[Lexicog] Re: Lexical Relations vs. Etymology

[maxwell at LDC.UPENN.EDU]

Quoting David Frank <david_frank at sil.org>:
> Now as to the issue of whether a phrase can be a noun, I would still 
> say no. You say that "vital statistics office" functions as a noun. 
> I'm not sure what you mean by that, but I think that "functions as a 
> noun" and "is a noun" might be two different things... Nouns are 
> words, and phrases consist of more than one word.

But then there are compound nouns, and I think that's what "vital 
statistics office" is.

Sometimes in English (and I guess always in German), compound nouns get 
written as single words, like "manhole"; sometimes they are hyphenated, 
like "church-goer"; and sometimes they are written separately, like 
"inspection team".  That seems to be a function of how common they are 
(or to what extent they are lexicalized; or maybe these are the same), 
and partly a function of English spelling standards.  There's certainly 
a good deal of variation in this, too.

English compound nouns are usually endocentric, meaning that they are 
headed by a noun.  There are compounds in other languages (and a few in 
English, like "pickup") which are exocentric.  Indeed, that is 
virtually the only kind of compound you get in Romance languages 
(Spanish 'parabrisas' "windshield", literally "for breezes").  There 
are also other kinds of compounds found in languages like Sanskrit, 
which have the appearance of coordinate nouns.

Possibly related to compounds is incorporation, where a noun is 
incorporated into a verb (and sometimes appears inside the verb's 
inflection).  About the only English example is "babysit".  Many 
polysynthetic languages (or all of them, depending on your definition 
of "polysynthesis") do this.

As for the status of these constructions as words, I suppose it depends 
on what you mean by "word", which as we all know, is a slippery 
linguistic notion.  I would not call them noun phrases, since (at least 
in the singular, in English) they require a determiner to make them a 
complete NP.  In some versions of X-bar theory, at least the 
non-lexicalized ones (and maybe the lexicalized ones) would be called 
N-bar (where N-double-bar = NP).

Another construction, possibly related, is used in things like "a 
come-as-you-are party".  Pretty much anything can get stuck together 
like that, and it functions typically in English as an adjective.  It's 
not clear what you would call it from a theoretical perspective.

> The best analysis I have see of this phenomenon in English, where one 
> noun modifies another, is a book by Peter Fries (1970), Tagmeme 
> Sequences in the English Noun Phrase. He calls the slot where one 
> noun modifies another, a margin of close-knit modification.

"Close-knit modification" might be seen as the Tagmemic equivalent of 
N-bar, or maybe of "complex word."

Another reference on compounding (but from a cross-language 
perspective) is the article of that name in the Handbook of Morphology, 
by Nigel Fabb.

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD

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