WHEN NOUNS SURFACE AS VERBS 5 page

A fourth type of pre-emption works by homonymy instead of synonymy, as stated in this principle:

(28) Principle of pre-emption by homonymy: If a potential innovative denominal verb is homonymous with a well-established verb and could be confused with it, the innovative verb is normally pre-empted, and therefore is considered unacceptable.

So Jan Dodged to New York, meaning ‘Jan went to New York by a Dodge’, is normally unacceptable, because it would be confused with the common verb meaning ‘shift suddenly’. The same goes for Jan Forded to New York, though the parallel construction Jan Chevied to New York is quite all right in the appropriate contrastive context. To take another semantic domain: to summer, autumn, and winter in France is acceptable, but to spring and fall in France is not, being pre-empted by the homonymous common verbs spring and fall. When marked for past tense, as in She springed and falled in France, they get even worse: the speaker now sounds as if he had also added the wrong inflections. Homonymy, then, is still another source of pre-emption.

4.5. Ready computability. Condition (c) on its own requires that the sense of a denominal verb be one that the listener can compute readily. The idea is that, although some denominal verbs may be comprehensible on every other count, they may not be readily computable in this context by this particular listener. As an analogy, imagine that Helen told Sam, I asked Linda and Winifred over tonight, but the older one couldn’t make it. If Linda and Winifred were of similar age, and Helen knew that Sam couldn’t figure out which was older without considerable thought, she shouldn’t have referred to Winifred as the older one. Its referent, although computable, cannot be computed readily. She could have used the latter instead, since its referent is computed readily from information easily accessible in what she said. The relative acceptability of the older one and the latter, then, depends not merely on computability, but on ready computability. These examples have their parallels in innovative denominal verbs.

In order for the sense of an innovation to be computed readily, the listener must ordinarily be able to bring to mind very quickly the information necessary for its computation. Many people, for example, would find It’s stratusing right now, uttered by the first person they met in the morning, to be unacceptable – even though, with some thought, they could figure out what it meant. But said by a television weather reporter, in a discussion about cloud formation (as it actually was), it is quite acceptable. In that context, the listener finds it easy to recall that stratus is a type of cloud, and to see that the speaker must be talking about cloud formation. Similarly, My telephone was Hoovered once would be unacceptable in many contexts, since it would be difficult to discover the eponym J. Edgar Hoover and to sift through all we know about his activities to arrive at wiretapping. But in a conversation about FBI wiretapping, an utterance of the same sentence is fully acceptable. Accessible information seems to be crucial to ready computability.

Accessibility of information can also make a difference to what a verb is taken to mean, since one criterion for the salience of a particular kind of situation is its accessibility in memory. Thus, in Roger speared a cake of soap, spear would ordinarily be taken in one of its conventional senses, 'pierce as with a spear’. But in a conversation on how Roger had managed to carve soap into different shapes for a display on hunting, it would be taken as an innovative denominal verb meaning ‘form into the shape of a spear’. In this context, the conventional meaning of spear is pre-empted, not merely because Roger’s carving activities are mutually known by the speaker and listener, but also because that knowledge is readily accessible. The speaker can be confident the listener will see this information to be relevant, simply because it is so accessible in this context. So the constraint on ready computability is an important part of the innovative denominal verb convention.

4.6. Rhetorical considerations. Why invent denominal verbs? The main reason, perhaps, is economy of expression. As Grice notes, the speaker who observes the cooperative principle will try to avoid unnecessary prolixity. When someone says I guitared my way across the US, he is trying to pack into guitar what would otherwise have taken him many words to express. This economy is especially useful in new areas of technology for which there are too few verbs for situations that occur constantly. In computer circles, for example, people have evolved such denominal verbs as key in the data, flowchart the program, program the system, output the results, and CRT the trace, along with many others that are utterly opaque to outsiders. New technologies seem to be responsible for many of the denominal verbs that are now very common – Xerox, telephone, wire, radio, and paperclip. In each case, a complicated situation is expressed economically in a single verb.

