Meaning of cranberry word | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A word used only in certain fixed phrases or idioms, with a meaning that is otherwise opaque; often a fossil word.
2. A word that contains a cranberry morpheme.

Examples

“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.”

“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.”

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

“(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.””

“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.”

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

CEFR level