![\"\"](\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/NS_Giver.gif\" "\\"Click")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This illustrates the protean nature of English compound-noun semantics. But it made me wonder whether the commoner form was \"Complaint Department\" (as in this strip) or \"Complaints Department\", since I think I've seen both.<\/p>\n
A bit of poking around turned up something that I didn't expect: The COCA corpus (425 million words of American English) has 8 instances of \"complaint department\" and none of \"complaints department\". In contrast, the British National Corpus (100 million words of British English) has 1 instance of \"complaint department\" and 9 instances of \"complaints department\".<\/p>\n
This might be taken by crypto-Whorfians to suggest that the Brits are (10\/100)\/(9\/425) = 4.7 times more concerned about complaining than Americans are, but I won't go there, among other things because these counts are rather small, and may simply reflect a difference in the distribution of source-text types. But these results do suggest that there's a trans-Atlantic difference in the choice of \"complaint\" vs. \"complaints\" as the first element of this compound noun.<\/p>\n
This in turn suggests several questions that I don't have time to look into this morning: Is this apparent difference (between British \"complaints department\" and American \"complaint department\") a real one? How strong are the geographically-linked preferences? (Not strong enough for me to have noticed, anyhow.) Is this an instance of a more general trans-Atlantic difference in noun-compound morphology? Whatever the difference is, when and how did it arise (if, of course, it exists at all)?<\/p>\n
Perhaps someone has already explored these questions, somewhere in the extensive linguistic literature on the form and meaning of English noun compounds and complex nominals more generally; if so, no doubt a helpful reader will tell us about it in the comments.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, for some insight into one of the reasons that this extensive literature has come into being, see this exchange between Geoff Pullum and me:\u00a0\"Postcard from Vegas, 3: Regularly-inflected plurals exclusion? I don't think so<\/a>\", 12\/1\/2003; \"Activities Centers in Paradise and Santa Cruz<\/a>\", 12\/1\/2003; \"The rigors of fieldwork trips<\/a>\", 12\/1\/2003.<\/p>\n Update — A bit more data.<\/p>\n Guardian page counts via Google \"site:\" search, actual pages returned rather than estimates; NYT page counts from query.nytimes.com, 1981-present.<\/p>\n guardian.co.uk: \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \"activity centre\" 190 \"activities centre\" 264\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (58% plural) guardian \"complaint department\"\u00a0 13 \"complaints department\" 179\u00a0 (93% plural) So the early returns suggest that there is a real difference, but one that's probabilistic rather than categorical, and one that may differ for different compounds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today's Non Sequitur:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linguistics-in-the-funny-papers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNew York Times: \u00a0\u00a0 \"activity center\" 149 \"activities center\"\u00a0\u00a0 95\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (39% plural)<\/p>\n
\nNYT \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \"complaint department\"\u00a0\u00a0 43\u00a0 \"complaints department\"\u00a0 10\u00a0 (19% plural)<\/p>\n