Noncompositional

Yesterday I was at a climbing gym working out on a treadmill (climbing isn’t my thing, generally), and noticed something interesting about the medical warning printed on it. It read (roughly):

If you feel pain, faint, or dizzy, stop exercising immediately.

Though I’d read that warning dozens of times on many occasions, this time it garden-pathed me. The structure is [if you [feel N, A, or A]], which involves coordination of a noun with two adjectives (or their phrasal projections). But thanks to the lexical ambiguity of faint, I parsed it as [if you [feel pain], [faint], or], at which point I was expecting another (finite) verb phrase, but instead got dizzy instead.

I’m guessing I parsed faint as a full VP for a few reasons, including possibly a higher frequency of the verb than (this sense of) the adjective, and perhaps more tellingly, the unlikelihood of conjoining a noun and an adjective as a complement of feel. There’s potentially nothing ungrammatical about it — and as complements of be, or predicative arguments of verbs like consider, it’s no problem. But it seems that even for a verb as light as feel, N+A conjunctions seem a little weird.

A look through the COCA revealed two potentially real hits for “feel N and A”

he also is made to feel outlaw and inferior — instead of ill.

You couldn’t help but feel empathy and sorry for the mother.

The first is potentially an adjectival variant of outlaw, but the second is legit — and boy does it sound strange to me. But, in accordance with the Zimmer principle, if you add some words, it improves: You couldn’t help but feel not just empathy but genuinely sorry for the mother.

I’m pretty sure the treadmill sentence is syntactically well-formed, or at least I’d like to say so. But there’s definitely something fishy going on with the coordination of unlike types, depending on what the governing context is.

[update: almost forgot -- BROOD has a discussion on this from exactly five months minus one day ago]