hate to rain on everyone's agreement parade, but this is just not
> true
> (not true for English, I mean).   The words are NOT pronounced as if
> they
> were independent, and this is easy to see.
Better than! German compounds are rather special as each component keeps its
own stress (or makes a secondary stress of it). If those expressions get only
one stress, it means that their status of compound cannot be doubted! I had
used the German example to prevent arguments of the like: "but if both
components are stressed it cannot be compounds anymore".

   Take the words:
>
> cooler
> court
> heater
> beater
>
> Put them in a sentence, like:   "That's my x."   With each one of
> these
> words, you'll notice that there's a stress on the first syllable (for
> "court", a stress on the word).   Now put those in compounds:
>
> water cooler
> basketball court
> water heater
> egg beater
>
> And try again: "That's my WAter cooler"; "That's my BASketball court";
> "That's my WAter heater"; "That's my EGG beater".   (I could do this
> in
> SAMPA, but this is clear enough, I hope.   Caps = stress.)   Note that
> the
> first nouns in the compounds are pronounced as usual, but the second
> nouns
> all lose all their stress--that is, the whole word becomes unstressed.
Completely unstressed, or does it keep a bit of secondary stress?

> You
> don't say: "That's my WAter HEAter".   That would show right away that
> you
> weren't a native speaker of English.
>
Well, I know a few native English speakers that do pronounce compounds that
way :)) . Maybe it's their particular dialect.

>
> Point is: Compounds are different from two nouns in juxtaposition (where
> one
> noun modifies the other.   You guys know the terminology.   It was too
> thick
> for me :(   ).
>
Well, you think you've disagreed with me, but actually you made my point even
better :)) : those expressions, although written as separate words, are really
unseparable compounds. The presence of a single stress is an irrefutable proof
(once again, the German example was there only to show that the presence of
more than one stress could not necessarily rule out compounding :)) ).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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