[Lexicog] Nouns

[Rudolph Troike]

Mike, have you been watching the Dukes of Hazard, or are you reacting to your
recent move south of the Mason-Dixon line? (rednecks, gun racks, and grits)

Re Greg & Heather Mellow's question, I concur with Mike that things like "hot
dog" (when referring to the food item) are usually called "compound nouns",
while a sequence of Det Adj N, as in "a green house" is called an NP (or in
Hallidayan terms, an NG (noun group). There is a great deal of controversy
regarding what is or is not a compound noun vs an NP in English. Orthography
is sometimes a guide, as in "greenhouse", but as in Mike's "gun racks", that
doesn't always work, and is extraneous to the spoken language anyway. The
big question revolves around whether the pattern of heavy stress on the first
element is to be taken as the defining feature. This works for many, but not
all combinations we might want to call compounds. And of course this is not
applicable in most other languages. Probably the majority of compound nouns
in English are formed by N + N, as Mike said, but there are many other
possibilities, such as Adj + N (as in "greenhouse", "redneck"), [N + V + -er]
("windshield wiper", "elevator operator" -- to use a couple of examples
favored by A.A. Hill and the structuralists), and even [V + Adv/Particle]
(goofoff, pushover) and the reverse [Adv/Prt + V] ("downdraft", "overkill"].

As to Greg's question about what a Noun is, while it is true in some Salishan
languages (as Swadesh famously pointed out, and as Eloise Jelinek has amply
demonstrated) that at the form level there are no pure distinct Ns or Vs,
but only NPs or VPs, for most languages one can distinguish syntactically
an N position and a V position. A Noun, then, is best identified, if not
defined, as whatever goes into a N position, and a V likewise. (This is
deliberately Structuralist, but can be converted into any other jargon, as
in the Minimalist Program, one would have lexical elements marked [+N] --
there is no discussion of how they acquired that marking, but they are
simply part of the Numeration out of which sentences are built.) My strong
belief is that Ns and Vs, and perhaps a few functional elements, as well as
things like Subjects and Predicates and Sentences, are simply built into
our biological wiring, and in Goedelian fashion, are beyond our ability to
define, since we can't get beyond the system in our heads no matter what
metalinguistic terminology or framework we concoct. Like "point" and "line"
in geometry, terms like Noun and Verb are primitive terms of the system, and
cannot be defined except deductively in terms of how they function within
the system. This bothers people who feel comfortable with pseudo-definitions
such as "a Noun is the name of a person, place, or thing", but the emptiness
of such a "definition" quickly becomes clear if we try to press to ask what
it means to "name" something (vs a Verb "expressing"), and what "thing"
means: most dictionary definitions obfuscate the undefinability of "thing"
by making it appear that the term is definable. At advanced levels of
discourse linguists and psychologists and philosophers may speak grandly of
"entification", which is merely the process of putting a word or expression
in an N slot, and nothing is gained by imagining that the emperor has finer
clothes. "In the beginning were the slots...."

Of course we may have _operational definitions_ which are specific to each
language, which help in identifying slot/filler correlations, as Ken Pike
liked to talk about them in his Tagmemic model. But these don't define
the slot, but merely provide formal criteria for identifying members of the
slot class. Chomsky gussied up these observations in his TG and GB (P&P)
models, and in his Phrase Structure Rules in the TG model, probably came
closer to confronting the essential primitive nature of these labels than
anyone (except perhaps Hjelmslev, from whom Chomsky may have derived many
of his original ideas), but he really never pursued the issue to any depth,
and has moved away from it in his Minimalist Program.

A digression on "hot dog" -- Spanish had an initial problem in dealing with
the term, since opponents of simple borrowing had to find a satisfactory
translation, but "perro caliente" literally referred to a dog ("perro") in
heat. In Spain, this was delicately nuanced by using the diminutive "-ito"
on "perro", giving "perrito caliente", since a little dog would not be
sexually mature and thus the wrong inference would not be present. Nowadays
in Mexico, it is simply "hot dog", thus finessing the translation quandary.
However, there is danger lurking in the natural urge to attempt to
make sense of an opaque compound by assuming simple compositionality. A
Turkish friend, a good Moslem and new to this country, was taken to a
county fair by an American acquaintance who offered to buy him a hot dog
at stands on the fair grounds. After politely demurring several times,
assuming that he was being invited to eat dog meat, my friend finally
exploded with anger when his host tried to urge him to eat a "super dog"!

     Rudy Troike





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