[Lexicog] Percentage of idioms vs single words

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 4 Feb 2004 rrhodes at cogsci.berkeley.edu wrote:
> 	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.

I agree with this, but I'd add that expressions like forest fire are used
to the exclusion of apparently synonymous or hyponymous alternatives like
woods fire or jungle fire.  In consequence of observations like this,
while frequency of use might not determine lexicalization, but it could
well be indicative of it in a practical way.  In addition, I'm afraid I'm
out of touch with thought on English accentuation, but isn't there is a
difference in the accentuation or pitch contour of fixed expressions like
forest fire and unfixed ones?  You can, of course, say jungle fire with
the same intonation, and you can say both forest fire and jungle fire with
the modifier modified intonation, with various pragmatic consequences.
This is the old whitehouse vs. white house observation, combined with the
observation that where word boundaries are written in English (and other
languages) is something of a pragmatic or even arbitrary matter anyway.


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