Comments(2) Soon I will return to regular updates (or, at least, as regular as they were before around Christmas). About 90% of my time over the past week has been taken up by moving into a new apartment with two people I’ve never lived with before. So, as you can imagine, it’s a bit of work. But now it’s sort of done, and since we’re having a party on New Year’s Eve, that’s added incentive to finish up.
I watched a show on the food network today, the topic of which was kitchen gadgets. One of these gadgets was a device by Whirlpool that is supposed to combine the speed and convenience of a microwave with the baking/browning power of the conventional oven. The result: the MicrOven.
A blend between microwave and oven, this word is particularly interesting because the original name (and still the best?) for the cooking devices that use microwave radiation is microwave oven. The coining of that term clearly did nothing to change the overall semantic coverage of the word oven — it still refers to the conventional kind, and it can’t be used on its own to refer to a microwave. I might hesitate if asked whether a “microwave oven” was a type of oven. Another example would (for some people) be short pants (aka shorts), which may or may not be a subtype of “pants”. [Note that I'm pretty sure that simple microwave came to be used to refer to the devices rather soon after they were commonly called microvawe ovens. At least this is what the OED leads one to believe.]
Contrast this with toaster oven. Now, the basic way that regular ovens and toaster ovens work is often the same (though I’ve never seen a gas-powered toaster oven). If someone asked if I had an oven, but all I had was a toaster oven, then I might say, “well, no, but I have a toaster oven — good enough?” But if all I had was a microwave oven, it would probably seem preposterous to say, “well, no, but I have a microwave — that’s just as good, right?” At the very least, there would be more situations where it would be preposterous, because the overlap in function between conventional ovens and microwaves is much smaller than with toaster ovens.
I think the more common situation for N-N compounds is that what the compound denotes is a subtype of the right-hand noun (ski lifts, correspondence courses, video games, conflict diamonds). Closer to the area of recent technology, consider mobile/cell phones, which are considered types of phones, and which can be called such. Or think of the (electronic) card key, which has managed to hold on to the term key since it has the same basic function as normal keys, even though it works in a rather different way. (On the other hand, they are more often called key cards, perhaps partly because they are often seen along with other “cards,” like ID cards. But this usage has not seemed to change the meaning of plain “card” – if asked to empty my wallet of cards, I might think, “but I don’t have any cards in my wallet.”)
Returning to talk of function, a microwave oven has, at least in my life, a rather different function from other sorts of devices that you stick things into in order to heat them up. In fact, I don’t think there are many dishes that I could prepare equally well in either device. Yes, I could make microwave brownies and melt butter in a conventional oven: but why would I? [okay, my microwave is currently broken, so if I didn't have any pots...] I would think that most people think somewhat similarly. And for those people for whom shorts are not a type of “pants,” perhaps the same could be said. And if I thought like mulling it over more and thinking of more compounds like this, maybe I could see if such is the case for a majority of the microwave oven-type compounds.
[Looking at my shelf of syntax and semantics books, I just thought of some nasty pseudo-examples: trace theory (see Skeptical Linguistics Essays) and, to give equal time to multiple camps, cognitive linguistics (see...uh...some people, I'm sure). Oh, and Chinese grammar (okay, that was out of line)]
I know people talk about how text-based communication over the internet is hampered by a lack of cues common in spoken discourse, like intonation, stress, visual gestures, and so forth. People try to find ways to get around this, including use of emoticons, typeface alterations, explicit marking of actions (used to use this quite a lot on IM and IRC isn’t sure if it’s still common is also unsure of its discourse function, but its syntax sure is interesting), and so forth.
But sometimes text provides you with the ability to communicate information in a way that is technically possible with speech, but in reality is unrealistic. (Or, at least, might seem unrealistic to someone like myself). Take parentheses (please!): you can express all variety of auxiliary information in a syntactically reasonable way with them, and the rules of their interpretation lets you completely separate their meaning off from the rest of the sentence. To do the same thing in speech would, in some cases, require some very detailed intonational and gestural fancywork.
One concrete example came to me after I started to look at some linguistic phenomena surrounding the use/mention distinction. I think looking at these sentences should clear things up:
Bertha (a pseudonym) lives in La Paz, Bolivia, and her medical history Bertha provides insight into the effects of chagas. Helen Reed (a pseudonym) lives in Oakland, CA, with her partner and daughter. James Dean (a pseudonym) works at Denny’s and needs Medicaid to pay for the support programs and medical insurance he needs to live and work LAUREL TEAM (A NOM DE PLUME) LIVES IN HUDSON COUNTY Joe, a pseudonym, lives in Oakland, California.
Here the matrix subject refers to some individual, but the apposition construction tells us that a pseudonym probably attaches to something denoting a name. So there is a sort of type clash going on here. Nonetheless, these are perfectly interpretable — and, in fact, when seen in text are (IMO) much more comprehensible than they would be if spoken. The parentheses do a world of good here, and google tells me that most people are smart enough to use them, though the occasional comma gets through. If spoken, I expect it would require some rather salient intonational marking (the typical “comma” intonation), along with perhaps a gesture that marks the same sort of meaning (hand out, palm down, a slight frown, all indicating “some non-central/parenthetical stuff currently happening”). Maybe some mavericks out there will start to implement “air parens.”
Now, if you thought the apposition construction could lead to some odd stuff, check out these:
Julian Swan is a pseudonym who lives in Los Angeles. Winston Wolfe is a pseudonym who contributes to h2g2, Wikipedia and the local print media. T.C. Adler is a pseudonym who, according to the book jacket, is “very experienced in both the worlds of art and the Church.” Mag Cabot is a pen name who’s [sic] real name is Jenny Carroll.
Absolutely beautiful.
Homework assignment: consider the structure assigned to the same CONJ similar N, as in:
Additional terms such as diatype, genre, text type, style, acrolect, mesolect and basilect among many others may be used to cover the same or similar ground. [Wikipedia] This feature is based on the premise that one author citing another author suggests that they may both be writing on the same or similar topic. [U of Alabama] An FDA investigation has found that many foreign medications, although marketed under the same or similar-sounding brand names as those in the United States, contain different active ingredients than in the United States. [FDA] …the evolutionary change of a ribozyme to a deoxyribozyme with the same or similar catalytic functions might also have occurred through random mutation and selection. [Scripps] My one concern however, is the accuracy of the lists and if there is sufficient information to distinguish between two individuals with the same or similar names. [GuideStar] Since the same and similar material has been covered so much better elsewhere, with greater interest, sensitivity and wit, it seems difficult to recommend this film. [Midnight Eye] The Dewey Decimal Classification scheme used in the Barr Smith Library is commonly used by many other libraries to arrange material on their shelves so that books on the same and similar subjects will be found in the same area. [U of Adelaide]
(One might also consider the paradigm NP be similar / the same)