/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6758169]

Is there a term for when a certain combination of words is so commonly put together that it effectively becomes a single, stock term, and then people come to enunciate it in ways that don't really make sense for the original combination?

Like, if you have the original two words "uniform deviate," meaning simply "a deviate which is uniform," and pronounced "U-niform DE-viate," with equal stress at the beginning of both distinct words because the original speakers perceive them as perfectly distinct, but it gradually comes to be used as a single unit so often that it gets perceived linguistically by the unconscious that way, and then our natural tendency toward euphony smooths out the pronunciation as it would a single long word ("U-niformdeviate," removing the halting emphasis on the beginning of the second word).

Is there anything in linguistics about this? I don't know anything about linguistics, so I don't know where to start looking. I was just thinking about how words are combined into new "units" like this, and the original etymology is lost but people still perfectly understand the meaning of the new unit.

Or similar things, like certain adages still being used and fundamentally understood by people who don't understand the original phrasing or vocabulary (e.g., because it's archaic). For instance I know someone who knows exactly what "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" means, but has no fucking idea what that phrase LITERALLY means, because he has no clue what a gander is.

[Anonymous No.6758206]

yeah its called putting a fcking hyphen between the two words.

you gay-ass retard

[Anonymous No.6758231]

>>6758206

[Anonymous No.6758242]

>>6758169
This is just how compound words get made and there are uniform rules for syllabic and sentence stress when using compound words in English. Look those up and you'll have all the answers to your stupid, stupid question.

[Anonymous No.6758244]

>>6758169
terrible thread

[Anonymous No.6758270]

>>6758242
You're misunderstanding what I mean.

I mean when the mind doesn't perceive a compound phrase as a compound anymore, or when its original users convey what they perceive as two distinct terms to a new generation who perceive it as a single term (e.g.). Like the way that some people perceive "anymore" as a single linguistic unit with a specific adverbial function, without thinking "logically" that it means "temporally longer by any extent."

I'm trying to think of better examples but it's hard for some reason. I guess a good one would be "a whole nother." That phrase exists because for some weird reason people started perceiving "nother" as adjectival and "a" as the indefinite article, somewhere back in their unconscious, and so it becomes perfectly logical (and understandable to others) to modify "nother" adverbially with "whole." Even "another" as a word in the first place is a combination of "an other," which is an archaism.

[Anonymous No.6758329]

>>6758270
"nother" is just "an other", "other" being adjectival in both forms.

"anymore" is just "any more" and means the exact same thing, just repackaged to sound more like the way it's pronounced.

[Anonymous No.6758342]

>>6758169
You mean like 'not at all'?

[Anonymous No.6758378]

>>6758329
I know, but what I'm saying is that many people would never think to say "a whole other," even though that's correct. They'd say "a whole *nother*", revealing that they perceive "nother" to be an actual functional word that means something, which they would never do if their language usage was running some kind of etymological logic engine.

The point being that whoever said "an other" first, some Middle English guy simply using the indeterminate article with an adjective, (if he had a good education) could probably have explicitly explained his usage: "I want to say the adjective 'other', and I need an indeterminate article before it because the target noun is singular." Makes sense. But fast forward hundreds of years, and you have illiterate teenagers with no concept of grammatical rules intuitively feeling on some level that the word "nother" is a distinct adjective meaning "different". They have a whole nother sense of what that phraseme means.

I'm reading this:
http://www.calvin.edu/weblogs/language/more/whole_nother_paper/
and it seems like it's a popular stance that it's infixation, but that seems weird to me. I am definitely not intentionally using infixation when I say it sometimes.

>>6758342
I think so. That's a phraseme, right? That's basically what I mean, the way a commonly used combo becomes a stock phrase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phraseme)), but I'm wondering if there's any discussion of what happens when the phraseme has been used for so long that people don't think about the original meaning of the component words. It's just intuitively considered a single lexical unit, so speakers end up emphasising syllables differently than people who originally used the "pure" phrase (i.e., they actually perceived it intuitively as a combination of distinct words).

I'm trying to dig through linguistics terminology but it's hard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization

This actually seems very close to what I mean:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen
Something like this, but where the garbled phrase *retains its original meaning* or at least a large part of it, although the average speaker wouldn't be able to explain the phrase/word if pressed.

I think the moral of the story is that I just have to go read some linguistics shit now.

[Anonymous No.6758382]

cliche or idiom

[Anonymous No.6758385]

>>6758169
collocation nigga

[Anonymous No.6758399]

Like 'religious right'? It is almost disconnected from the idea of right-wing politics.

[Anonymous No.6758432]

>>6758169
The general phenomenon of words 'just feeling like they belong together' is called collocation in modern semantics. It's an airy concept that encompasses everything from preposition/verb combos that only seem to work together to idiomatic nonsense phrases, so maybe it's not specific enough for what you mean.

In a larger sense, what you're talking about with the change in emphasis (not pronunciation, sorry but you're just a smidge off there) as a phrase begins to be viewed as a single term is just one messy blotch in the very, very messy process of language evolution. Different schools of linguistics/semantics/semiotics (themselves different names for schools of thought that discuss the same damn thing [for the most part] ) will pin different names on it, and each name will cover a slightly different semantic topography. That's where my specific knowledge craps out here, sorry.