[Lexicog] semantic domains

[Wayne Leman]

--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, Peter Kirk <peterkirk at q...>
wrote:
I am interested by the discussion about the ratio of nouns to verbs
in a
dictionary. But from my experience one might expect to see a wide
variation in the proportions.

English has quite a lot of abstract nouns corresponding to event
words,
and in my SIL training as a translator it was often stressed that in
many non-western languages such concepts have to be expressed by
verbs
rather than nouns. That would suggest that these languages would have
a
significantly higher proportion of verbs in their lexicon.

But not all non-western languages work like this. In Azerbaijani and
Persian (also in Turkish, but more so in Ottoman than modern Turkish)
a
large number of verbal concepts are expressed by means of a "compound
verb" consisting of a noun (or sometimes an adjective) and one of a
small number of simple verbs such as "be", "do", "give". The nouns
and
adjectives are typically borrowed from Arabic, and are often Arabic
verbal nouns, but take noun morphology in the host language; most but
not all of these words can also be used independently. As a result,
these languages are rich in nouns, but have very few verbs if these
compound verbs are not taken as lexical units.

So, although from a semantic viewpoint we might expect to see similar
ratios of event and thing concepts across languages, we should not
assume that the proportion of nouns and verbs, according to
morphological and syntactic categories, is similarly stable across
languages.

--
Peter Kirk
peter at q... (personal)
peterkirk at q... (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
--- End forwarded message ---