Beyond picker upper
It seems like one of those things that keeps getting “casually discovered”–that is, that I hear mention of at least once a year–is the result of applying the agentive -er suffix to particle verbs like pick up and clean out. What’s interesting is that the most common result (according to some study [studies? -I've only seen a 1978 manuscript by Moira Yip cited wrt this issue]) is picker upper and cleaner outer. There are some interesting observations made by David Mortensen in this post of his now archive-only blog.
But how about this: what do you do with take advantage of? Well, today, I somewhat consciously produced taker advantage ofer. A quick search on Google reveals:
Kira I Am: does it say that kkira is the numbe rone drunk girl taker advantage ofer? link
Yes! This seems to be a one-line extract from some sort of IRC or similar chat session. I especially like the semantic undergoer expressed as a pre-modifier.
In any case, this seems like an interesting test case for models of realizational morphology, as there is more than just a head verb and a particle. Exactly which bits of the word are eligible for the morphological process?
OED has “picker-upper” (1913), “fixer-upper” (1932), “pepper-upper” (1934), “maker-upper” (1936), “builder-upper” (1936), “opener-upper” (1941), “mucker-upper” (1942), and “looker-upper” (1951). But “Ver-up” is actually more frequently attested than “Ver-upper” in the forms collected by the OED.
Like mucker-upper, but with an f.
Ben: interesting. Is that by number of entries, or frequency in a text (i.e., types or tokens?)? I’m sure people probably show variation.
Dad: classy =)
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