[Corpora-List] lexical semantics and alchemy

[Anne-Kathrin Schumann]

Hi,

Ken wrote: "It would be nice if we could get some community-wide effort into this. We need a vehicle, perhaps transforming Wiktionary. It would be nice if we could apply John's rules to Ted's compounds and *put those findings into a dictionary* (lexicographers have only barely done so, while lexicologists need that information). "

-- As far as I find time, I would be happy to contribute some German and Russian material (if needed?). In my view, comparing compounds in a Germanic and a Slavic language could yield interesting results. Russian has multiple types of compounds with complex grammatical and semantic features and, as far as I know, all of them are productive. There also might be some hope that comparison with Russian sheds light on semantically opaque compounds in English because a big part of them will nicely translate into more explicit multi-word units in Russian (at least in terminology - I'm not sure about the 'rubber duck'). But this is just an idea, not a hypothesis. 
I also want to contribute some German examples to the rule vs. analogy discussion. "Vollzug" was a very nice one because 'voll' is extremely productive on all levels of German discourse and across different POS categories. In my view, there are two distinct senses to 'voll': one that expresses exhaustiveness or completeness as in Vollmilch, Vollei, Vollkorn, Vollzug, Vollernte and older forms such as volljährig etc. In colloquial (probably juvenile) speech, however, 'voll' seems to be more of an intensifier as in Volltrottel, Vollpfosten, Vollidiot or even in phrases as 'Das ist ja voll super'. 
I don't see a rule here. Certainly people could also say 'Komplettzug' or 'Supertrottel' and they actually do (maybe not with these words, but I think the principle is clear), but the impact of these ad hoc forms cannot be compared to relatively stable units with 'voll'. I think this really is a case of analogy. There also might be metaphorical compounds (didn't we have 'rubber chicken'?).
Regards,
anne
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