[Lexicog] Nouns

[Mike Maxwell]

Greg and Heather Mellow wrote:
> You mentioned two tests for compound nouns.
>  
> One test is a syntactic test, "a compound noun can appear anywhere in 
> syntax that a
> plain noun might appear (assuming semantic compatibility)"
>  
> Another test is a semantic test, "one writes lexical entries in a 
> dictionary for compound nouns
> if they are not compositional, that is, if you can't figure out their 
> meaning from the meaning of the two parts"

Actually, I only intended the first as a test for compound nouns.  The 
second is a test for whether to include a 'thing' in the dictionary, 
where 'thing' might be a compound noun, like "hot dog", but it might 
also be a derived noun (i.e. a word that is a noun by virtue of a 
derivational affix, like "arrangement"), or for that matter some other 
part of speech by virtue of a derivational affix (like 
"organize"--that's not a real good example, since one could argue 
whether that is really derived from "organ", but it's late at night and 
it will have to suffice).  A 'thing' that should be included in a 
dictionary might also be or even an idiom (as in Ron Moe's later msg). 
  (And of course nonderived forms, like "dog" in English or "hablar" in 
Spanish, should be included in the dictionary.)

I guess the reason that was confusing was that I said that compositional 
compounds, i.e. compounds whose meaning was transparent, need not be 
included.  But they're still compounds.

> With respect, your example of 'gun rack' does not pass the semantic test 
> because I can figure out what the expression means from the two 
> component parts. 

Right, although there's always a gray area where the meaning is a little 
transparent.  In this case, putting "gun rack" in the dictionary might 
be overkill.  But what about "meat rack", which (I think!) is a 
horizontal rack in a stove?  In any case, "gun rack" is still a compound 
noun, just a fairly transparent one.

> Perhaps a compound noun is a simple noun construction (typically two or 
> three words) that is commonly used as a fixed expression...

I would say that is true, at least for English.  Some languages lack 
compound nouns, and some have other related sorts of constructions--noun 
incorporation, for instance, where a noun (usually the direct object) 
has become a morphological part of the verb (Mohawk is a famous example 
of this).  And Spanish (and French) has a somewhat rare set of words 
that are composed of a preposition and a plural noun, like paracaidas 
"parachute", composed of the preposition 'para' "for" and the noun 
'caidas' "falls".  These are generally non-compositional, and therefore 
belong in a dictionary.

There are other types of compound nouns, too; Sanskrit grammarians two 
thousand years had a pretty good typology of them, which I don't recall 
right now.

All these sorts of constructions are on the borderline between 
morphology and syntax (assuming you make that distinction--not all 
linguists do).  A particularly clear example is in Bora and Muinane, two 
related languages of Peru and Colombia, where there is a clear cline 
between things that one would commonly call compound nouns, and things 
that are pretty clearly noun + affix.  (The right-hand member of these 
constructions generally represents a shape, hence they are called 
'classifiers'.)  The phenomenon is fairly widespread in that part of the 
world, even among unrelated languages, and something similar is found in 
clusters of languages elsewhere in the world...

BTW, the things we are talking about here are well documented by 
linguists, and if you want to pursue them further, I'm sure we could 
suggest references.  The Handbook of Morphology might be a place to 
start.  SIL's LinguaLinks (software) has some introductory writeups on 
both linguistics and lexicography, and their forthcoming FieldWorks 
will, I believe, have even more.

    Mike Maxwell


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