(Non-AtD, mildly GR-related) "that's one reflective-ass mirror..."

Michael Bailey michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com
Fri Mar 28 07:12:31 CDT 2008


http://linguistlist.org/donation/fund-drive2006/conf.html

found this in pdf 2 - carries the Bummer-Bodine
pedagogical dialogue a step further, no attribution...
(maybe they arrived at their conclustions independently)

Serious-ass morphology: The anal emphatic in English
Diana Elgersma

....virtually any adjective can serve as the base:
tasty-ass ('This is one tasty-ass donut!'), curly-ass ('Those
are some curly-ass fries!'), and hairy-ass ('That's one hairy-ass ass!')

Mono- and bi-syllabic adjectives are the most frequent bases for the
'-ass' affix; however, though marked, tri+-syllabic adjectives are not
ungrammatical: reflective-ass ('Oo-ie! That's one reflective-ass
mirror!') or Wisconsin-ass ('Woof! That's some Wisconsin-ass
cheese!') ....

One interesting case is the word backward. There are several variants
with this particular base, including bass-ackward, backasswards
(infixation), or the prefixed ass-backward. This latter variant can
potentially be explained as an iconic reversal; that is, putting the
normally suffixed '-ass' in a prefixed position is in itself backward.
It is possible to have the attributive variant backward-ass
('That's one backward-ass idea'), however, this particular
construction cannot occur as a predicate adjective:
* 'That idea is backward-ass.'

....Finally, I would like to comment briefly on the collective suffix
''n' shit.' This is a fairly productive form, e.g. 'We went to the zoo,
and there were all these lions and tigers 'n' shit,'
'So he was all freaked out 'n' shit,' etc.
The implication being that there were not only lions
and tigers at the zoo, but a wide variety of other exotic
and wonderful animals, and that aside from being freaked,
this person was experiencing a vast array of other
(disturbing) emotions....



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