[Lexicog] Defining verbs, etc.

[Mike Maxwell]

David Tuggy wrote:
> How about a verb such as "elbow", or "knife", or ... ? Would you *not* 
> derive it from the noun? It seems quite reasonable to me to say that 
> these are monomorphemic, yet still derived. ...
> (Zero-derivation or zero morpheme becomes a bit of notational variation, 
> as far as I can see.)

I guess I don't have an opinion.  Etymologically, clearly the verb is 
derived from the noun.  Whether there is in the mind of the native 
speaker a _derivational_ relation is, in my opinion, hard to tell (and 
dependent on your definition of "derivation").  One could get into the 
semantic issues here, e.g. "to stone someone" is more than just touching 
them or even hitting them with a stone.  So is the verb "stone" derived 
from the noun "stone", synchronically?  I don't know.

FWIW, I think English tends to have such noun-verb pairs more than the 
other languages I know (although maybe I just don't know them well 
enough).

In any case, the original statement (by Rudolph Troike) was
>>> For one thing, those interested in lexical decomposition
>>> recognize that many (perhaps most) verbs consist of a covert
>>> light verb component and a nominal component...

and I don't think that many--certainly not *most*--verbs have such a 
null derivation from a noun, if that's what it is.  If I were to go by 
the primary meaning and my intuitions (which I'm not sure I would, but 
that seems to be the idea here), I would say that for many of the 
verb-noun pairs which exist, the relationship in fact goes in the 
opposite direction: the noun 'work' seems intuitively less "basic" than 
the verb 'work', the noun 'show' less basic than the verb, the noun 
'fill' or the adjective 'full' less basic than the verb 'fill', etc.

For many other cases, I think any directionality is debatable, 
especially in the synchronic sense.  And it may be that in fact what's 
going on is that roots are basic, having some sort of associated meaning 
(perhaps a vague one), and that *both* noun and verb lexemes are derived 
(in some sense) from the root.  But even if that's true, I wouldn't 
think of the resulting verb lexemes as having any kind of light verb 
relationship with the root--for one thing, there is no light verb, 
there's just a verb; for another, there is no noun, just a root with no 
category/POS.

In sum, I'm leery of claims about word derivations that depend entirely 
on a perceived semantic relationship, with no visible affix or light 
verb, and no way other than intuition of deciding the direction of 
derivation.

But perhaps we're wandering too far from lexicography...
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


 
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