Don't mind all the blogging, I'm just a verbal processor and right now blogging=talking. So in English we have these compounds, that we don't even think of as compounds. Say I am eating a pop-tart (this is a fun one because it's already a compound) and I tell you that it is a pop-tart pop-tart then you will say, 'oh yes, Linnea is not eating those cheap tasteless store-brand pop-tarts, only real pop-tarts are good enough for her.' Here the redundancy is used to reinforce the genuineness of what's being talked about. So I'm dealing with all of these redundant noun-noun compounds in Old English and I'm trying to figure out whether these are reinforcing genuineness (a terror-terror, as opposed to that kind of terror that you have when you dream that you failed an essay test because you ran out of time, but then you woke up and realized it wasn't true and realized that maybe you should get some help for your academic anxiety because when you have a dream about running out of time on a test and then are afraid to go back to sleep things have definitely gone too far) or are they intensifying (a treasure-treasure, which is just so much more . . . treasureful than a regular treasure) or are they showing plural, which would be weird, but some of them seem to point to that: strength-strength is used when describing "the strength of thirty men."
Posted by linnea at November 7, 2006 8:07 PM