cranberry word

English

Etymology

From or by analogy with cranberry morpheme.

Noun

cranberry word (plural cranberry words)

1. (linguistics) A word used only in certain fixed phrases or idioms, with a meaning that is otherwise opaque; often a fossil word.
   • 2012, Probal Dasgupta, “Rephrasing the question of complex predicates in Bangla: A biaxial approach”, in Rajendra Singh, Shishir Bhattacharja, editors, Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics: 2012, →ISBN, page 10:

     Likewise, cranberry words like the underlined words in hediye jawa ‘to be bored to death’ and keMce jawa ‘to go wrong (said of plans)’ were cited by P. Dasgupta (1980: 99–101) as evidence for a base-generated V V analysis of the compound verb construction.

   • 2013, Andrew McIntyre, “English particle verbs are complex heads: Evidence from nominalization”, in Holden Härtl, editor, Interfaces of Morphology, →ISBN, page 53:

     Here it will not do to say that the non-head is related to raiser by pragmatic inferences, since such compounds are possible even for speakers for whom hackle is a cranberry word not usable outside the idiom chunk.

   • 2019, Livnat Herzig Sheinfux et al., “Verbal multiword expressions: Idiomaticity and flexibility”, in Yannick Parmentier, Jakub Waszczuk, editors, Representation and parsing of multiword expressions: Current trends, →ISBN, page 45:

     The cranberry word in this idiom is kelaħ, which has no known literal meaning.

2. (linguistics) A word that contains a cranberry morpheme.
   • 2013, Don Ringe, Joseph F. Eska, Historical Linguistics: Toward a Twenty-First Century Reintegration, →ISBN, page 118:

     (13d) exhibits the same suffix as the two adjectives that precede it in the list, though the root is otherwise unattested; it is a Greek “cranberry word.”

   • 2018, Francis Katamba, “Morphology: Word Structure”, in Jonathan Culpeper et al., editors, English Language: Description, Variation and Context, →ISBN, page 58:

     The bound morphs cran-, mul- and huckle- occur only in these forms in the entire language. […] The knotty issues raised by cranberry words are of wider relevance. There are many other situations where the zeal with which the linguist identifies morphemes has to be tempered.

   • 2019, Réka Benczes, Rhyme over Reason: Phonological Motivation in English, →ISBN, page 84:

     However, such problem cases also appear in morphology, in so-called cranberry words, where the morphemic status of cran- is far from settled.