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

[Rich Cooper]

John,

May I point out that patent claims and specifications use long noun trains
in many highly specific uses of otherwise well known terms?  

Those same engineers and scientists have been writing something like two
million patent specifications that have been issued.  N-N constructions
abound, and there are numerous sentences related by context to the specific
use of that N-N construction in each case.  

-Rich
 
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2

-----Original Message-----
From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [mailto:corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of
John F. Sowa
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 6:36 AM
To: corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Moving Lexical Semantics from Alchemy to Science

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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