[Lexicog] Percentage of idioms vs single words

[Richard Rhodes]

It seems to me that there are two sets of assumptions in play in this
discussion. First, what does it mean to be lexicalized? And second,
what is the role of pragmatics?

	Let's look at the lexicalization question first. If you
believe that productive analyzability precludes lexicalization, then
you are forced to conclude that forest fire is not a lexical item.
I'd argue to the contrary. Just because a phrase has a productive
analysis does not preclude its being a lexical unit. Thus I'd say
that forest fire, house fire, campfire, brush fire are all
lexicalized, while tree fire, city fire, and roof fire are not. I
don't believe that this can be determined by any straightforward
syntactic or semantic test. Although I've selected a set of phrases
that all have locative readings, the first four have something
"special" about them.

	1) forest fire There's an important sense in which forest
fires are a regular topic of discussion -- at least here in the
American West where they are an annual problem. Whether it's the
frequency of usage that gives forest fire its lexical status I'll
leave to the corpus linguists to decide. I'm only registering an
introspective fact that a forest fire seems like a thing to me in a
way that a tree fire doesn't.

	2) house fire If you think about all the things the
expression house fire could mean and doesn't, e.g. the fire in the
fireplace in the house, coupled with the fact that it's a reasonably
common occurrence both physically and lexically, and you have a
reason house fire is a lexical item and city fire or roof fire isn't.
(City fires are very common in the real world, they're just not
talked about in that way. Roof fires aren't the most common kind of
house fire but they are usually talked about as house fires.)

	3) campfire This needs no explanation. This is not just a
fire in a camp. It refers to a very specific kind of fire. That alone
warrants listing as a lexical entry.

	4) brush fire Again the semi-idiomatic use of the word brush
in this expression makes it an obvious lexical entry.


	The pragmatic question is equally tricky, but it depends, in
part, on the view you have on lexicalization. If you believe that
that which can be analyzed, must be analyzed, then the following
observations probably won't have much traction for you.
	Some background first. On the question of English compound
nouns, we seem to have forgotten Judy Levi's 1978 work on compounds.
She observes that there is added semantic content in compounds of a
fairly limited sort which is not explicit. The cited examples in a
Levi type framework go like so:

	a wood fire is a fire USING wood
	a forest fire is a fire IN (the) forest (actually LOCATIVE)

and
	an electric fire is a fire CAUSED BY electricity
		(BTW, I have to say electrical fire, *electric fire for me)

I would argue that the fact that there are standard interpretations
means that information has to be listed in the lexicon in some way.
There are three options:

1) associate the added semantics with the head noun.

	fire in compounds N fire = fire AT LOC N or fire USING N or
fire CAUSED BY N

2) associate the added semantics with the modifying noun

	forest in compounds forest N = N AT LOC forest, etc.

3) associate the added semantics with the compound

	forest fire = fire AT LOC forest

It's a whole paper to show that 1) and 2) are fraught with problems
(although 1) fares better than 2)). Needless to say, I favor 3),
whose only problem is that it may come close to making the lexicon
encyclopedic. (I'd argue that that's not a problem, but a necessity
anyway.
	But there remains the problem of pragmatics. The fact that
one can force a non-standard interpretation of a lexicalized phrase
pragmatically does not mean that all the interpretations of the
phrase are pragmatically driven. We have to account for preferred
readings.

	Levi also points out that there are parallels between
compounds and adjectival forms (as in the variants electric fire vs.
electrical fire). Many of the adjectives in these pseudo-compounds
are not usable as predicative adjectives.

	*That engineer is electrical.

This is apparently the only source of non-predicative adjectives,
which further supports the treatment of such phrases as units. (A
fuller discussion can be found in Levi.)

	I should add a quick final note that working on Sayula
Popoluca over the past years I have run across clear syntactically
testable distinctions in lexicalization between complex forms of
identical analysis. This is why I feel strongly that analyzability is
not a test for non-lexical status. (Nobody said language was easy.)

Rich Rhodes


>Patrick Hanks wrote:
>>  ...D) be unnecessary because they are
>>  really part of the grammar not the lexicon - an 'electric fire' is
>>  just a type of fire ..."
>>
>>  D) is not true, unfortunately.  If it were true, 'forest fire' would
>>  be synonymous with 'wood fire'. But both these MWEs (which are not in
>>  ordinary dictionaries) have distinctive conventional meanings, which
>>  an ideal dictionary would state explicitly.  A forest fire is out
>>  there in the forst, and a wood fire is at home in your house (or in a
>>  camp, for cooking).
>
>Isn't there a slippery slope here, grading off into encyclopedic knowledge?
>That, or I'm missing the point.
>
>At its simplest, a forest fire is a fire where the fuel is a forest, while a
>wood fire is a fire whose fuel is (any) wood.  And in fact there can be lots
>of different kinds of wood fires besides the two you mention: a fire in a
>boiler on a ship, where they're burning wood instead of coal or oil; a house
>that's on fire, where one is contrasting the burning of wood with burning of
>something else (perhaps some toxic substance contained in the house); etc.
>I guess it doesn't seem to me that listing in your dictionary the kinds of
>things that contain wood, and can therefore be part of a wood fire, is very
>useful.  And the fact that a forest fire is not in your home is simply a
>result of the fact that we don't have forests in our houses.  (I wish I
>did.)
>
>Or maybe your point is that if 'forest fire' and 'wood fire' were
>synonomous, we could just as well refer to a forest fire as a wood fire?
>But it seems to me that there's a Gricean reason for this: all forest fires
>are wood fires, but not vice versa, and we try to be somewhat explicit.
>
>(Now if Disney built a forest in California out of--what else--plastic, and
>it caught fire, we might conceivably call it a forest fire; and then we
>might want to distinguish 'wood forest fires' from 'plastic forest fires'.
>But I don't want a plastic forest in my house :-).)
>
>Putting it differently, a "city fire", "prairie fire", "building fire" etc.
>all have much the same kind of meaning as "forest fire": a fire in a
>location; while "paper fire", "oil fire", "coal fire" etc. are like "wood
>fire": a fire burning a substance.  But that's because forests (etc.) are
>locations, while wood (etc.) is a substance.  Isn't this just pragmatics/
>encyclopedic knowledge, rather than convention?
>
>In sum, compound nouns are notoriously productive in English, with the
>meanings of productive compounds being determined for the most part by
>pragmatics.  I'm not sure I see the sense (pardon the pun) in doing a
>dictionary of that (or if you do create such a work, calling it a
>dictionary).
>
>     Mike Maxwell
>     LDC
>     maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu
>

--
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Richard A. Rhodes
Associate Dean, Undergraduate Division
Interim Director, Office of Undergraduate Advising
College of Letters & Science
113 Campbell Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2924
Phone: (510) 643-4184
FAX: (510) 642-2372

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