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

[John F. Sowa]

On 1/30/2011 10:25 PM, amsler at cs.utexas.edu wrote:
> one needs etymological data to know what compounds came first and thus
> established the premise for the analogy or rule that followed their
> introduction. Lacking knowledge of 'case zero' one can't follow the
> spread forward.

But the N-N construction is highly productive, especially in technical
writing.  In fact, many people criticize engineers and scientists for
their "freight train" constructions with long strings of nouns.

For example, the term 'space suit' was popular in science fiction
long before any humans actually wore them in space.  But NASA
coins huge numbers of N-N constructions:

   thermal comfort undergarment -- a garment worn under a space suit
      to maintain a comfortable temperature.

The general principle for interpreting an N-N compound is to look
for some phrase or sentence that links the two words.  The so-called
easy cases are ones in which such a phrase can be found in the
dictionary definition of one or the other words.

But another good source would be technical articles, which often
contain domain-specific compounds.  The rarest examples can be
the easiest because the defining phrase may be in the same
document or a closely related document.  But note that the
defining phrase may contain related word forms, such as
comfort - comfortable, thermal - temperature.

John




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