I think I understand the syntax of "guy-with-an-axe-guy" now. This is a phrasal template used idiolectically in my immediate circle, used to emphasize the salient characteristic (the "with-an-axe" part) while suggesting a possible lack of other salient characteristics.
E.g.:
A: How's the new player doing in your campaign?
B: He's playing guy-with-a-sword-guy, so it's simple, so he's doing fine.
Or:
A: When did Steven Seagal go from karate guy to guy-with-a-paunch-guy?
Bear with me a bit and I'll explain how I got to the answer.
First I was thinking about English and Chinese. Chinese is the classic example of an "isolating" language, meaning one in which the words don't express any agreement or change depending on their semantic or syntactic roles in the speech. E.g., there's no subject-verb agreement like there is in English, where the form of the verb changes when the subject is he, she or it.
English is pretty nearly an isolating language, with only a few, fairly simple changes (nouns for number, some adjectives for comparison, pronouns for case, and verbs for tense and number).
Isolating languages rely strongly on word order to define the syntax of a speech act. Much word ordering is rigid; if the man bit the dog with the broken fang, there's very little you can move around to express the same idea. (There are some transformations, like right-raising It was the dog with the broken fang that the man bit, but that's out of scope.)
It turns out that English and Chinese both permit the structure NP N, where a noun phrase modifies a head noun, and this can recurse. E.g. I want some sockeye salmon steaks, Take the old river valley road to get there faster. Now consider this from your parser's perspective, working on understanding an incoming string of speech: The next expected slot is a direct object, so I'm looking for a noun, and here comes a noun, and oh crap it's followed by another noun, and another.
Now, as a native English speaker, my parser is actually used to stacks of NPs. But I was thinking about the word-for-word translations of Chinese I've seen, and, for me at least, it's damn hard to piece together a string of nouns (and other modifiers) in a completely unknown language into a coherent stream.
And that's when the answer occured to me. It's not guy-with-an-axe-guy. It's guy-with-an-axe guy. guy with an axe is an NP modifying guy. The NP in an NP N can take modifiers, after all. Intrusive PPs may be rare, but they're not illegal. E.g. Kim Basinger had the hooker with a heart of gold role, of course. The only wrinkle is that the head noun of the modifying NP is the same noun it's modifying, guy, and that's just semantics.
It may even be related to reduplication, e.g., Going to the grandparents' is fun, but it's not fun fun. Duplicating the generic guy may contribute to the suggestion of lack of other salient characteristics.
So now you know. Guy with an axe guy is just a standard NP N construction.
Posted by Greg at November 19, 2007 12:00 PM