[Lexicog] Interesting inquiry

[Mike Maxwell]

rtroike at email.arizona.edu wrote:
> I received the following inquiry from Keith Percy, who gave me
> permission to pass it on to the LexList. It is intriguing as a
> demonstration of a literal attempt to substitute dictionary
> definitions for lexical items in an effort to gain a clearer
> understanding. I have responded to him already pointing out some
> problems with his application of the method

I suppose one of the problems is that while two words or phrases might 
be more or less synonymous, this does not mean their syntactic 
requirements are the same, or even that their part of speech need be the 
same.  So in the given example, "lose control" takes (at least in the 
example sentence) a PP with 'of' as its complement, while "lose power to 
check" takes an NP.  If you make the syntactic adjustment, the 
replacement sentence is reasonably good, and somewhat synonymous:
   ...he begins to lose all [power to check] his liquor consumption...
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu

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