[Corpora-List] Moving Lexical Semantics from Alchemy to Science

[chris brew]

:
> The comments re: 'shopping cart' and 'shopping trolley' seem to me to
> reinforce a problem that keeps the field of lexical semantics as alchemy
> rather than as a more scientific pursuit. We just don't have enough data
> about compound nouns to be certain of what they are doing in the language
> overall; to know whether they are manifestations of underlying rules or
> happenstance creations. The OED provides us with some historical dates for
> first occurrences of open compounds and large contemporary corpora provide
> us with statistics on the extant forms in use today, but until now we've
> lacked the access to the statistical (frequency) history of the open
> compounds over time. Fortunately, now the Google nGrams from Google books
> has filled in that void.

Well yes, except that the Google books data is idiosyncratic in its own way
(not that
we yet know a whole lot about what its idioysncrasies are), so conclusions
about the
language overall are probably going to need to stay cautiously moderate,
because of
the risk involved in generalizing from any specific data set.

Depending on temperament and level of comfort with messy situations, maybe
some lexical semanticists will be happy with a trajectory in which the
discipline
gradually becomes more capable of getting a handle on this kind of
difficult, sparse quantitative data. For that, my bet is that lessons will
come from
disciplines, such as historical linguistics, where the data is so sparse
that the
standard methodology is to collect as much converging qualitative
side-evidence as
possible, on the plausible grounds that a single source, no matter how
reassuringly quantitative and sciency, is not going to be enough to
determine the answers.

On this take, what lexical semanticists need is to combine analyses of
things like
the Google data with careful and scholarly thinking about what ELSE one can
possibly
know about the problems in hand. The contrast with alchemy is not the one
I'd choose,
what is actually needed is a combination of *rea*l science and
*real*humanities-based scholarship.

*"`In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were REAL
men, women were REAL women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri
were REAL small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.'" (Douglas Adams, of
course)*
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