Economy of expression apparently has its rewards. First, there is precision. For the hospital worker, autoclave the scalpels is more precise than sterilize the scalpels, and yet takes no longer to say. Second, there is vividness. For a political writer, it is more effective, to say The mayor tried to Richard Nixon the tapes of the meeting than to use erase in place of Nixon. The allusion to Nixon calls forth an image of an unscrupulous politician trying desperately to cover his tracks – an image that even a longer description could never capture adequately. There seems to be an intrinsic value to making allusions without belaboring them. Third, there is surprise. Jokes, witticisms, and other rhetorical devices depend for their effect on surprise, which in turn depends on economy of expression. This effect is exploited daily by such newspaper columnists as Herb Caen: The SF Progress is not a biweekly, as erratum’d here yesterday, but a semi-weekly, and Chevy [Chase] especially has been chop-sticking all over the place, starting with Kan’s.

When economy of expression is taken too far, it loses its ready computability, and the result is inelegant. Some verbs seem inelegant because they are cumbersome, as in We Fourth-of-July’d at Lake Tahoe. This inelegance, however, is sometimes used deliberately, for comic effect, as in Punch’s He extract-of-beefed his bread. Other verbs require so much extra work in computing that the effort doesn’t seem worth it. While the attested example Karen weekended in the country seems good enough, Karen Saturdayed in the country does not. It appears that the effort demanded for computing Saturdayed outweighs any economy of expression, although this too may be an asset for comic effects.

There are also some clear cases of morphological confusion, where an innovation is unacceptable because its parent noun is already inflected for tense or number. Compare these forms:

(29) *John United’d/ United-Airlines'd/ Trailways’d to Los Angeles.

(30) John UA’d/ American’d/ Greyhounded/ Air-California’d/ Hughes-Air-wested/ PSA’d to Los Angeles.

In 29 the verbs are cumbersome: they seem difficult to parse, and their parent nouns difficult to identify. It isn’t just the double inflections in 29 that make them awkward, for they are equally unacceptable in infinitival constructions:

(31) *John decided to United/ United-Airlines/ Trailways to Los Angeles.

In these verbs, the inflections on the parent nouns seem to conflict with construing the verbs as infinitives. Note, however, that the adjective-forming suffix in American in 30 does not lead to such unacceptability. In general, then, parent nouns ending in -ed or -s lead to morphologically confusing innovations, avoided because they are not so readily computable.

4.7. Syntactic constraints. By condition (f), the kind of situation that a verb denotes must encompass the parent noun plus all the verb’s surface arguments. For Julia centrifuged the solution, the kind of situation denoted must simultaneously involve Julia, centrifuges, and the solution – not just Julia and centrifuges, or just centrifuges and the solution. That can be done if Julia is an agent, the solution is the patient of her action, and the centrifuge is the instrument by which her action is carried out. This constraint, along with conditions (a)–(e), is fulfilled if centrifuge is taken to mean ‘separate by means of a centrifuge’. The kind of situation denoted by a verb, then, will change with the surface arguments present. Tent has different meanings in David tented the blanket; David tented the baby before the storm hit; The marines tented the hillside; and David tented near the river, each depending on the surface arguments present. This condition, of course, has played a critical role in our discussions of mutual knowledge, kinds of situations, specificity, and ready computability.

Many innovative verbs require more inferential filling in than either centrifuge or tent, because the parent noun does not play such a direct role in the kind of situation denoted. Consider these five uses of siren (34–35 are examples we have actually heard):

(32) The fire stations sirened throughout the raid.

(33) The factory sirened midday and everyone stopped for lunch.

(34) The police sirened the Porsche to a stop.

(35) The police car sirened up to the accident.

(36) The police car sirened the daylights out of me.

