THEORY: [CONLANG] Compounded compounds.

Dirk Elzinga, On 29/06/2007 03:08:
> The Compound Stress Rule should provide a way to disambiguate
> compounds. Try this one: 'Chinese art dealer'. If the intended reading
> is "a dealer of Chinese art", the constituency will be [[Chinese art]
> dealer] and one might expect main stress on 'Chinese'. If the intended
> reading is "an art dealer from China", the constituency is [Chinese
> [art dealer]], and the expected stress will be on 'art'.
>
> (My intuition is actually a bit different from what the Compound
> Stress Rule would predict. For the first reading, "a dealer of Chinese
> art," I find that compound stress is on 'art', but word stress for
> 'Chinese' is on the second syllable. For the second reading, I find
> that the "Rhythm Rule" has applied and, while compound stress is still
> on 'art', word stress for 'Chinese' is now on the first syllable. That
> is, 'Chinèse árt dealer' vs 'Chìnese árt dealer'. I just asked my
> wife, and it appears that the intuitions are rather subtle here. But I
> stand by mine.)
??? Since _Chinese_ is an adjective, stress should be [[Chinese ART] dealer] and
[Chinese [ART dealer]]. And since _art_ is stressed in both, shift from chiNESE
to CHInese shd occur in both.

I can't think how the Compound Stress Rule could disambiguate compounds (except
where there is an adjective/noun ambiguity) by virtue of main stress. But it
should be able to disambiguate through secondary stress, e.g.
'SOUP kitchen ,spoon attack "the kind of spoon attack one learns in a soup kitchen"
with secondary stress
in contrast to
'SOUP kitchen spoon attack "attack with a soup kitchen spoon", "attack with kitchen
spoon performed with soup" without secondary stress.

What would you say is the best reference on the stress patterns of English
noun--noun syntagms? (Best in the sense of grappling with full complexity of
the data.)

--And.