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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>As a fellow inspiree of John Sinclair, I'd like to
add something to Phillippe Humblé's remarks about multi-word
expressions.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>MWEs are not well covered in English
dictionaries</FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>. What Phillippe is doing in an
electronic dictionary re MWEs in Pg is very interesting: another assault on
reductionism. Hurrah for Phillippe! </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>English
- a "well documented" language as far as its vocabulary is </FONT><FONT
face=Arial size=2>concerned - has tens of thousands of conventional
MWEs that have never been </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>documented in any
dictionary. Why not? "Well," says the dictionary </FONT><FONT
face=Arial size=2>publisher, "Putting them all in the dict. would A) cost too
much in </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>lexicographer time; </FONT><FONT
face=Arial size=2>B) make the dictionary unacceptably large; C) be impossible
because </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>we don't have data on all of them and new
ones are being created all </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>the time; and D) be
unnecessary because they are really part of the </FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=2>grammar not the lexicon - an 'electric fire' is just a type of fire
..."</FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>A) is a good point. Collecting and defining
tens of thousands of MWEs systematically would certainly greatly increase
already strained compilation costs, even if one spent only 5 lexicographer
minutes on each one. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>B) was a good point before the advent of on-line
dictionaries removed </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>space
constraints.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>C) is true but irrelevant -- the ideal on-line
dict. would collect and define </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>the MWEs that
ARE available, and allow for adding </FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=2>more as they </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>become available.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>D) is not true, unfortunately. If it were
true, 'forest fire' </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>would be synonymous with
'wood fire'. But both these MWEs (which are not in </FONT><FONT face=Arial
size=2>ordinary dictionaries) have distinctive conventional meanings, which
</FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>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).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>* * *</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>And something on "authentic examples" vs. "invented
examples": </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Phillippe and I agree that the contents of a
dictionary are determined at least in part by the target audience. AND that
authenticity (i.e. being found in a corpus) alone is not enough. Evidence of
conventionality is also needed. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>But I see no conflict between a good product and a
good theory. Certainly, bad theories (of which there are plenty, and
very popular they are too) can lead to bad products. Complete absence of theory
also leads to bad product. If one presses the editor of a good
dictionary about its theoretical foundations, you generally find that
there ARE theoretical foundations, even though they may not be (indeed,
almost certainly are not) anything like received linguistic dogma and even
though the editor may deny having any theoretical basis at all. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Thinking back to the 70s (a time when I still
believed in introspection as a technique for inventing illustrative data)
--- well, if I had a penny for every bad example that my colleagues and I took
out of Collins English Dictionary -- a pre-corpus dictionary, despite
attempts by the publishers to claim or imply otherwise -- on the
grounds that it (the invented example) was unnatural, I'd be a rich man. And
still there are unnatural examples that slipped through. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I am sorry to hear that the "naive
authenticity" view re-surfaced on Cobuild 2. It lurked on Cobuild 1. You do
indeed need a very large number of examples to be able to select at least one
example for each sense of each word if the selected example is to be
both natural and well focused (i.e. short). I think this is because
writers do not simply repeat the normal uses of language -- they
EXPLOIT them in order to say new and interesting things, or to say old things in
new and interesting ways.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>In this connection, Judy Kegl has a wonderful story
about being urged to look in a corpus to find authentic,
natural data... The word they were discussing was BAKE and the corpus that
they had available was Associated Press 1980something. So Judy looked, and
the very first example she found was:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>"Always vacuum your moose from the snout up, and
brush your pheasant with crumbs of freshly BAKED bread, torn not sliced."
(It was a quotation from the New England Journal of Taxidermy or some such
publication.)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>"THAT's authentic?! </FONT> <FONT
face=Arial size=2>I'm supposed to use THAT as a model of normal English
usage?"</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
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