I noticed this expression in the newspaper and had to investigate what it was. It is a shoe. In this context, chocolate is the color of chocolate, crocodile is the skin of the animal used as a material, and kitten heels is a style of shoe, with a petite heel; petite is a salient attribute of kittens and the heel is metonymic for the whole shoe. To the extent that I have a feel for this, a shoe wouldn’t necessarily be referred to as a kitten heel if the rest of the shoe didn’t also have the attributes characteristic of this kind of shoe, for example a boot with kitten heels might be referred to as a kitten heel boot.<\/p>\n
The example shows how four nouns in a row conceal an intricate underlying structure; given these cultural associations, you wouldn’t call the same thing a crocodile chocolate kitten heel, and certainly not a chocolate kitten crocodile heel. The color has to come before the material, and “kitten heel” can’t be broken up.<\/p>\n
Color comes before material systematically, for example in blue suede shoes, yellow rubber ducky, and red silk pajamas.<\/p>\n
Normally, shape can precede material: square wooden table, flat plastic disk, long steel knife. Kitten heel can’t be separated, though, because the two parts have a conventionalized meaning togther; they form a kind of a compound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I noticed this expression in the newspaper and had to investigate what it was. It is a shoe. In this context, chocolate is the color of chocolate, crocodile is the skin of the animal used as a material, and kitten heels is a style of shoe, with a petite heel; petite is a salient attribute […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":85,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"featured_image_src":"","featured_image_src_square":false,"author_info":{"display_name":"Svenonius","author_link":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/author\/peter-arne-svenonius\/"},"rbea_author_info":{"display_name":"Svenonius","author_link":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/author\/peter-arne-svenonius\/"},"rbea_excerpt_info":"I noticed this expression in the newspaper and had to investigate what it was. It is a shoe. In this context, chocolate is the color of chocolate, crocodile is the skin of the animal used as a material, and kitten heels is a style of shoe, with a petite heel; petite is a salient attribute […]","category_list":"General<\/a>","comments_num":"1 comment","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/85"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":220,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogg.uit.no\/psv000\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}