[Lexicog] Percentage of idioms vs single words

[jasper holmes]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Maxwell [mailto:maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu]
> Sent: 04 February 2004 20:18
> To: lexicographylist
> Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Percentage of idioms vs single words
>
>
> 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?

Yes there is. Perhaps that is the point that you are missing. The knowledge
that a language's users have about the words that make it up *is*
encyclopedic, and if you can;t put that in a dictionary then you haven't put
it in a dictionary (not that that means you haven't made something of a
dictionary, just that you haven't finished yet.)

> That, or I'm missing the point.
>
> At its simplest, a forest fire is a fire where the fuel is a
> forest, while a
>
> ...
>
> 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?
>

There you go then: it is a property of fires that they have both locations
and fuels. This is a property of fire *and* of the English word _fire_ (and
the French words _feu_ and _incendie_, both of which capture different
meanings of _fire_, determined in part by their locations and fuels and
etc).

> 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).

I suppose the sense would be that you thereby produced a book that told you
what English words meant.

>
>     Mike Maxwell
>     LDC
>     maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu
>

And later ...

> Now _here's_ an interesting point!  Who--or what--is the audience of your
> lexicography?  If it's a computer, than all the kinds of fires we've
> discussed, and more, need to be distinguished.  But if it's a
> human--even a
> native speaker of Chinese or Tzeltal learning English (or possibly a
> computer that has the benefit of the common sense knowledge database from
> CyCorp)--I suspect you need do a lot less distinguishing among
> senses.  Just
> how much less is, naturally, an empirical question.  (Maybe you would have
> to explain more to a pre-contact Eskimo who had never seen a
> wooden house or
> a forest, even after you explained to them what these things were.)

No. Don't forget the difference between English and French (and Russian and
all them).

>
>     Mike Maxwell
>



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