Hi there neighbor. I’m doing something about compounds in English and Spanish for my MA Linguistics dissertation, and I’m 2-weeks in, and already knee-deep in books and articles about Romance compounding, exocentric synthetic compounds in English, deverbal complex words and right-hand-headedness. It’s crazy-go-nuts.
Just today I was thinking to myself, “Brianne, you’ve really gone down the compounding rabbithole…” and I immediately responded, “RABBITHOLE! ANOTHER COMPOUND!!” And then the first Brianne shook her head.
I’m learning some really interesting things that make me say “OH!” outloud in the quiet fairhurst building, (sorry fellow students), and I’ll share them when I have a more concrete direction that will make some of this preliminary research unusable, but for now this post is just a friendly resource for me to point new acquaintances to when I ooh and aah over compounds that appear naturally in conversation. Foolproof, handbook, footprint, pickpocket, straitjacket. I’m going to do this for the next 5 months…. at least.
April 29, 2012