[Lexicog] Re: lexical phrase

[Ron Moe]

David—

I like your examples. Now I know a little more why you are struggling with
this issue. (I’m struggling too with some of the theoretical aspects.) Your
example, Tiwé kò'w la! is a nice illustration of a particular kind of
expression. I ran into this sort of thing when thinking of example words in
various domains. In fact a number of domains have specific lexical items for
the imperative. The domain ‘Leave’ is one such: ‘Go away! Get! Get out of
here! Beat it!’ The domain ‘Stop’ likewise has imperatives such as ‘Halt!’
We can use ‘leave’ and ‘stop’ in the imperative, just as most words can be
used in the imperative. But these examples are not normal imperatives. We
could debate whether ‘Get!’ is merely an example of usage or requires
special handling. (I can’t think of a declarative sentence using ‘get’ in
the sense ‘leave a place’. I have to use the phrasal verbs ‘get out’ or ‘get
away’.) ‘Go away!’ and ‘Get out of here!’ can possibly be interpreted as
literal. ‘Beat it!’ is a more clear example of an idiom. But all of these
expressions have something in common—they are the normal ways in which
someone tells someone to leave (especially when one is angry). I don’t think
any of them is predictable (at least for an outsider). The same thing
strikes me for your example, “Remove yourself (from) there!” It sounds an
awful lot like an idiom. Yes, you can make sense of it from the parts. But
it isn’t predictable. Maybe this is another test for idiomaticity (if that’s
a word).

Your other example of ‘take patience’ is a very nice example of a conceptual
metaphor. Idioms based on conceptual metaphors are also unpredictable in
form and meaning. Greek shares a lot of idioms with English, based on the
same conceptual metaphor, but often differing in meaning. In both Greek and
English we can ‘give love’, ‘receive love’, and ‘have love’. But we normally
do not say ‘take love’. Both Greek and English have a tendency to nominalize
character traits and behavioral actions. The underlying conceptual metaphor
is something like, ‘Love/hope/etc is a thing that you can have’. So you can
‘have lots of love’ or ‘lack love’. My guess is that there is some similar
conceptual metaphor in St. Lucian Creole that is the basis for ‘take
patience’. Conceptual metaphors give rise to both idioms and “metaphorical”
secondary senses of words. Whether or not such things are ‘idioms’ depends
on our definition of idiom. It may be that ‘take patience’ should be handled
under a metaphorical secondary meaning of ‘take’.

Perhaps it would be worth quoting David Crystal:

idiom(atic) A term used in grammar and lexicology to refer to a sequence of
words which is semantically and often syntactically restricted, so that they
function as a single unit. From a semantic viewpoint, the meanings of the
individual words cannot be summed to produce the meaning of the ‘idiomatic’
expression as a whole. From a syntactic viewpoint, the words often do not
permit the usual variability they display in other contexts, e.g. ‘it’s
raining cats and dogs’ does not permit ‘*it’s raining a cat and a dog/dogs
and cats’, etc. Because of their lack of internal contrastivity, some
linguists refer to idioms as ‘ready-made utterances’. An alternative
terminology refers to idioms as ‘habitual collocations’. A point which has
attracted considerable discussion is the extent to which degrees and kinds
of idiomaticness can be established: some idioms do permit a degree of
internal change, and are somewhat more literal in meaning than others (e.g.
‘it’s worth his while/the job will be worth my while’, etc.). [Crystal
1985:152]

>From this I take it that there is more than one criteria for classifying
something as an idiom, and that there are several parameters that exhibit a
range of variability.

Ron Moe

 

   _____  

From: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
[mailto:lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of David Frank
Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 1:03 PM
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Lexicog] Re: lexical phrase

 

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: HYPERLINK "mailto:dr_john_roberts at sil.org"John Roberts 

To: HYPERLINK
"mailto:lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com"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

 


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