Recently a colleague and I were searching the Corpus of Contemporary
American English (Mark Davies <www.americancorpus.org>) and discovered
the sentence below, which I thought might interest members of the list.


>>You'll have a chance to take home some classical pieces
>>of memorabilia at the Houston Symphony Partners' Mad
>>as a March Hare Symphony Surplus Salvage Spring
>>Cleaning Clearance Sale.


This sentence ends with the single noun phrase:

the Houston Symphony Partners' Mad as a March Hare Symphony Surplus
Salvage Spring Cleaning Clearance Sale

As I looked at this noun phrase several questions occurred to me.

1.  Exactly which words function as Head? Is it simply the noun 'sale'?
Or 'clearance sale'? Or 'spring cleaning clearance sale'? Or more?

2. At the other end of the phrase, does the phrase that ends with the
apostrophe begin with 'the' or with 'Houston'? To put it another way is
it the clearance sale *of the Houston symphony* (i.e. it’s a kind of
possessive)? Or should we interpret 'Houston symphony's' [without the
word 'the] as a sort of descriptive genitive. (Sorry Herb, I know you
don’t like that terminology, but I have to use the terminology I'm used
to.) There are two consequences of interpreting 'Houston Symphony's' as
a descriptive genitive: a) 'the' functions as the determiner of the
noun phrase as a whole, and b) 'Houston Symphony's … clearance sale' is
interpreted much like a noun + noun sequence where 'Houston Symphony's'
functions as the first noun (sort of) and describes a type of sale,
while 'clearance sale' (or whatever you think the Head is) functions as
the second noun.

3. It is clear that 'Mad as a March Hare' is to be treated as a single
constituent. What sort of a constituent is it? (e.g. Adjective,
Adjective phrase, Other?) Would you analyze its internal structure or
would you prefer to treat it as not having an internal structure?

4.  The sequence of seven nouns at the end of the phrase contains
several recognizable phrases -- e.g. Symphony Surplus, Spring Cleaning
and Clearance Sale. Would you assign an internal grammatical structure
to match these semantically determined phrases. The result of imposing
such a structure would be to read the sequence as involving something
like the following sequences:
(Symphony (Surplus))
 (Salvage)
(Spring (Cleaning))
(Clearance (Sale))

There is an alternative answer to question 4. That is to treat these
seven nouns as simply an unstructured sequence of nouns which get
INTERPRETED as having an internal semantic structure. That is, any
structure we perceive in this sequence of nouns is merely a semantic
structure, not a grammatical structure.

I would be interested in seeing any answers list members might supply.
In this context, I would particularly ask you to provide arguments to
support your answers so far as possible.

In addition, certainly other interesting / valuable questions could be
asked about this construction. It might be interesting to explore the
range of useful questions that might be explored in conjunction with
this construction. Let me particularly encourage teachers -- and their
students to contribute.

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/