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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Patrick Hanks said:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<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>I note that in the New Oxford Dictionary of English 'electric
fire' and 'gas fire' are mentioned under 'fire' as 'fire' being short for
'electric fire' or 'gas fire'. Under phrases it has the MWEs 'breathe fire'
and 'catch fire' but not 'open fire'. (In Amele (Papuan) 'open fire' means 'to
light a fire'.) On the other hand, they list 'alarm clock', 'atomic clock',
'biological clock', 'cuckoo clock', 'grandfather clock', 'grandmother clock',
and 'quartz clock' presumably as different types of 'clock' but not 'digital
clock' or 'wall clock'. And they don't list these MWEs under 'clock' as
extensions of meaning denoting the range of the concept. What principles do the
compilers of NODE work with for including MWEs in their dictionary of English or
not?</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>John Roberts</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV></FONT> </DIV></DIV>
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