Re: noun compounds

On 3/6/06, caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...> wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
>
> >"For desert, we have apple and b.berry pie" -- could be either,
> >personally  I'd interpret it as two kinds of pie. Certainly we
> >USers say "For Thanksgiving, it's customary to have mince and
> pumpkin pie"-- >2 kinds of pie (love 'em both!!)
>
> Is it not a bit "dangerous" to say "we USers"?  "Mince and pumpkin
> pie" means, to me, only one kind of pie.  If I meant two different
> kinds of pie, I would say "mince and pumpkin pies" and let context
> determine the exact meaning.
>
> What's for dessert?
> Mince and pumpkin pie. (one kind)
> Mince and pumpkin pies. (two kinds)
The confusion clearly stems from the duality of "pie": it can be a
collective, referring to an entire class of food,  or an ordinary
singular noun, referring to a single instance of said class.  (A
duality shared by many other nouns, of course; it seems especially
common with food.)  Thus one can say "We have pumpkin pie for dessert"
(collective) as well as "We have a pumpkin pie for dessert" (singular)
or "We have pumpkin pies for dessert" (plural).  You can replace
"pumpkin" with "mince and pumpkin" in any of those three phrases, but
you get ambiguous meanings in the collective and plural cases.    IML,
 "We have mince and pumpkin pie for dessert" is simply ambiguous - it
could mean two different varieties of pie or one variety with two
components.

If I were the speaker, I might attempt to distinguish the two by
pronunciation, with the single-variety called something closer to
"mince'n'pumpkin" than "mince and pumpkin".   I claim that
"mince'n'pumpkin" would be a compound noun in that case.  But that
only helps if it is indeed "mince'n'pumpkin" pie under discussion; to
make the other meaning clear I would simply have to say "mince pie and
pumpkin pie".

-Marcos