[Lexicog] Nouns

[Mike Maxwell]

Greg and Heather Mellow wrote:
> According to my "old fashioned" training, a noun is a plain word 
> (whatever that might mean) and a noun phrase is the noun together with 
> any combination of modifiers that lump together with the noun. (The 
> secret of what defined a noun was never revealed to us.)

There are those linguists who claim that there is no universal 
distinction between nouns and verbs.  While many languages lack 
adjectives and other parts of speech that traditional grammars include 
(and may include other POSs that traditional grammars lack, such as 
postpositions), my personal opinion is that the distinction between noun 
and verb is fairly clear in most--probably all--languages.  You find 
clear cases (words for concepts like "dog", "house", "run", "throw"), 
then find the language-particular morphosyntactic ways these are 
distinguished.  But I digress (and I could digress a lot more...)

> The point is though, that combinations of words were thought to be noun 
> phrases.
>  
> Thus 'big dog' and 'hot dog' are both noun phrases.
>
> An alternative view is that there are things which we might call complex 
> nouns. In this view 'hot dog' is a complex noun.

"big dog" is perhaps an NP, although in English you would normally get a 
determiner ("a", "the", "this"...).  "Hot dog" is actually ambiguous; if 
my dog lays out in the sun too long, he might be "a hot dog".  But the 
food item is arguably a compound noun, along with things like "pickup 
truck", "gun rack", "redneck".

In addition to a determiner and pre-modifying adjectives, English NPs 
may have lots of other internal parts, such as prepositional phrase 
modifiers ("the gun on that gun rack"), relative clauses ("the gun 
that's in my gunrack"), possessive NPs acting as determiners ("my 
pappy's corn squeezins") etc.  But all these components are optional 
except for the head noun (e.g. "grits" can be an NP, in addition to 
being a noun, in a sentence like "Grits is good").

BTW, in English things we call compound nouns often are not made up of 
two nouns (like "gun rack" is), but rather of an adjective + noun ("hot 
dog", "blackboard").

> So when label the part of speech for 'hot dog' in my dictionary, should 
> I put n.phr or n ? 

I would not think of the compound noun "hot dog" as an NP, but rather as 
a compound noun.  A "compound noun" would be a sub-type of "noun", in 
the sense that a compound noun can appear anywhere in syntax that a 
plain noun might appear (assuming semantic compatibility).

Typically one writes lexical entries in a dictionary for compound nouns 
if they are not compositional, that is, if you can't figure out their 
meaning from the meaning of the two parts.  So "hot dog" would be listed 
as a kind of food, but "hitchhiker story" would not be, because if you 
know what a hitchhiker is, and you know what a story is, you can figure 
out that the compound is a story by or about a hitchhiker.

As for the label, I would probably label "hot dog" as a compound noun, 
simply because it's more descriptive than calling it a noun.
-- 

    Mike Maxwell
    CASL/ University of Maryland


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