[Lexicog] Percentage of idioms vs single words

[Mike Maxwell]

I'll try very hard to make this my last posting on this topic, lest I wear
out your monitors :-).

Ron Moe wrote:
> Many things burn, but not all can be expressed by '(substance) fire'.
> We don't normally talk of a 'candle fire' (but cf. candlelight).

Right, but think what it would mean if someone did say 'candle fire': it
would probably mean that there was a fire somewhere which involved a bunch
of candles (a candle store, or someone dumped a bunch of candles in their
fireplace and burned them up, etc.).  What's going on here, I think, is that
a 'fire' is prototypically larger than a single flame (and not that
'<substance> fire' is not a meaning of 'fire').

> But we do have a small set of conventionalized substance fires
> because those substances have special relevance when talking
> about fires.
> 'Forest fires' and 'grass fires' are dangerous and rage out of
> control. They are featured on the evening news.

Are you saying that frequency of use = conventionalization = lexicalization
=> include in dictionary?

rrhodes at cogsci.berkeley.edu wrote:
> It seems to me that there are two sets of assumptions in play in this
> discussion. First, what does it mean to be lexicalized? And second,
> what is the role of pragmatics?

And third, what needs to be included in a dictionary? (Or as I might put it,
what goes in a dictionary and what goes in an encyclopedia?)

> If you believe that productive analyzability precludes lexicalization,
> then you are forced to conclude that forest fire is not a lexical item.
> I'd argue to the contrary. Just because a phrase has a productive
> analysis does not preclude its being a lexical unit... I
> don't believe that this can be determined by any straightforward
> syntactic or semantic test. Although I've selected a set of phrases
> that all have locative readings, the first four have something
> "special" about them.
<snip>

What I'm missing here is the definition of 'lexical item'.  My definition is
basically the one you reject, but I'm unclear what your definition(!) is.
Your examples follow:

> 1) ...an introspective fact that a forest fire seems like a thing to
> me in a way that a tree fire doesn't.

I'm all for introspection (that's how this discussion got started).  But if
I draw the introspective line between 'things' and 'non-things' differently,
does that mean we have different lexicons?  Or putting it differently, we
need an argument for where to draw the line.

> 2) house fire If you think about all the things the
> expression house fire could mean and doesn't, e.g. the fire in the
> fireplace in the house

A fire in the fireplace (or the stove, if the food drips and catches on fire
but doesn't set the house on fire; or the fire in the furnace) do not
constitute cases where the _house_ is burning.  (And if the fire is that
localized, Grice would say that we're unlikely to use the term 'house fire'
to mean the location of the fire.)

> ...coupled with the fact that it's a reasonably
> common occurrence both physically and lexically, and you have a
> reason house fire is a lexical item and city fire or roof fire isn't.

Is the fact that s.t. is common sufficient for saying that the phrase
describing it is lexicalized?

> 3) campfire This needs no explanation. This is not just a
> fire in a camp. It refers to a very specific kind of fire. That alone
> warrants listing as a lexical entry.

I would agree with this one.  It is neither the case that the camp is on
fire (hopefully), nor that it is any old fire that happens to be in the camp
(when the lightning strikes my tent).

> 4) brush fire Again the semi-idiomatic use of the word brush
> in this expression makes it an obvious lexical entry.

I don't find the use of 'brush' here idiomatic, just specialized.

> The pragmatic question is equally tricky, but it depends, in
> part, on the view you have on lexicalization.

I agree, and I think this is getting to the core of the disagreement.

> ...Judy Levi... observes that there is added semantic content
> in compounds of a fairly limited sort which is not explicit....
>
> 1) associate the added semantics with the head noun.
>
> 2) associate the added semantics with the modifying noun
>
> 3) associate the added semantics with the [particular] compound
>
> It's a whole paper to show that 1) and 2) are fraught with problems
> (although 1) fares better than 2)). Needless to say, I favor 3),

Well, there seems to be another possibility (I haven't read the original
paper, so I'm stepping out on a limb here; I hope I don't burn it off
beneath myself): the interpretation of compounds is free, that is the
relation between the two Ns is pretty much any interpretation we can
imagine--but it's constrained by our knowledge of the world.

> But there remains the problem of pragmatics. The fact that
> one can force a non-standard interpretation of a lexicalized phrase
> pragmatically does not mean that all the interpretations of the
> phrase are pragmatically driven. We have to account for preferred
> readings.

I would say that the preferred reading is the one that makes sense, and that
this comes into play every time you hear a new compound: carburetor fire,
phosphorus fire, elevator fire...  After you've heard them a few times, you
know what to expect--and maybe that's what you're calling lexicalization.
For my part, I would reserve the term 'lexicalization' for things that are
not compositional, such as campfires, sunsets, tidal bores, mother boards
etc.

BTW, we may also be using the term 'lexicalization' in two more different
ways in this discussion: as s.t. psychological/ linguistic, and in terms of
what we ought to include in our dictionaries.  One may argue that these
ought to be the same, but I think it depends very much on how much
lexicalization you think there is in the first sense.

    Mike Maxwell



------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark
Printer at MyInks.com. Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US & Canada.
http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511
http://us.click.yahoo.com/mOAaAA/3exGAA/qnsNAA/HKE4lB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->


Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     lexicographylist-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
     http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/