In 32 the siren’s role is already indirect, since siren means ‘produce a wailing sound by means of a siren’; and in 33–36, it is this sound that is critical. In 33–34, the sound is used as a signal – for midday in 33, and for the Porsche to stop in 34 – but the way it works in the two instances is distinctly different. In 33 it is a time marker, and in 34 a police warning; these two aspects are meant to be taken as part of the situations denoted. In 35, the siren’s role is still less direct. To account for the police car doing something involving a siren up to the accident, one is led to the sense ‘drive quickly accompanied by the sound produced by a siren’. The warning function of the siren here is less central. Example 36 is particularly interesting, for it is a syntactic blend of siren and the idiom scare the daylights out of. The superficial arguments the daylights and (out of) me together signal the presence of the idiom, and siren itself requires that this scare involve a siren. One is therefore led to the sense ‘scare by means of the sound produced by a siren’. Syntactic blends of this sort are not uncommon.

This sketch of syntactic constraints brings out two points. First, the interpretation of an innovative verb is strongly constrained by its syntactic environment. This is hardly surprising. But second, these constraints do not work in a vacuum. To distinguish the interpretations of siren midday and siren the Porsche to a stop, one must know the difference between factory and police sirens, and how they are used. To interpret Ed’s teapot the policeman, one must know even more. So syntactic constraints must be considered along with all the other conditions placed on interpretations – conditions (a)–(e). No single constraint will suffice.

5. Innovations versus idioms. Innovations that are contextuals are common in other areas of the language too. Among noun compounds we find egg plate (said of a plate decorated with pictures of eggs), mystery woman (said of a woman who wrote mystery stories), and umbrella head (said of a man who wore an umbrella on his head). Downing argues that these cannot be handled by derivation. Among denominal adjectives we find Stonehengey (said of a man with conservative views), dinnery (said of food more appropriate for dinner than for other meals), and Beethoveny (said of music that sounded as if Beethoven could have composed it). Among possessives we find Justin’s bus (the bus Justin watched yesterday), my tree (the tree I always point out as we pass), and Erie Stanley Gardner’s lawyer (Perry Mason, the lawyer Gardner created). And among shorthand expressions we find two Picassos (two people who paint much like Picasso), my street (the majority of adults on my street), and San Francisco (the basketball team based in San Francisco). These four categories are just a sample of the places in English where innovations are common.

Like denominal verbs, these categories span the continuum from innovation to idiom (or well-established construction). Among noun compounds, for instance, contrasting with the innovations are virtually opaque idioms like bulldog, thunder-mug, and tinderbox; while birdcage, dogsled, and bookshelf probably lie in the middle. But just what is this innovation-idiom continuum? We will consider this question briefly from four different points of view: the history of English, the acquisition of English by the child, the processing of English by the language user, and the synchronic description of English. Each viewpoint yields a somewhat different answer. In our discussion we will use only denominal verbs as illustrations, but the points we make are equally applicable to other types of innovation as well.

5.1. Historical change. Nearly every denominal verb in the lists above, we assume, was introduced into English as an innovation. This is generally confirmed by the OED – though there may be exceptions. Each verb, then, arrived at its present form by a complex historical process we will call idiomatization. Because the process is gradual, each verb passes through several stages on its way from innovation to idiom; and because fresh verbs are being introduced into this process all the time, at any moment there are verbs at each stage. We tentatively propose six stages in this process, and illustrate each with examples from present-day-English.

(a) Complete innovations. Denominal verbs begin their lives as complete
innovations. To our ears, Wayne, Cagney, pie, erratum, and bargain-counter are complete innovations. Some may remain nonce forms, while others may proceed to the next stage.

(b) Near-innovations. When a speaker or group of speakers uses an innovation more than once, and it is recognized as the same form, then we have a near-innovation. Thus Herb Caen has used houseguest and chopstick more than once, and readers have begun to recognize these as ‘his’ words. Once again, these may or may not proceed to the next stage.

(c) Half-assimilated transparent idioms. Some verbs become transparent idioms for one group of speakers, but remain innovations for everyone else. Key in the data, for example, appears to be idiomatic among computerniks, as noted earlier, but it is still perceived as an innovation by the rest of us. Satellite the broadcast was probably idiomatic within CBS before it was used on television, where it was perceived by most viewers as innovative. For verbs at this stage to move on to the next, they must generally be transparent to the outgroup, as both key in and satellite are.

