[Lexicog] Percentage of idioms vs single words

[Mike Maxwell]

Patrick Hanks wrote:
> ...D) be unnecessary because they are
> really part of the grammar not the lexicon - an 'electric fire' is
> just a type of fire ..."
>
> D) is not true, unfortunately.  If it were true, 'forest fire' would
> be synonymous with 'wood fire'. But both these MWEs (which are not in
> ordinary dictionaries) have distinctive conventional meanings, which
> an ideal dictionary would state explicitly.  A forest fire is out
> there in the forst, and a wood fire is at home in your house (or in a
> camp, for cooking).

Isn't there a slippery slope here, grading off into encyclopedic knowledge?
That, or I'm missing the point.

At its simplest, a forest fire is a fire where the fuel is a forest, while a
wood fire is a fire whose fuel is (any) wood.  And in fact there can be lots
of different kinds of wood fires besides the two you mention: a fire in a
boiler on a ship, where they're burning wood instead of coal or oil; a house
that's on fire, where one is contrasting the burning of wood with burning of
something else (perhaps some toxic substance contained in the house); etc.
I guess it doesn't seem to me that listing in your dictionary the kinds of
things that contain wood, and can therefore be part of a wood fire, is very
useful.  And the fact that a forest fire is not in your home is simply a
result of the fact that we don't have forests in our houses.  (I wish I
did.)

Or maybe your point is that if 'forest fire' and 'wood fire' were
synonomous, we could just as well refer to a forest fire as a wood fire?
But it seems to me that there's a Gricean reason for this: all forest fires
are wood fires, but not vice versa, and we try to be somewhat explicit.

(Now if Disney built a forest in California out of--what else--plastic, and
it caught fire, we might conceivably call it a forest fire; and then we
might want to distinguish 'wood forest fires' from 'plastic forest fires'.
But I don't want a plastic forest in my house :-).)

Putting it differently, a "city fire", "prairie fire", "building fire" etc.
all have much the same kind of meaning as "forest fire": a fire in a
location; while "paper fire", "oil fire", "coal fire" etc. are like "wood
fire": a fire burning a substance.  But that's because forests (etc.) are
locations, while wood (etc.) is a substance.  Isn't this just pragmatics/
encyclopedic knowledge, rather than convention?

In sum, compound nouns are notoriously productive in English, with the
meanings of productive compounds being determined for the most part by
pragmatics.  I'm not sure I see the sense (pardon the pun) in doing a
dictionary of that (or if you do create such a work, calling it a
dictionary).

    Mike Maxwell
    LDC
    maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu




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