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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Quang's research (was: Terminology question)
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References: <35s90i$tn@linus.mitre.org> <36060d$2th@asia.lm.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 16:13:19 GMT
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In article <36060d$2th@asia.lm.com>,
Rod McGuire <mcguire@telerama.lm.com> wrote:
>Yes, I think (but I don't have references at hand to verify this) that
>this construction was named "fucking-insertion" in a paper by the famed
>Vietnamese Porno-Linguist, Quang Phuc Dong, or one of his buddies.
>The examples in that paper were something like:
>
>	"un-fucking-believable" and "in-fucking-credible"
>
>and the theory was that the pre-inserted words had structures like:
>
>	[un [believe able]]  and [in [credit able]]
>
>(but I don't remember these were supposed to be morphological or
> syllabic-stress structures)
>
>The argument was that if "fucking" was inserted too deep within
>such structures it produced unacceptable words, i.e.:
>
>  *"unbelieve-fucking-able"  and *"incred-fucking-able"

Steven Pinker in _The Language Instinct_ mentions (without citing a source,
unfortunately) a simpler rule that accounts for why these examples are
unacceptable without bringing in structure or deepness of insertion at
all: the expletive must appear before the stressed syllable.  

The construction is not limited to -able words, by the way.
Abso-fuckin-lutely not.
