[Lexicog] Re: lexical phrase

[David Frank]

I don't have a problem with making a dictionary entry for "on the other hand," but my question is whether it is a lexeme in and of itself. I would not consider everything necessarily a lexeme that I would make a subentry in a dictionary. (I think I said "minor entry" recently, but according to the way I use these terms, I should have said "subentry.")

I will give some examples from our dictionary of St. Lucian Creole (Kwéyòl). We had an entry for tiwé because it is a lexeme meaning 'to remove.' Under the entry for tiwé, we listed Tiwé kò'w la! as meaning "Go away!" If you wanted to know how to express English "Go away!" in Kwéyòl, you would not use words meaning either "go" or "away," so we made a subentry under tiwé that shows that to say "Go away!" in Kwéyòl one would literally say "Remove yourself (from) there!" That doesn't mean to me that Tiwé kò'w la! is a lexeme in Kwéyòl.

Also in the Kwéyòl dictionary, we have the word pasyans meaning 'patience.' Under the entry for pasyans, we have a subentry pwan pasyans, which tells the English reader of the Kwéyòl dictionary that in Kwéyòl, you don't "have patience," but rather you "take patience". That doesn't mean to me that pwan pasyans is an idiom. Since this is a Kwéyòl-English dictionary, what we listed as subentries is based on the perspective of an English speaker studying Kwéyòl and the collocations the English speaker would consider natural. I don't think that every time you have a collocation that is natural in one language but not in another, that necessarily means you are dealing with an idiom. So I don't think that everything that you might make into a subentry in a dictionary is necessarily a lexeme. Note that in our dictionary of St. Lucian Creole, we didn't list any phrases as stand-alone entries. All phrases that we included were included as part of a major entry.

However, if we decide that "on the other hand" is an idiom in English, then I will accept that it should also be called a lexeme, though it seems to me that some lexemes are more semantically complex than others.

-- David Frank

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: John Roberts 
  To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 1:01 PM
  Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Re: lexical phrase


  Thanks, Sebastian. I wanted to clarify what was meant by compositional and non-compositional. This is how an idiom is defined in wikipedia:

  An idiom is an expression whose meaning is not compositional-that is, whose meaning does not follow from the meaning of the individual words of which it is composed.

  So it follows from this that what Ron is calling a lexical phrase, such as 'on the one hand' is a type of idiom and therefore a lexeme and therefore should be entered in a dictionary. 

  I haven't been following this discussion too closely, but why is there a problem in having a dictionary entry for 'on the other hand'? 

  John Roberts
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lexicography/attachments/20061206/d48c31cc/attachment.htm>