(d) Assimilated transparent idioms. Verbs like bicycle, truck, crowbar, and paperclip appear to be fully assimilated into English as verbs, even though their interpretations are fully transparent. We would know what they meant even if we hadn’t heard them before.

(e) Partly specialized idioms. A great many verbs are no longer entirely transparent because they have become partly specialized. Four we have already mentioned are smoke a pipe, park the car, ground the plane (‘keep down’), and land the plane (‘bring down’). Land, for instance, was originally used in navigation to mean ‘disembark’. Earlier in this century, it was transferred (along with many other navigational terms) to aeronautics – for airplanes putting down on land from the air. When airplanes were designed to put down on water, the idiomatization was apparently so complete that it didn’t seem odd to ‘land’ on water.

(f) Opaque idioms. Many verbs have come to have such obscure denominal origins that, for most people, they are completely opaque. Boycott, dun, diddle, and fudge are based on the names of long forgotten individuals, and most people now think of them as verbs pure and simple. Charleston and shanghai are based on familiar place names, but few people know the connection. Riddle and ferret are based on common nouns unfamiliar or unknown to most people. Slate, badger, and beef are based on familiar nouns, but few people are aware of the noun-verb relations.

Not all denominal verbs will pass through the stages in this order, or even complete the series. A verb like key in could lose its transparency within the computer community even before it is assimilated into English; and verbs like ground and eye will probably never become opaque. The majority of denominal verbs, it seems, have become assimilated just because they are virtually transparent. This makes them readily understood by people who have never heard them before, especially children, and they are therefore readily maintained with a stable meaning. Yet when there is a lexical gap that could usefully be filled, opaque verbs like lynch, boycott, and pander are also readily maintained – but as verbs unconnected to nouns.

Because one of the main functions of idiomatization is the creation of special-purpose verbs, dictionaries are strewn with partly specialized idioms. The verbs formed from shell, as listed in the OED, are quite typical: ‘remove (a seed) from its shell’, ‘expel (a growth)’, ‘shed (milkteeth)’, ‘drop out of a shell’, ‘remove the shell of, ‘bring forth as from a shell’, ‘scale off’, ‘enclose in a shell’, ‘furnish with shells for collecting oyster spawn’, ‘spread shells on’, ‘bombard with shells’, and ‘drive out by shelling’. Many of these senses are utterly unfamiliar to modern ears, as we would expect. Such specialized senses should be abandoned when the object is no longer is use, as in to archie or to roneo (Partridge); when the object no longer has the particular use, as in Zeppelin the fleet, used in World War I to mean ‘bomb the fleet from Zeppelins’ (Jespersen); or when the special allusion is no longer recognizable, as in Copenhagen the fleet ‘sink without warning’, or Burgoyne a general ‘capture’ (Partridge). Dictionaries probably underestimate the number of specialized uses that have arisen by this process.

5.2. Language acquisition. Children learning their first language almost certainly do not distinguish innovations and idioms the way adults do. They appear to treat many adult idioms as if they were innovations, and many adult innovations as if they were idioms. These two ‘errors’ have important consequences.

Children produce innovations from a very early age, and some of these conform to the adult constraints on innovations. Thus one child, C, said I’m crackering my soup as she dropped crackers in her soup (age 3;11); another child, D.H., said Mummy trousers me in talking about getting dressed (age 2;3); still another, S, said I broomed her after hitting his baby sister with a toy broom (age 2;7). But the innovative denominal-verb convention takes time to learn, and many early innovations fall short of the adult constraints – some wildly – even though most are interpretable in context. So C, fantasizing about a trip, said We're all going to Mexico – Not drive to Mexico – Not car to Mexico – airplane to Mexico (age 4;0). And, S, wanting to have some cheese weighed, said You have to scale it first (age 2;4). On other occasions, he commented That truck is cementing of a cement truck with its back revolving but not pouring cement (age 3;1); It flagged of a flag that suddenly billowed in a gust of wind (age 3;2); and, asking if his pants had been mended, Is it all needled?(age 3;2). From our observations, many (perhaps most) children produce innovative denominal verbs, though they vary greatly in how often they do so.

