[Corpora-List] lexical semantics and alchemy

[Justin Washtell]

It occurred to me that my viewpoint is a bit polarised. I suppose if you're coming at this from the other angle - if etymology is what you're interested in, rather than in a behavioural classification of words and compounds - then the implication is that corpus-driven computational approaches will likely not take your very far.

Justin Washtell
University of Leeds

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From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of Justin Washtell [lec3jrw at leeds.ac.uk]
Sent: 02 February 2011 12:07
To: Anne-Kathrin Schumann; corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] lexical semantics and alchemy

I have a friend who used to habitually use the word "fully" as an affirmative (where the ever-so-slightly less trendy of us would say "totally"... as in "yeah, totally man").
Many of the folks I've met in Northampton use "bare" as a superlative adverb: "that gig was bare good", and even "there was bare [lots of] folks there". I'm not sure whether it derives from the adverb "barely", or the adjective "bare" (both of which almost seem at odds with the sense on some level). At any rate, it seems to fit once you've heard it a few times... as these things always do :-)
With respect to compounds I guess the observation here is that these uses can actually be very productive colloquially, but to an outsider stumbling across a handful of the more common uses, say "bare good", they might look distinctly idiomatic.

Were I not sufficiently immersed in the local language, even as a human, then I could not be expected to know these usages. Data sparseness would therefore seem to be the major bottleneck for any computational approach, whatever model/algorithm one adopts. Also, knowing the etymology does not seem necessary or useful in these cases. I expect that few of the people who use these terms know or care how they came about, yet they are intimately familiar with their usage and meaning - and with that they are perfectly versed to write a dictionary, to identify whether they are idiomatic, etc.

Justin Washtell
University of Leeds

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From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of Anne-Kathrin Schumann [annek_schumann at web.de]
Sent: 01 February 2011 11:49
To: corpora at uib.no
Subject: [Corpora-List] lexical semantics and alchemy

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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