[Lexicog] Kinds of fire

[Patrick Hanks]

 ----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Roberts" <dr_john_roberts at sil.org>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>

...

>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 - 

Good question(s). 

NODE is a printed paper dictionary, so it would have been quite impossible to include all the non-transparent MWEs (as I would like to do in an on-line dictionary), even if criteria for transparency wree well developed. 

WRT the cases you mention, I think we simply made a mistake in omitting the verb phrase open fire. I have just re-read the NODE entry for open and it does not cover open fire satisfactorily, though sense 4 comes close in places.  

Terms like electric fire and gas fire were included in NODE, if I remember rightly, because a) they are fixed expressions; b) they are fairly common; and c) they denote classes of artefacts, contrasting with other terms such as radiator and storage heater. This might be seen as militating in favor of including digital clock -- but it can argued or shown that the head noun after digital is somewhat more variable (think of digital watch, for example).  If there is a principle involved, it is the degree of fixedness -- both fixedness of reference class and fixedness of phraseology.

However, I don't want to press too far the case that NODE makes principled distinctions affecting every detail.  No doubt there are inconsistencies. We could have debated the principles and their application to individual cases for ever. ("This way, madness lies!")  The lexicographers were given broad guidelines (many of which are explained in the front matter) and they did their best to implement them while working under severe constraints of time and space.

Cheers, 


Patrick


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