[Lexicog] Re: When Semantics Doesn't Matter

[Hayim Sheynin]

Dear members of the list,

Can somebody explain to me, why it is necessary to broaden
the concept of lexeme, including many word locutions as one
lexeme. I usually put these locution into phraseology group like
idioms and identify lexeme with word.

Hayim Sheynin

John Roberts <dr_john_roberts at sil.org> wrote:                                      
 bolstar1 wrote: 
   
-John: I used "lexeme" in its broader, and I think more elegant and 
proper, sense – much as Oxford Companion to the English Language 
does. For example, Oxford extends the concept to include "kick the 
bucket" as a lexeme (phrasal lexeme) for "death."  David Crystal does 
the same in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 
wherein he includes "It was raining cats and dogs." as a lexeme. I 
find this appealing, as it speaks to meaning (function) as opposed to 
category (form). I side with function more than form in analyzing set 
phrasal units and rhetorical devices. (NOTE: big difference between 
set phrases -- and compositional, or created, phrases.) There are 
just too many examples where the two don't mesh, and function is self-
evidently more important to a reader than the form they take (e.g. 
many of the prepositional phrases – though adverbial or adjectival in 
function, are relational (prepositional) in appearance – or vice 
versa  -- 1) at a loss to explain = prepositional form for the 
adverbial lexeme "speechless"; in a quandary = prep. form for adv. 
lexeme "perplexed"; win fair and square. = compound adjective lexeme 
for the adverbial "fairly." Form-function dissonance abounds in the 
English language
and I assume it to be true in other languages as 
well. Caveat: there is a place to identify form, rather than, or in 
addition to function. But for the sake of this discussion, it is the 
reason I took "apparent" liberty in its use. Additionally, this is 
one reason, among many, that computer-generated corpora cannot 
replace good, old-fashioned trench-work in "parsing," and I use that 
term broadly, too, spoken and written English. 
     So for the operant boundaries (underlying lexeme) of the 
terms "chiasmus" and "antistrophe" I should have said, "inverse order 
of roots or root-variants" (note: not form/category per se and not 
function per se). John, as to your examples, I noticed that they 
basically fall under the category "created phrases" or "compositional 
phrases" or if they caught on in the vernacular "coined phrases" -- 
rather than set phrases. Here, dictionary precedent refers to 
classically-oriented rhetorical literature or poetry, not strings of 
possible uses. Yet, by definition, and by intuition, if one asked 
what rhetorical device that speaker/writer was using, it still would 
have to be "chiasmus" or "antistrophe." What else could they be 
called? Which was my original question.

Scott N.
 

------     Note Oxford Companion's abbreviated entry below 
regarding "lexeme."    -------

Tom McArthur's Oxford Companion to the English Language (editor), 
with Robert F. Ilson (University College of London (contributor) -- 
editor of International Journal of Lexicoraphy – at the time of 
publication ) – editing the entry for `lexeme'.

"A unit in the lexicon
governed by sound and writing or print, 
its content by meaning and use. Thus, penicillin is the realization 
in print of a single English lexeme, while the nouns crane and 
bank represent at least two lexemes each: crane (a particular  bird 
and a particular machine), bank (the shore of a river and a 
particular kind of financial institution. Conventionally, a lexeme's 
inflections (such as cranes, banks) are considered variant forms, 
whereas such derivatives as banker are considered separate lexemes

[later, exemplifying lexemes] (groups of words)
the idiom "kick the 
bucket"." 

OED: 
A word-like grammatical form intermediate between morpheme and 
utterance, often identical with a word occurrence; a word in the most 
abstract sense, as a meaningful form without an assigned grammatical 
role; an item of vocabulary.

Encarta: 
A fundamental unit of the vocabulary of a language : makes, making, 
maker, made  


Merriam-webster" 
The fundamental unit of the lexicon of a language. (e.g. find: finds, 
found, finding)   
  
  Scott,
 
 I am enjoying this dicussion with you about "antistrophe" and "chiasmus" and I have found your responses interesting. One point of debate is that I think there are still differences of opinion between us as to what a lexeme is. 
 
 Lyons (1968: 197-198) introduced the term "lexeme" to give theoretical substance to the traditional (and classical) notion that items like "sing (v)", "singer (n)", and "song (n)" are different words. The lexemes for these different items would be SING, SINGER, SONG, respectively. The main reason for saying these items are different lexemes is because they have different semantic and grammatical functions. SING names an event while SINGER and SONG name entities - different entities. Grammatically, each has its own distribution in the syntactic structure of English and each has its own paradigm of inflectional forms. E.g. SING functions as a verb and has the paradigm of word-forms: sing, sings, sang, sung, singing; SINGER functions as a noun and has the paradigm of word-forms: singer, singers; and SONG functions as a noun and has the paradigm of word-forms: song, songs.
 
 Linguistics dictionaries define "lexeme" in these terms, i.e. as Lyons originally intended. E.g. Crystal (1992) 'A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics' says: "Its original motivation was to reduce the ambiguity of the term 'word', which applied to orthographic/ phonological, grammatical and lexical levels, and to devise a more appropriate term for use in the context of discussing a language's vocabulary. The lexeme is thus postulated as the abstract unit underlying such sets of grammatical variants as walk, walking, walked, or big, bigger, biggest. Idiomatic phrases, by this definition, are considered lexemes (e.g. kick the bucket (= DIE)). Lexemes are the units which are conventionally listed in dictionaries as separate entries."
 
