On Thu, 27 Jan 2022 at 02:40, Iikka Hauhio <fergusq@protonmail.com> wrote:
SuStel:
A noun-noun construction is a combination of nouns that are not a compound noun, not a complex noun, and may or may not be lexicalized.
But what is the concrete difference between a compound noun and a noun-noun construction?
I already answered this question in my previous email, which I was about to send when you sent this one.
Imagine that instead of *'Iw HIq *we had *'IwHIq *and instead of *ropyaH* we had *rop yaH*. How would the language be different? Would these words have different a usage, meaning, grammar or pronunciation? Would something else be different, and if so, what? What is the justification to have a distinction between these two ways to form similar word combinations?
I've addressed usage and meaning, and grammatically I've pointed out that the first noun in a noun-noun construction can take a suffix, but the first component of a compound noun cannot. I think {rop yaH} means something very different from {ropyaH}. If I told someone to go to {roplIj yaH}, I might be telling them to go to a leper colony and not an infirmary. But you raised the point of pronunciation, and I think there's a difference there, too. Okrand wrote that the pronunciation of {wab Do} "speed of sound" and {wabDo} "Mach number" are the same. But I think that the *stress* is different. In {wab Do}, both words have equal stress. In {wabDo}, the {Do} is stressed and the {wab} is not. In {tera'ngan}, the {ra'} is stressed but not the {ngan}. In {tera' ngan}, both the {ra'} and {ngan} are stressed. So the presence or absence of a space serves a purpose, which is to reflect the stress in speaking. -- De'vID