a couple of things.

[dsudis]

1) Please tell me someone has written the crossover demonstrating how awesomely the Winchester brothers would get along with Ronon Dex.

b) "She's My Winona" = new-movie!Spock vid, Y/Y?

ETA: Paging linguistics-types to the comments over on LJ...

Comments

[shaws_ghoti]

i have to remark upon the difficult of pronouncing "new-movie!Spock" aloud. you and your recursive noun compounding.

[dsudis]

The ! is silent. :)

[shaws_ghoti]

well yes but if i understand the phenomenon correctly the ! represents a pitch-accent on the preceding word which is a hallmark of noun-compounding.

okay the more i think about this the more i think you just blew my mind. if we just had "new movie", i think the stress is on movie, so:

[new móvie]

which is expected because 'new' is an adjective... but if you modify a noun with another noun (a noun compound), the stress is on the modifying noun, so:

[nóun compound] = noun!compound
[fúture Spock] = future!Spock
etc...

so then when you make a noun compound where the modifier is "new movie" you would expect:

[ [new móvie] Spock]

but instead, you get

[ [néw movie] Spock]

but why!?!

[dsudis]

I don't know. Initially my intuition was that the emphasis does actually stay on 'movie', but now I can't tell. Aaaargh.

[shaws_ghoti]

well maybe your first judgment was right. prosody intuitions are tough because prosody is so context-sensitive. like, if you were stressing that it is new-movie!Spock not old-movie!Spock you'd get stress on "new", if you were comparing new-movie!Spock to new-movie!Ohura you'd get stress on Spock, etc...

[darthfox]

Yes, this is also a factor. [torn between nostalgia and flashbacks]

[renenet]

I agree with your initial intuition. Also, I'm inclined to sort of run "new-movie" together a bit to verbally indicate that it's a compound term rather than a two-word phrase (as it would be in the sentence "I went to see a new movie yesterday.")

[darthfox]

The stress on "new" and the first syllable of "movie" is the same, when I say it. "new-movie!Spock" has three syllables of equal stress and one ("-ie") of less.

Also, as you know, Bob, I did my master's thesis on noun-noun compounds, and the above "if you modify a noun with another noun (a noun compound), the stress is on the modifying noun" is essentially what I set up in the intro as the prevailing theory that in noun-noun pairs you can tell it's a compound if the stress is on the left and you can tell it's just a colocation of nouns if the stress is on the right, and it's Not Remotely Always True. Just thought I'd mention it to shaws_ghoti before he spends too much time thinking about it. I already spent two years. Happy to share the paper with him if he's interested. :-P (Why, after all, is it the Empire STATE Building instead of the EMpire State Building? Why? Why? ... And so on.)

[shaws_ghoti]

aha! i should have known; the answer is always: it's more complicated.

[kalpurna]

There might be a semantic thing coming in here, maybe? Because we're not talking about a Spock who is new because he is in a movie, since there have been other movie Spocks, but a Spock who is in a movie and is NEW. The newness is what's more relevant.

[darthfox]

That's what he was saying up here (side note: just took me two tries to spell "here" and three to spell "side", wtf). Except how would you stress it differently if it was a Spock who was in a new movie or a new Spock who was in a movie? "New" should get the stress in both cases, right? (Cf. the canonical "[o]ld French teacher" example.) Oh, bracketing is fun.

[lovelypoet]

I think the issue is that to really express what was being said, it should be represented as "new!movie-spock"

[nora_charles]

I don't pronounce "new movie!Spock" (Spock from the movie, not the TV show) and "new-movie!Spock" (Spock from the new movie, not the old movies) or any interpretation of "old French teacher" the same.

"New-movie!Spock" /'nju'muvi'spak/
"new Movie!Spock" /'nju''muvi'spak/ or even /'nju|''muvi'spak/ (though that's kind of exaggerated)