[Lexicog] part of speech for phrases

[Chinedu Uchechukwu]

Ron,John and Rhodes,
I found your discussion has been very interesting, as it touches on 
some of the issues that I am presently preoccupied with.
Ron initially pointed out the dictionary features that might be 
connected with the typology of a particular language, and connected 
it to the question: root or stem in dictionary organization.
POSSIBLE SOLUTION:
In the dictionaries of my native language Igbo (a tone language, 
spoken in South Eastern Nigeria)two solutions have been profered: 

ROOT ORGANIZATION
The first was root organization, and for the following reason:
(1) The language has only two vowels to distinguish between the 
infinitives. This would mean organizing the whole verbs of the 
language under two initial alphabets ("i" and "!")
(2) The infinitive forms can constitute a problem to the learner, as 
they ALTER the tone of the root, which is needed to classify the 
verb. For example -rí (eat), is a high tone verb, but with the 
infinitve marker 'i', it becomes írí (to eat). The infinitive marker 
has a high tone and the root tone is lowered to a downstep, although 
the root has maintains a high tone in all its inflectional forms.

So to maintain the inherent tone of the verb a root organization was 
prefered. 


IMPERATIVE FORM ORGANIZATION
THis method was adopted by Echeruo in his Igbo-English dictionary. It 
has been found quite confusing, and not as much helpful as the root 
organization.

A possible solution that I see can more readily be realized through 
an electronic dictionarry than a print dictionary. This solution is 
first of all directed at the learner of the language. This means 
making the verbal inflection and tonal variations part of the sub-
entries to a head word.

It is of course an entirely different issues to realize such a 
dictionary in a book form. 

Chinedu Uchechukwu
Otto-Friedrich University, Bamberg
Germany.


--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, "John Roberts" 
<dr_john_roberts at s...> wrote:
> Ron Moe said:
> 
> > What I've been hoping for is a set of criteria for 
subcategorizing various
> > types of idiomatic phrases. They can be distinguished by their 
internal
> > structure. They can be distinguished by their degree of setness 
(can the
> > constituents be reordered, can other words be inserted, can any 
of the
> words
> > be replaced, can any of the words be inflected, etc.). They can 
also be
> > distinguished according to their semantics, but this is like 
assigning the
> > part of speech 'verbal noun' to 'death', or 'verbal adjective' to
> 'morbid'.
> > Are there any other ways they can be subcategorized? I'm currently
> assigning
> > all idiomatic phrases the part of speech 'phr.', since I have no 
well
> > motivated way of further categorizing them.
> 
> But you do want to categorize idioms according to their syntactic 
function
> as well as their internal structure. They are not just phrases, but 
phrases
> that function as 'phrasal verbs', 'phrasal adjectives', 'phrasal 
nouns',
> etc.
> 
> So I would say that _pass up_ and _kick the bucket_ are both 
phrasal verbs
> on the basis of their internal structure. Both _pass_ and _kick_ 
can be
> inflected for tense, for example, and both have objects. _going 
over_ is a
> phrasal noun. You can pluralise the nominal in this phrase, as 
in 'they gave
> him several goings over' (this identifies the lexical class) and 
you can
> modify the expression with an adjective, as in 'they gave him a 
good going
> over' (this identifies the syntactic function).
> 
> John


 

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