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

[Yorick Wilks]

The mutations of "hamburger" are particularly delicious: in the UK the ignorance of the word's provenance is seen best in the standard form "beefburger", which contrasts with "ham" although almost all users must know a hamburger isnt made of ham, even if they have never heard of Hamburg.
YW

On 29 Jan 2011, at 15:29, Angus B. Grieve-Smith wrote:

> On 1/29/2011 2:26 PM, Yorick Wilks wrote:
>> We could probably have guessed that if you live in the UK, rather than in the US where (lots!) more English speakers live.
>    I'm not sure what your prediction was, but I do live in the US, and I've only been to the UK for a total of three long weekends.  I've seen plenty of walking stick bugs, and eaten a bunch of banquet chicken, for what it's worth.  I have no memory of hearing that sense of "rubber chicken," until earlier this week as part of the phrase "rubber chicken circuit."  Apparently the first attestation of the "rubber chicken circuit" was in the L.A. Times in 1937:
> 
> http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/1718/
> 
>    Now, can anyone write a program that could disambiguate "rubber chicken circuit"?
> 
>    Actually, it strikes me that one thing that's missing from this discussion of compound noun formation is the role of analogy.  "Rubber chicken circuit" clearly comes from other circuits like the lecture circuit and the Keith circuit.  "Devil's food cake" makes a lot more sense if you contrast it with "angel food cake."
> 
>    Compound formation also interacts with clipping in unpredictable ways, so "cheesesteak" actually comes from "cheese steak sandwich," while "buffalo burger" and "veggie burger" both resulted from the clipping of "hamburger."  There are also borrowing and dialect issues, which can be seen from the great debate over "eggplant parmesan":
> 
> http://www.cliffordawright.com/caw/food/entries/display.php/topic_id/4/id/109/
> 
>    My guess is that you'd be able to figure out the meanings of some large fraction of compounds automatically, but there would be others that would be opaque.  And I think that'd be a fairly good model of the way that native speakers go about understanding their language.
> 
> -- 
> 				-Angus B. Grieve-Smith
> 				Saint John's University
> 				grvsmth at panix.com
> 



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