Co-ordination fail

One of the first topics in intro syntax classes is the notion of constituency, including a variety of tests which can be used to determine constituency. One of these tests is the co-ordination test: generally only items of the same syntactic category can be conjoined. Thus the following examples are fine: fresh and clean (coordination of adjectives), mad dogs and Englishmen (coordination of nouns [DPs]), (to) serve and protect (coordination of infinitive verbs). But verbs can't be conjoined in the same way with nouns, e.g. *I like mad dogs and to serve is bad; and prepositional phrases don't conjoin with nouns, e.g. *I like mad dogs and on top of the Empire State Building is also bad.

Here's a label I noticed which violates the co-ordination constraint:

*[_DP Side Dish], [_DP Soup Mix], [_PP Over Rice]

Accidental sarcasm: On focus semantic values and hotel lifts

Earlier this month I was in Baltimore for the annual LSA conference, and gave a talk on why wh-words (e.g. who, what, when etc.) need ordinary as well as focus semantic values (in contrast to Beck 2006, Cable 2007). Relevant to the calculation of focus semantic values, I spotted this notice in the conference hotel elevator:

The relevant bit: "protecting and empowering Marylanders....in SO many ways".

Here so is focussed; presumably to emphasise the variety of ways in which Marylanders are protected and empowered. However, I can't help but read the focus on so as sarcastic (I can imagine someone saying "Oh yeah, you were SO helpful to me."), though I'm not sure why.

[Update (30.1.10): Does DLLR monitor the activities of this construction site?

from a post on Arnold's Zwicky blog.]

References:

Beck, Sigrid. 2006. Intervention effects follow from focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 14:1–56.

Cable, Seth. 2007. The grammar of Q: Q-particles and the nature of Wh-fronting, as revealed by the Wh-questions of Tlingit. Doctoral Dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

Bumpits: On compounding and unhappy orthography

A (relatively) new product I noticed in the local CVS:

As I understand it, the "Bumpits" product is a plastic insert/comb that "bumps up" the hair, making it look fuller. The choice of orthographical representation for the product is very unhappy though...

At first glance, I read it of course as "Bum Pits". Pits often functions as a shortened version of "arm pits". And when pits is combined with bum--whether the latter is interpreted as bum, "a homeless person; a lazy and dissolute (and often unwashed) person", or bum "buttocks"--the result is not a product many people would want to purchase. (I'll spare readers visual representations of either of these interpretations...)

A Google search reveals that I'm not alone in finding the orthographic representation of "bump its" as "Bumpits" an unfortunate choice: see here, for instance.

The orthography problem is worsened, I believe, by the fact that function words, like pronouns, are not the most frequent members of compound words in English. So while both bump and bum are perfectly fine common nouns that any self-respecting nominal compound would be happy to include, pit, as a noun, is a much more likely candidate for nominal compounding than the pronoun it. So I think English speakers' natural inclination (at a subconscious level), when faced with a choice between "bump-its" and "bum-pits", is to choose the latter interpretation, since the Noun-Noun combination of "bum-pits" is a more typical example of compounding than a Noun-Pronoun combination like "bump-its".

What I don't understand is why the possibility of the unfortunate readings didn't occur to the "Bumpits" marketing people. I mean, the idea behind the name isn't bad, appealling to the sense of "bump it up (a notch)". And though, as discussed above, the pattern of compounding in English favours Noun-Noun over Noun-Pronoun, the former interpretation could have been effectively suppressed by means of a thoughtful choice of orthographic representation.

That is, why write it as a single word: Bumpits? Why not Bump Its or Bump-Its? Or, if they liked the idea of a single word, why not discourage the reading "bum-pits" in some other way, e.g. BumpIts or Bumpits?