Monday, October 13, 2008

The Analyzability of Exocentric Compounds - Buckle Bunny and Puck Bunny

In looking up information for the post about skiers' slang last week I came across two other sport-related terms that fascinated me: buckle bunny and puck bunny. Both buckle bunny and puck bunny are considered exocentric compounds (not definable by either constituent and considered semantically un-analyzable).

Buckle bunny: a female groupie of rodeo cowboys.
Puck bunny: a female fan of hockey or hockey players; a hockey groupie, especially one who has casual sexual relations with players.

These so-called exocentric compounds are clearly modeled on the linguistic template provided by the compounds beach bunny and snow bunny. The productivity of this template combined with the metaphoric interpretation of the word bunny is what allows these new compounds to be definable or semantically analyzable and therefore not truly exocentric.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

love it

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