Because of this early facility, children may produce and understand particular denominal verbs very differently from adults. Consider these four possibilities. First, they may learn the noun hammer, and then create and use the verb hammer, even though it is idiomatic for adults. Here their innovation corresponds to the adult’s transparent idiom. Second, they may hear the verb truck, and from their prior knowledge of the noun truck interpret it as an innovative denominal verb. Again, their innovation corresponds to the adult’s transparent idiom. Third, they may learn the noun dial as applied to clocks, bathroom scales, and gas meters, and separately learn the verb dial the number for push-button (and dialless) telephones, never realizing that the two are related[13]. In this case their opaque idiom corresponds to the adult’s partly specialized idiom. Fourth, they may hear a near-innovation like Let’s chopstick for dinner again – in the absence of chopsticks – and interpret it as an idiom meaning ‘have Chinese food’. In this instance, their opaque idiom corresponds to the adult’s near-innovation. There are other possibilities, too, including those in which the child and adult agree in their treatments. The point is that, as children create their own system of language, they may alter the status of verbs as innovations or idioms.

Children, then, may play a role both in keeping language stable and in speeding language change. They probably contribute to language stability when they treat adult idioms as innovations. For example, in producing or understanding bicycle, truck, and jeep as innovations, they may prevent those verbs from deviating too far from the paradigm ‘go by [vehicle]’, from becoming partly specialized idioms like land, ground, and smoke. On the other hand, children probably spur on language change when they treat near-innovations and partly specialized idioms as opaque. Thus, treating the noun and verb dial as unrelated, they may contribute to the acceptance of dial as an opaque idiom; in treating chopstick as an opaque idiom, they may effectively be introducing it into English as just such an idiom. Here as elsewhere, children are probably instrumental in both maintaining and changing language.

5.3. Language processing. In speaking and listening, people must certainly process innovations and idioms very differently. Consider comprehension. For innovations, at one extreme, people must create completely new meanings: confronted with Wayned, they cannot retrieve a ready-made meaning from their mental lexicon, since they have none for verbs they have never heard before. If the line we have taken is correct, they must construct the meaning of Wayned in conformity with the innovative denominal-verb convention. For idioms, at the other extreme, listeners must retrieve ready-made senses: they must look for boycott as a verb in their mental lexicon, since they don’t have the parent noun Boycott available. Parallel arguments hold for innovations and idioms in production.

Between the two extremes, it isn’t always clear what should happen. Transparent idioms, for example, could be processed either as innovations or as opaque idioms; both processes would lead to the right interpretation. But these verbs are so frequent, and so well assimilated as verbs, that they are presumably processed most of the time like opaque idioms. In comprehension, it would be inefficient for their meanings to be recreated each time when they could be retrieved from the lexicon ready-made – like most other word meanings. Indeed, this almost has to be true if we are to account for pre-emption. When a verb has a common idiomatic sense, that normally takes precedence over certain innovative senses. Thus, although on reflection the noun bottle may be recognized in bottle the beer, this information isn’t normally used in the process of saying or interpreting it.

Yet, in the right circumstances, transparent idioms may be processed as innovations. Imagine hearing We used everything – we snowmobiled, snowshoed, and skated, as opposed to We did everything – we hiked, drank beer, and skated. The first sentence contrasts the three instruments, and invites skated to be processed as an innovation on a par with snowmobiled and snowshoed. But the second contrasts three activities, and invites skated to be treated as an opaque idiom on a par with hiked and drank. With contrastive stress, the noun origins of a verb are readily brought to the fore. In We didn’t use our car – we taxied to the airport, the instruments are contrasted, a car vs. a taxi, while the rest of the meaning of taxied, ‘went by X’, is backgrounded (Watt). How transparent idioms like skate and taxi are processed, therefore, may depend on the context. This may also be true of partly specialized idioms.

The presence of innovations, near-innovations, and idioms sometimes processed as innovations offers a distinct challenge to most theories of comprehension and production. These theories implicitly assume that all word meanings are available ready-made in the mental lexicon. That assumption is clearly wrong. If innovations of all types are as common and as readily understood as we suppose, then no theory of comprehension or production can be complete unless it handles them in the natural course of the relevant processes. Right now this goal seems far off.