 Trask (1996) refers the enquirer after the meaning of "lexeme" to "lexical item" where he says: "A word regarded as a comparatively abstract object which has a more-or-less consistent meaning or function but which can possibly vary in form for grammatical purposes. For example, the items dog and dogs are both particular forms of the lexical item DOG, and take, takes, took, taking and taken, are particular forms of the lexical item TAKE. A lexical item is a word in the sense in which a dictionary contains words, or in which the vocabulary of English contains so many words; in most (not all) theories of grammar, a single lexical item receives a single lexical entry."
 
 Yet despite what Crystal and Trask say about how lexemes are traditionally entered into a dictionary this is not how traditional English dictionaries have been made. For e.g. in my Chambers English Dictionary (1989) it has an entry for 'sing', where it gives a dictionary definition of the meaning of 'sing'. But also listed under this entry are many other words and phrases derived from the lexeme SING, such as 'singer', 'singable', 'singablesness', 'singing-bird', 'singing flame', 'singing sand', 'sing-song', 'sing along', 'sing another song'. The reason all of these different lexemes are listed under the lexeme SING in Chambers is because they follow a root or stem-based organisation of dictionary entries. Under this approach any word that has the root-form 'sing' as part of its morphological makeup will be listed under the lexeme SING. The derived form 'song', for example, has its own entry because it does not contain the root 'sing'. This reason for this is that
 producers of printed dictionaries are keen to save on paper and this is deemed as a reasonable way of reducing the number of entries in a printed dictionary while still enabling the user to find a particular item. However, it only works where the first root is the base. It doesn't work so well where the final root in the derived form is the base. But the problem is that when dictionary makers do this their users get confused as to what a word is.
 
 However, you said you undersand 'antistrophe'/'chiasmus' to be: "inverse order of roots or root-variants" (note: not form/category per se and not function per se). So under this definition any of the words 'singer', 'singable', 'singablesness', 'singing-bird', 'singing flame', 'singing sand', 'sing-song', 'sing along', would be an acceptable antistrophe to 'sing'?
 
 Now, I am not sure if you said that the examples I gave only "count" as legitimate instances of antistrophe/chiasmus if they were to be found in some work of literature or not. But that would be like saying *blick* does not count as an English word because no-one has used that combination of phonemes yet as an English word. But in principle it could be an English word, as it follows the morphophonological rules for constructing English words, which a word like *blsk*, for example, doesn't. By devising the examples below I am trying to find out what are the "rules" for constructing 'antistrophe'/'chiasmus' in English. So let's say I am composing some great work of literature (maybe writing my memoirs) and I wanted to use any or all of the examples below - which would be acceptable/unacceptable?
 
 From your original example "Better a witty fool than a foolish wit." it seems that a derived word is allowed as an 'antistrophe'. But would "hunting" be allowed as antistrophe to the strophe of "hunter", for example, since "hunting" is not derived from "hunter"? Could "flies" be antistrophe to the strophe "flying", since they are clearly not the same lexeme? And then what about the idioms at the end? "cook the books" is an idiomatic phrase meaning 'to embezzle" but this strophe-antistrophe sounds fine to me. I am sure I have heard or read something like this elsewhere. With "change her mind" it is "mind" that is idiomatic as the reference is to "her purpose/intention/decision" and not literally "her mind".
 
 an intriguing mystery and a mysterious intrigue
 plate glass and a glass plate
 a wedding ceremony and a ceremonial wedding
 a dogged hunter and a hunting dog
 a jealous rage and a raging jealousy
 flying colours and coloured flies
 barbarous cruelty and a cruel barbarian
 a raving beauty and a beautiful rave
 a crooked arm and an armed crook
 boyhood and a hooded boy
 forfeit a claim and claim a forfeit
 to demand satisfaction and to satisfy a demand
 
 cook the books and book the cooks
 [EMBEZZLE]
 change her mind and mind her change
    [PURPOSE/INTENTION/DECISION]
 ring the changes and change the rings
 cry baby and baby cry
 keep in the dark and dark in the keep
 dead of the night and night of the dead
 nearest and dearest and dearest and nearest
 
 However, to me examples like:
 
 "cook the books and book the cooks"
 and
 "change her mind and mind her change"
 
 are more acceptable instances of strophe-antistrophe because the words stay the same but change their meaning and therefore add the element of punning. It is the same with your example: "Better a witty fool than a foolish wit." It adds punning (play on word form with word meaning).
 
 Chiasmus seems to be defined as an inversion of grammatical struture, e.g.:
 A crossing parallelism, where the second part of a grammatical construction is balanced or paralleled by the first part, only in reverse order.
 A rhetorical inversion of the second of two parallel structures, as in “Each throat/Was parched, and glazed each eye” N+Adj and Adj+N
 
 Antistrophe seems to be defined more simply as:
 The repetition of words in reverse order, ie, "the father son and the son father."
 
 I assume this means 'the same words in reverse order'. Thus the question with antistrophe is "what constitutes a word"? From a linguistic point of view, for two different word-forms to be considered to be the same word they have to belong to the same lexeme. "witty" and "wit" do not belong to the same lexeme. The paradigm for WITTY is witty, wittier, wittiest and the paradigm for WIT is wit, wits. The paradigm for FOOL is fool, fools and the paradigm for FOOLISH is foolish, more foolish and most foolish. So "Better a witty fool than a foolish wit." is not an instance of strophe-antistrophe since it does not present the same words in reverse order. Likewise it is not an example of chiasmus because it does not present a reversal of grammatical structure, since it is Adj+N and Adj+N.
 
 
 John R
 
 
 -- 
 ********************
 John R Roberts
 SIL International Linguistics Consultant
 dr_john_roberts at sil.org
 ********************   
     
                       

       
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