Meaning of cutthroat compound | Babel Free

Definitions

A compound word formed of a transitive verb and a noun; an (usually exocentric) agentive-instrumental verb-noun compound.

Examples

“But not for the compounds I study — the fun ones! — which are called agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun compounds. Now, for the rest of the talk I'm going to be calling them cutthroat compounds, so don't worry about that.”

“Cutthroat compounds name things or people by describing what they do. A cutthroat cuts throats, a telltale tells tales, a wagtail wags its tail, a killjoy kills joy”

“When did it become common for linguists describing a class of words to use a particular(ly good) example to refer to the class as a whole? (e.g. "eggcorn," "cutthroat compound" quite recently”

“many early English cutthroat compounds were French loanwords, which were then translated and played with, creating variations and semantic clumps.”

“There aren’t a lot of cutthroat compounds in common use these days — only about 30, depending on your definition of common. Probably the most well-used one is breakfast, that meal that breaks the fast begun (presumably) after dinner the previous night.”

CEFR level