[Lexicog] Re: When Semantics Doesn't Matter

[bolstar1]

Hayim: Good question, and I agree with your implication. The problem 
lies in determining what constitutes a "word," with hypenation (and 
hyphenation variations) alone, making the distinctions fuzzy. In 
addition, form-function dissonance & distinctions between set-
phrases/created-phrases/verb phrases (semantically & rhetorically) 
add additional layers of overlapping groupings. I noticed in my 
citiations/quotes about alliteration and consonance that there was a 
disparity among the major lexicons. This seems less than assuring 
when when expecting the general public to determine distinctions.    
     This is the reason that colloquia and conferences (with round-
table discussions and consensus-building) seem to be an ideal venue 
for ironing out those differences. 
     I'm not sure if next year's Euralex conference in Spain, or 
upcoming linguistic conferences generally, will deal with this. But I 
would like to hear your thoughts on possible remedies. Till then I 
must yield to the lights that shine brighter than mine. 

Scott N.
 
--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, Hayim Sheynin 
<hsheynin19444 at ...> wrote:
>
> 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 ...> 
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 ...
>  ********************   
>      
>                        
> 
>        
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