[Lexicog] Nouns

[Greg and Heather Mellow]

Thanks Max,

You have answered the main question. In a dictionary, you would label a fixed expression as a compound noun. I think I will follow your advice.

Once the part of speech we call "compound noun" is included in the grammar, we get the problem of distinguishing between compound nouns and noun phrases. You mentioned two tests for compound nouns.

One test is a syntactic test, "a compound noun can appear anywhere in syntax that a 
plain noun might appear (assuming semantic compatibility)"

Another test is a semantic test, "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"

My example of 'hot dog' is ambiguous because the same construction has two different referents. The food item passes both the tests, so that sense of hot dog is a compound noun.

With respect, your example of 'gun rack' does not pass the semantic test because I can figure out what the expression means from the two component parts. In fact I think there is a significant proportion of compound nouns that fail the semantic test because they were originally constructed from words that obviously referred to the item in question. Brown trout, elm beetle, hitchhiker, member of parliament, dishwasher, fireplace; these are intuitively compound nouns in my mind, but if I had never heard of them, I could discern the approximate meaning from the component pieces.

Perhaps a compound noun is a simple noun construction (typically two or three words) that is commonly used as a fixed expression, to consistently refer to a specific referent and which appears in the syntax anywhere a simple noun might appear (assuming semantic compatibility). Although the syntactic evidence for adopting this part of speech is weak, the correlation between the word group and the referent is strong, leading to a strong intuitive argument for the 'reality' of this linguistic phenomenon.

What do you think?

Regards,
Greg

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mike Maxwell 
  To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 11:35 PM
  Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Nouns


  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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