[Lexicog] Percentage of idioms vs single words

[John Roberts]

Patrick Hanks said:

MWEs are not well covered in English dictionaries. What Phillippe is doing in an electronic dictionary re MWEs in Pg is very interesting: another assault on reductionism. Hurrah for Phillippe!  English - a "well documented" language as far as its vocabulary is concerned - has tens of thousands of conventional MWEs that have never been documented in any dictionary.  Why not?  "Well," says the dictionary publisher, "Putting them all in the dict. would A) cost too much in lexicographer time; B) make the dictionary unacceptably large; C) be impossible because we don't have data on all of them and new ones are being created all the time; and D) be unnecessary because they are really part of the grammar not the lexicon - an 'electric fire' is just a type of fire ..." 

I note that in the New Oxford Dictionary of English 'electric fire' and 'gas fire' are mentioned under 'fire' as 'fire' being short for 'electric fire' or 'gas fire'. Under phrases it has the MWEs 'breathe fire' and 'catch fire' but not 'open fire'. (In Amele (Papuan) 'open fire' means 'to light a fire'.) On the other hand, they list 'alarm clock', 'atomic clock', 'biological clock', 'cuckoo clock', 'grandfather clock', 'grandmother clock', and 'quartz clock' presumably as different types of 'clock' but not 'digital clock' or 'wall clock'. And they don't list these MWEs under 'clock' as extensions of meaning denoting the range of the concept. What principles do the compilers of NODE work with for including MWEs in their dictionary of English or not?

John Roberts


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