[Lexicog] Re: lexical phrase

[maxwell at LDC.UPENN.EDU]

Quoting John Roberts <dr_john_roberts at sil.org>:
>> Mmm. I was talking about the meaning of 'on the one hand' being
>> compositional. A lexeme is supposed to be a minimal semantic unit and
>> Ron is arguing that 'on the other hand' is a lexical phrase, i.e. a
>> lexeme. But I would say the meaning of 'on the one hand' has several
>> components including the fact that it is properly followed by 'on the
>> other hand'. It is first part of a comparative expression.

The issue which I think you're raising here--whether the meaning of 
some word or expression can be broken into components--is an old 
theoretical issue in linguistics (it came up during the "wars" over 
generative semantics in the '70s, and probably antedates that by a 
lot).  I on the other hand am using the term "compositional meaning" to 
mean that the meaning of the whole can be determined from the meaning 
of the parts.  So for example the first clause (as well as the second) 
of
  I got up on the wrong side of my bed, and therefore tripped over my shoes.
has compositional meaning, because it's the literal sense.  Therefore 
if you know the meaning of all the words, plus you have the syntactic 
parse, you can figure out what the whole construction means.

But in
  Watch out for the boss--he must have gotten out of bed on the wrong side.
the meaning of the similar clause is non-compositional or metaphoric: 
it means something other than rolling out of bed on to the floor.

There's some discussion (in the context of reasoning about the meaning 
of sentences) at   
http://webdeptos.uma.es/filifa/personal/amoreno/teaching/ling/17.htm

The implication of this distinction for dictionaries is that you should 
think about having a dictionary entry (of some sort) for multi-word 
expressions that have non-compositional meaning, but you wouldn't 
normally have a separate entry for an expression whose meaning was 
compositional.

The same thing goes for morphology, of course: if the meaning of a 
derived word is reasonably compositional (like 're-edit' or 'page 
number', counting compounding as morphology), you don't have a 
dictionary entry for it.  But if the meaning is non-compositional (like 
'repay', which does not mean to pay someone the second time; or 
'backpack'), then there should probably be a dictionary entry.  
(Inflectional morphology is compositional almost by definition; whether 
derivational morphology and compounding is has to be decided for each 
derivational or compound construction.)

Lexicographers often differ over when meaning is or is not 
compositional.  In the theoretical linguistic realm, as well, there is 
disagreement over questions about particular cases, and over where some 
of the meaning about non-compositional knowledge belongs (lexical vs. 
encyclopedic knowledge).

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD

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