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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Now take a verb, having been "nouned," and re-verb it. (And never mind the side trip about "reverberation.")
Or conversely, a noun, having been "verbed," and re-noun it. (And never mind the side trip about the state of being "reknowned").
I'm sure Nuncle Z can come up with some real world examples of this phenomenon.
As a machine having to process such constructs, or as an engineer having to design such a machine (to parse these and assign discrete meaning to them), the problem emerges: the process can go on infinitely, referring to (or should I say "referencing") itself with no specific end defined.
For stack-based machines, this infinite recursion will ultimately result in a "stack overflow" condition (exhaustion of available memory allocated for the stack). For register-based machines, it will ultimately result in the an "out of memory" condition (subtly different, exhausting of all available free memory).
Fortunately the human brain doesn't have the limitations of your typical finite-state machine. Normally, if a nouned verb is re-verbed, the resulting verb will have some significantly different meaning from the original verb, one of the verbs will fall out of use, or they will become local variants. The same would be true for verbed nouns that have been re-nouned. Oh, and the correct terms are 'reverbificatationize' and 'renounificationatingize.'
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old hand
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old hand
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It reminds me of a legendary cinnamon bun. Huh? Now who's speaking in code? 
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stranger
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stranger
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Yeow!!
Perhaps Monty Python summarized my reaction best in "Holy Grail:"
"Run away, run away!!!!!"
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stranger
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stranger
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"dead jectival:" another mondegreene (sp?)? Got to love these...
--DTs
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Z can come up with some real world examples of this phenomenon.
Of words that have changed lexical category more than once through zero morphology? Can't off the top of my head, and I agree with you that something would've changed along the trail, e.g., meaning, form.
I think it's not an issue in NLP (natural language processing). I suppose it depends if one thinks that part of speech-ness is some property inherent in a word or whether, as many would think, that it is how a word is used syntactically that determines what it is. The former handles words like love (noun and verb) which not even peevologists find anomalous owing to its antiquity, but the latter would seem a more robust way to develop a word tagger. (It should also be easy enough to rewrite any tail-recursive function as an iterative one, and in writing any function one should take into account infinite recursion or endless loops.)
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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old hand
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old hand
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Yeow!!
Perhaps Monty Python summarized my reaction best in "Holy Grail:"
"Run away, run away!!!!!" TIM: Well, that's no ordinary rabbit! ARTHUR: Ohh. TIM: That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on! ROBIN: You tit! I soiled my armour I was so scared! TIM: Look, that rabbit's got a vicious streak a mile wide! It's a killer! Monty Python anything tops my list! I love their turns of phrases, most especially the many ways to say "dead" in the parrot sketch... :0)
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old hand
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old hand
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...not even peevologists... Nice coinage, but technically shouldn't they be peevophiles, those who love to peeve (hey there's another good verbing of a noun!) - I mean, you yourself are a peevologist aren't you? That is, in the sense of being someone who is an expert or commentator on peeves and 'peevers' and all things peevish? 
Last edited by The Pook; 04/29/08 03:04 AM.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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peevologists
It's not my coinage, but I think of peevologists are those who collect peeves.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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old hand
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old hand
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peevologists
It's not my coinage, but I think of peevologists are those who collect peeves. Their own, or those of others? If the latter, then you're definitely a peevologist! 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Their own, or those of others? A difficult question to answer. Most of the usage shibboleths of the modern grammar nazi (aka prescriptivist, peevologist, grammar maven) are not their own, but come from other equally ill-informed pseudo-grammarians. For example, somebody like Dryden comes along and decides ex cathedra that sentences (which he never really get around to defining) must never end with a preposition. Even the Bishop Lowth found this fiat a bit too much and in his seminal peevological work, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, (whence many other modern-day usage factoids) he penned: The Preposition is often separated from the Relative which it governs, and joined to the Verb at the end of the Sentence, or of some member of it: as, “Horace is an author, whom I am delighted with.” “The world is too well bred to shock authors with a truth, which generally their booksellers are the first that inform them of.” This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style. NB, the sentence starting "this is an Idiom" and ending with to before the semi-colon. Old Bob had a sense of humor that Dryden and his ilk were lacking. But there is hope. Samuel Johnson started out editing his magnificent dictionary as a prescriptivist, but by the end he had pretty much become more of a descriptivist.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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