[Corpora-List] Chinese and English POS

[simon smith]

>
> Hi everybody,
>
> I am puzzled with the part of speech of "chief" in the phrase "the chief
>
> executive officer".
>
>
>

@Fukun



I think that your Chinese example sounds interesting, but unfortunately I
can't read it. Can you try again, with a Unicode font?



"Chief" is a legitimate example of a word that has distinct noun and
adjective readings. As an adjective it means "main" or "principal"; as a
noun it means "person in charge". A "chief executive officer" is of course a
"person in charge" too, but the "chief" part should still be analyzed as
"main", I think.



@Mike: Can you say any more about the theory that words do not have a
pre-determined POS? I have to confess I had always thought the
interpretation of "church" in "church tower" as an adjective to be nothing
more than a non-linguist's misunderstanding.



It seems more economical to say that any noun can (in principle) modify any
other noun, as part of a noun compound, than to record an additional POS,
namely adjective, for every single noun in the lexicon. I would say,
too, that there is no more reason to make out a special case for
substance-item compounds, such as "gold watch" and "lead balloon", than
there is for "radium watch" (G Pullum's example) or "iridium balloon".



However, theories which assign POS elsewhere than in the lexicon would cause
problems for that explanation (as well as for lexicographers, I would have
thought).



Simon



歡迎以中文回信



Simon Smith, PhD

Assistant Professor

Foreign Language Center

National Chengchi University



政大外文中心助理教授



http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~smithsgj/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20091102/da4ce0e7/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora