Re: Question about a grammatical term

Christophe wrote:

<<Also,
both words are still pronounced as if they were independent, but that's true
of
German compound words too,>>

     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.   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.   You
don't say: "That's my WAter HEAter".   That would show right away that you
weren't a native speaker of English.

For an example of a compound noun that does work this way, why not "a BRICK
BUILding" or "a pair of RAdio SUNglasses".   In that last examples, notice
how "sunglasses" was originally probably "SUN GLA-sses".   As compounds
become more common, they switch to the normal compound stress, where the
first word in the compound gets normal stress, and the second loses all its
stress.

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 :(   ).

-David

"imDeziZejDekp2wilDez ZejDekkinel..."
"You can celebrate anything you want..."
               -John Lennon

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