5.4. Synchronic description. Contemporary English has denominal verbs at each stage of idiomatization – from full innovations, like bargain-counter, to opaque idioms like boycott. How much of this information belongs in the synchronic description of English? If such a description is supposed to characterize the ideal speaker/listener’s ‘knowledge’ of English, we have a problem – because, as applied to denominal verbs, ‘knowledge’ has at least four interpretations. First, it could mean ‘always-used information’: in comprehending bargain-counter, listeners probably always use the fact that it comes from the noun. Second, it could mean ‘usable information’: for taxi, listeners may not normally use the fact it comes from a noun, but in contrastive contexts they can. Third, it could mean merely ‘awareness on reflection’: many people are surprised when they are shown that the noun and verb land are related – but, on reflection, they could probably figure this out for themselves. Fourth, it could mean simply ‘intellectualizable information’: most people could not figure out for themselves the relation between boycott and Captain Boycott; but when informed by a dictionary or a specialist, they would in some sense ‘know’ the denominal character of boycott. These successively more inclusive criteria for ‘knowledge’, of course, lead to different synchronic descriptions of denominal verbs.

Forced to make a choice, we would probably opt for a synchronic description that included only ‘usable information’, knowledge that is or can be accessed in normal language use. But it may be more defensible to include all information about denominal verbs, yet distinguish which parts are known at which level of knowledge. The synchronic description, in any event, will have to do more than just dichotomize denominal verbs into innovations and idioms.

There is a further complication: note that idioms and innovations can co-exist with the same parent noun. The idioms shelve the books and shelve the closet coexist with innovative uses of shelve, as in While maneuvering through the door, the carpenter shelved his assistant in the back (‘poked with a shelf’). The complication is that these idioms often shade off into innovations, with no clear boundary. In Alex forked the peas into his mouth, for example, fork has an idiomatic sense ‘convey in the normal manner by means of a fork’. We all know, of course, what the normal manner is – which, if this sense is to be idiomatic, must be defined independently of any context. But if it is mutual knowledge that Alex is a child who uses a fork two-fisted, or backwards, or only as a means to catapult food into his mouth, the speaker would intend fork to mean ‘convey by a fork in a two-fisted manner’, or ‘convey by a backward fork’, or ‘catapult by means of a fork’. At what point has Alex strayed too far from the ‘normal manner’? At what point have we moved from the idiomatic sense of fork to an innovative one? There is no obvious answer, and this adds still another complication to the synchronic description of denominal verbs.

6. Conclusion. We have argued that, although denominal verbs belong to a unified morphological family (they are all parented by nouns), they do not allow a unified semantic description. Innovations like Wayne and houseguest must be dealt with differently from opaque idioms like lynch and badger, and differently even from transparent but well-established verbs like bicycle and smoke. As for the innovations, we have argued, they are not derived from nouns in the usual sense of semantic derivation. What they mean depends on the time, place, and circumstances in which they are uttered, and must be accounted for by a convention about their use. This convention makes essential use of such notions as kinds of situations, rationality, ready computability, uniqueness, the speaker’s and listener’s mutual knowledge, and certain syntactic constraints. Innovations, however, are found not only among denominal verbs, but pervade virtually every other construction in the language. Forming and understanding them is therefore an intrinsic part of our capacity to use language, and should be accounted for by any theory of language that claims to be complete. So far, however, most attention has been paid to innovations that are not contextual. Yet, if we are right, many innovations are contextual, including (besides denominal verbs) compound nouns, possessive constructions, ‘eponymous’ verbs, commonized proper nouns, and shorthand expressions. There are probably many more types. If these are truly contextual expressions, they will require an account very much like the one we have given here for denominal verbs. As we have suggested, conditions (a)–(e) of our convention may be common to all such contextual expressions – with condition (f), which refers to syntactic constraints, changing from construction to construction. All this, in turn, is part of a broader attempt to specify what speakers mean in uttering sentences on particular occasions. This is an enterprise that has been neglected for too long.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 761