cranberry word

Noun

cranberry word (plural cranberry words)

1. A word used only in certain fixed phrases or idioms, with a meaning that is otherwise opaque; often a fossil word.
   • 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.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...
   • 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.2013, Andrew McIntyre, “English particle verbs are complex heads: Evidence from nominalization”, in Holden Härtl, editor, Interfaces of Morphology, →ISBN, page 53
2. A word that contains a cranberry morpheme.
   • (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.”2013, Don Ringe, Joseph F. Eska, Historical Linguistics: Toward a Twenty-First Century Reintegration, →ISBN, page 118
   • 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.2018, Francis Katamba, “Morphology: Word Structure”, in Jonathan Culpeper et al., editors, English Language: Description, Variation and Context, →ISBN, page 58