Green Collars are So Exocentric

I neglected to mention in yesterday's post that green collar, blue collar, white collar, gold collar, pink collar, and grey collar are all considered exocentric compounds. In general, there are two main types of compound words, endocentric and exocentric.

Endocentric compounds are those where the rightmost constituent, called the grammatical head, is what defines the category of speech and the semantic interpretation of the word. For example, a barstool is a type of stool that is used at a bar.

Exocentric compounds (which have been the focus of much of my work in linguistics) are generally believed to not be definable by either constituent and are therefore said to be headless. For example, a jailbird is not a type of bird or a type of jail.

Because exocentric compounds are said to be headless and not definable by the words from which they are formed, they have long been considered semantically un-analyzable. In turn, this semantic un-analyzability results in the perceived lack of productivity of this type of compound.

I, however, believe that exocentric compounds can be both semantically analyzable (through the use of metaphor and other semantic operations) and productive --- just look at the number of compound words that have been added to the English lexicon based on the linguistic template of the compound word white collar.

As the topic of exocentric compounds is one of my favorites, I assure you there will be more on their semantic analyzability in the future.

Green Collars and Linguistic Templates

One of the areas I have focused on in my studies of linguistics is compound words, so when I recently came across the compound word green collar worker I was very excited. I find it interesting to see how new words make it into the lexicon and how people are able to interpret them.

Some of my previous work on compound words has relied on Professor Mary Ellen Ryder's idea of using "linguistic templates" for interpreting novel compound words. Ryder predicts that a listener, upon encountering a new compound, will look to his or her stock of established compounds and the semantic schemas developed from them to interpret the compound, these are what she call "linguistic templates." The particular template a listener chooses to use in interpreting a new compound is what she calls the "analogy base." For example, given a novel compound such as whitemail, a listener would look to existing compounds and end up using blackmail as an analogy base.

So when it comes to the compound word green collar worker, people will, most likely, immediately think of the compounds white collar and blue collar workers to interpret the word. Little did I know that there are also gold, pink and grey collar workers as well.

The collar workers are defined as follows:
Green Collar - A worker who is employed in one of the environmental or agricultural sectors of the economy.
Gold Collar - Low-income, workers who invest in conspicuous luxury.
Pink Collar - A person who has a job that is traditionally considered a womens' job because the work does not require as much professional training and does not have the same pay or prestige as jobs that are traditionally considered mens' jobs.
Grey Collar - Workers that have jobs that include elements of both blue and white collar jobs, or workers in jobs that are entirely different from both white and blue collar jobs. Also, occasionally used to describe a person who works past the normal age of retirement

A final note on Ryder's "linguistic templates," I believe they also provide a basis for generating new compounds and likely contributed to the formation of each of the compound words discussed above.