{"id":1050,"date":"2012-10-21T02:23:04","date_gmt":"2012-10-21T01:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/?p=1050"},"modified":"2012-12-09T22:35:50","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T06:35:50","slug":"my-york-dissertation-the-abstract","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/?p=1050","title":{"rendered":"York Dissertation: The Abstract"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I have recently completed my master&#8217;s degree for Linguistics at the University of York. I am publishing the title and modified abstract for the 15000 word dissertation I submitted in September 2012 here as a reference for fellow linguists who may be be interested in obsolete English compounds and their link to language development.\u00a0For any questions regarding the dissertation, Appendix A, or historical linguistics, please email: <em>hughes.brianne at gmail.com<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">=====\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u00a0=====<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>From Turncoats To Backstabbers:\u00a0<\/strong>How Headedness and Word Order\u00a0Determine the Productivity of Agentive and Instrumental Compounding in English<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">=====\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u00a0=====<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>Abstract:\u00a0<\/strong>According to a study by Clark et al (1986), English-speaking children spontaneously create exocentric V+N (<em>turncoat<\/em>) compounds during the development of agentive and instrumental compounding. Historically, the <em>turncoat <\/em>pattern has low productivity in English. Appendix A (attached) is a chronological list of all of the known <em>turncoat <\/em>compounds that entered English between 1050 and 2009. Only two new words of this pattern have been created in the past fifty years: <em>Xpel-air <\/em>and <em>Pesterchum<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><em>Turncoat <\/em>compounds are advantageous for children learning verb-object (VO) languages such as English and Spanish because the pattern mirrors the syntax. Forms which are simple and transparent in accordance to the headedness and word order of a language are productive for both children and adults. Patterns that are structurally unclear, or that conflict with syntactic features, will be abandoned.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">The advantage of simplicity that <em>turncoat <\/em>compounds offer to children is outweighed by its unmarked structure and\u00a0many semantic limitations. The synthetic N+V+er (<em>backstabber) <\/em>pattern, on the other hand, complies with the headedness of English, is not limited by semantic clumping or verb transitivity, and can describe neutral objects as productively as it can reductive insults. <em>Backstabber <\/em>compounds also flourish in West Germanic languages, which share right-headedness with English.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><em>Turncoat <\/em>compounds are memorable and evocative descriptors of objects and occupations, but because of their clash with the headedness of English, their productivity cannot be sustained. <em>Turncoat<\/em> compounds will never challenge <em>backstabber <\/em>compound productivity.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">=====\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u0283\u00a0=====<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have recently completed my master&#8217;s degree for Linguistics at the University of York. I am publishing the title and modified abstract for the 15000 word dissertation I submitted in September 2012 here as a reference for fellow linguists who may be be interested in obsolete English compounds and their link to language development.\u00a0For any [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564,154,572,571,567,402,540,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-564","category-best-post-ever","category-career","category-compounds","category-dissertation","category-english","category-university-of-york","category-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tankhughes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}