elemtilas wrote: ↑22 Jan 2021 04:32
It is certainly an interesting construction. And you've got me thinking about it, though my conclusion is rather more prosaic than yours! Of course, loads of things can take cashier's place.
Yes, of course - I thought that would be clear from context, and from my suggestion of 'page' as an equivalent. My point wasn't about "cashier", it was about "number". What grammatical part of speech does this belong to, and what function does it serve?
Many of these can be replaced by ordinal numbers: third house, fourth left turn, second door.
Yes, that's the construction we're talking about, and why we're talking about it (c.f. the context of vlurch's question).
And number can be replaced by "letter", or even "station": "building letter A"; "teller station three"
I have never heard these constructions.
I would assume that the former is using "letter" by analogy to "number", in the case of ordination by letter name rather than by number. To the extent that this exists, I would assume "letter" here would have the same function as "number".
However, the latter construction I don't think is related. To me, that's a clear compound followed by a number. Note: cashier number 4 is the 4th cashier, not the fourth "cashier number" (though maybe that's the etymology?); by contrast "teller station three" I could only interpret as being the third "teller station".
(Unless it were some form of condensed press-speak, or war-speak: "teller, station three" (the teller at station three); but this would not be a normal register, and various grammatical oddities arise in these specialised registers.
I'd say that, at least in Leftpondia, "cashier", while it certainly can be used as a job title, rather than a title of rank or dignity, a person who tends the cash till in a shop or a bank, it doesn't have to be. We also use cashier to indicate the station itself, along the counter where the cash register and the credit card reader are. In fact, there is a store that has an automated announcement for people standing in the queue that says "cashier nine" or "cashier number nine", indicating that the customer ought to go to that numbered station, not that they need to go to a specific person.
I don't think this is an example of a title. It's common practice to assign internal numbers to cashiers, for accounting purposes. If there's a discrepancy in the till of Cashier #305, that'll have to be sorted, whether that individual worked at the station of "cashier number 3" or "cashier number 9" that day. In any event, it would be rather odd to address someone as "cashier" the way one might address a captain or a doctor.
Again, I wasn't really talking about the word "cashier" specifically, but about the grammar. [although traditionally one would indeed have used 'cashier' as a title: Cashier Smith, and so on]
While I like the idea of number being a preposition, I don't see what it would indicate. My questions would be: how exactly does the word number preposition?
Well, I agree that it would be a weird preposition.
However, in a construction of the type "X y Z", where X and Z are noun phrases, and the effect is for Z to specify which X is meant, 'y' is typically a preposition. "The cashier at the back", and so forth. And prepositions are used in English in very similar numeric constructions: "the batsman at four", "animals in twos", "the count of four". My biggest problem with this theory might actually be the definiteness: using "number 4" removes the need for (and probably forbids!) the definite article, and I'm not sure there's a reason why a preposition would do that?
And then, why would that explanation work better than some kind of nominal compound like "White House Press Secretary" (which is a title).
Grammatically, this is not alike at all to "cashier number four". For a start, a white house press secretary is a type of secretary, not a type of white house, whereas cashier number four is a cashier, not a four. Also, "white house press secretary" acts like a common noun, whereas "cashier number four" is a proper noun that can't (easily) take an article, and mere compounding probably shouldn't have that effect.
Or to follow the pattern, "trousers size 30" or "record tape eight".
I have never heard the former construction - unless it's a typo for "trousers, size 30", which is clearly a different thing entirely - or for "trouser(s)-size 30", which is also different. I also haven't heard the latter except as a plain ordinal - the eighth record tape.
I see what you mean by "conjunction" -- number, size, tape, they all "join" two related things. But there again, why that explanation, where we'd kind of have to stretch the meaning of "conjunction" just a little bit, rather than a simpler?
The reason I suggest these counterintuitive theories is precisely that I don't see a simple explanation - and I don't think you provide one either.
As for being part of the number, there are no numbers that don't take "number" before them, this could be a difference in dialect. "Cashier 3"; "Door 2"; "Record Book L". All of these are perfectly acceptable in US English. I (at least) would understand "Cashier 3" and "Cashier Number 3", "Door 2" and "Door Number 2" to be completely synonymous.
I'm sorry, I think you've misunderstood. I'm talking about grammar here. My suggestion was that you could consider "number four" simply to be a number - that this was just a lexical item - and hence "cashier number four" is just another way of saying "cashier four". But this seems like sophistry. It would be appealing if some numbers simply had "number" stuck before them sometimes - but ANY number can have "number" stuck before it sometimes. And if there are any rules about when it can appear, they're surely grammatical rather than lexical. So we have a morpheme that can be placed before any member of a certain class, in the same way, indescriminately - this does not seem like a genuine, unanalysable lexical element, but like a grammatical particle!
I can't honestly think of a situation where either would be righter or wronger than the other. Nor can I think of a situation where the word "number" is actually required.
And this is also weird!
My suspicion is that "number" USED to be an obligatory particle in forming ordinal numbers, but has become optional over time, making this primarily a register difference in modern English - but I've not researched whether that's actually true. However, even without "number", and with a zero particle in its place, the syntactical issues mostly still remain, I think.
I don't see how it adds any grammatical function, though. While it being a conjunction or a preposition or an apposition are all interesting, so far I remain unconvinced that any of these are actually what's going on. Sophistry notwithstanding, at least in US English, "number" is entirely dispensable. I think in the end, "number", along with an actual number, is nothing more than an attributive noun phrase, modifying, in your example case, the word "cashier".
Except that obviously it's not an attributive noun. For one thing: it follows the noun, rather than preceding it. But more importantly, it alters the syntactic properties of the head noun in a way that attributives can't do. So, taking an attributive construction like "face mask", we can produce "the face mask", "a face mask" and "face masks". But once we add "number X" to it, we can't: *"the mask number 2", *"a mask number 2", *"masks number two" (unless followed by "and three" or the like). [the article forms can occur, but not in normal speech, only in quotative contexts, where all sorts of weird things can happen in English]
Wikipedia suggests that there are "postpositive noun adjuncts", but the only examples it gives are clear example of titles+names - Lake Ontario, Operation Desert Storm - which only work with specific titles. Again, this looks a lot like "cashier number four", except that the "title" in this case is not always semantically a title, and is not lexically restricted as normal titles are. [we can say Operation War And Peace, but we can't say "book war and peace" - 'book' isn't licensed to act as a title in this way].
However, even this would just be kicking the can along the road: even if "number four" acts as a whole as a "postpositive adjunct", that doesn't answer what we should call "number" itself, and how it relates to other word classes.