[Lexicog] Forest fires and wood fires

[Patrick Hanks]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Maxwell" <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2004 9:17 PM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Percentage of idioms vs single words

> 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.  

Ah Mike, I perceive that you are resolutely pursuing necessary conditions for firehood, despite the exhortations of philosophers of language (notably Quine and Putnam) to desist. Focusing on wood and forest as "fuel" for a type of fire is reductionist -- an appeal to the Aristotelian notion of essences, necessary conditions under another name. ("We have outlived this doctrine of essences, I think" - Quine 1971).  Your account of forest fire and wood fire unifies them semantically as types of fire only by dint of suppressing useful, practical, important information about each. Prompted by your comments, I looked a bit more deeply. 

Excluding names and headlines, there are 23 hits in BNC for wood fire(s) and 54 for forest fire(s). 

Wood fire always denotes some kind of human-created entity, whereas forest fire doesn't.  The forest fire is always destructive and potentially lethal: this is part of its semantics or pragmatics (lexicographically, it doesn't matter which).  Wood fire is more complex. In 12 cases the wood fire is in a house, typically in a hearth for heating a room. In 8 cases it is in an outdoor camp.  There is one example of a wood fire powering an old locomotive; there are none of wood fires on ships.  Following a principle that dictionaries should make statements about the central and typical convention of the language while ignoring boundary cases, I think it is right to single out wood fires in houses and in outdoor camps for mention and not other possible but rare or unlikely cases. 

The "semantic prosody" (Sinclair's term) of wood fire is always positive (nice, cosy, etc.), the semantic prosody of forest fire is always negative (destructive, lethal). 

There is something horribly wrong (unidiomatic, unnatural) about the notion of referring to a wooden house burning down as a wood fire. I can find no evidence that any English speaker has ever said or written anythign like this. This is a good example of why linguists should not invent evidence.

In the Associated Press 1992-3 corpus, the facts about wood fire are uncannily similar to those in BNC. (American and English ARE the same language!) Forest fire is ten times more common in AP than in BNC, but that is what one would expect in a corpus of journalism.  The syntagmatics are no different. 

> 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?

Yep, that's my point. 

> 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.

Reductionist logical semantics of this kind allows all forest fires to be wood fires only in defiance of the idiom of the language. 

> 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).

The sense (purpose) would be to explain the idiom of the language as it is naturally and normally used, for the benefit of learners and computer programs alike. For one thing, would enable richer computation of implicatures, which is severely limited by a reductionist approach such as the one you advocate.

Cheers -- and thanks for thought-provoking comments --


Patrick

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