[Lexicog] Re: Lexical Relations vs. Etymology

Wed Mar 5 20:11:02 UTC 2008

Mike --

I am not at all surprised to hear you say that linguists don't all agree on 
what a word is. If anything were clear to all linguists, that thing would be 
uninteresting to them.

I'm not an expert on English grammar, and I don't want to push my position 
too strongly, and I do appreciate the discussion. But to me, 'bookshelf' is 
a compound noun and 'inspection team' isn't. If you call the latter a 
compound noun, then there is no end to the number of compound nouns you 
would have in English. Just about any combination of two nouns could be 
called a compound noun, where one modifies the other. ("What kind of team? 
An inspection team, not a football team or a software development team.")

Some linguists' approach to grammar is purely functional. Mine is not. That 
is why, in order to posit a certain grammatical category such as noun or 
compound noun or noun phrase, I would want to see the behavior that 
justifies that. So I wouldn't be satisfied with "X functions as a noun so it 
is a noun" if "function" is purely notional or semantic, and not 
paradigmatic or syntagmatic somehow.

To me, the stress pattern of 'bookshelf', with a primary and a tertiary 
stress, distinguishes it from the phrase 'book shelf', which would have a 
primary and secondary stress. I personally would tend to write 'churchgoer' 
as a single word for the same reason, and my spell checker just now didn't 
find a problem with that (though it didn't like 'syntagmatic' and 
'intonational'). The same goes for 'babysit' or 'anything'. And there may be 
some intonational differences between phrases and compound nouns, as well as 
stress differences. Spanish 'parabrisas' makes sense as a (compound) noun 
too, because otherwise, if it were a prepositional phrase, that wouldn't 
explain how it could be preceded with a determiner in a noun phrase.

Isn't the set of nouns in English basically a closed set that could be added 
to, whereas the set of sentences for English is an infinitely open set? 
Isn't that part of the difference (in English) between a word and 
grammatical constructions more inclusive than the word? Didn't Chomsky say 
that there is an infinite number of sentences that a grammar of English 
could generate, largely because of recursion? Anything having to do with 
recursion, I would think would go under syntax rather than under morphology. 
True, there are compound nouns in English, but again this is part of a 
closed set and not open-ended. And true, I have seen examples of words 
embedded in the middle of other English words for humorous effect, but those 
are idiomatic and quirky. And true, other languages might behave 
differently.

I have already agreed with what you said about noun phrases -- or determiner 
phrases -- having determiners as well as adjectives or other nouns as 
modifiers. So when we call 'vital statistics office' a phrase, it is not 
really a complete phrase. We are using that combination of words out of 
context, but normally it would be preceded by 'the' or 'a', in which case it 
would be a well-formed NP (or DP). And even if 'vital statistics office' 
isn't a noun, because it isn't a single word, it could still be a lexeme.

You may be right that N-bar and close-knit modification might be the same 
thing in different theoretical contexts. And I realize that there are 
probably better things written about the structure of English noun phrases 
since 1970.

-- David F

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>; "David Frank" <david_frank at sil.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2008 12:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Re: Lexical Relations vs. Etymology

Quoting David Frank <david_frank at sil.org>:
> Now as to the issue of whether a phrase can be a noun, I would still
> say no. You say that "vital statistics office" functions as a noun.
> I'm not sure what you mean by that, but I think that "functions as a
> noun" and "is a noun" might be two different things... Nouns are
> words, and phrases consist of more than one word.

But then there are compound nouns, and I think that's what "vital
statistics office" is.

Sometimes in English (and I guess always in German), compound nouns get
written as single words, like "manhole"; sometimes they are hyphenated,
like "church-goer"; and sometimes they are written separately, like
"inspection team".  That seems to be a function of how common they are
(or to what extent they are lexicalized; or maybe these are the same),
and partly a function of English spelling standards.  There's certainly
a good deal of variation in this, too.

English compound nouns are usually endocentric, meaning that they are
headed by a noun.  There are compounds in other languages (and a few in
English, like "pickup") which are exocentric.  Indeed, that is
virtually the only kind of compound you get in Romance languages
(Spanish 'parabrisas' "windshield", literally "for breezes").  There
are also other kinds of compounds found in languages like Sanskrit,
which have the appearance of coordinate nouns.

Possibly related to compounds is incorporation, where a noun is
incorporated into a verb (and sometimes appears inside the verb's
inflection).  About the only English example is "babysit".  Many
polysynthetic languages (or all of them, depending on your definition
of "polysynthesis") do this.

As for the status of these constructions as words, I suppose it depends
on what you mean by "word", which as we all know, is a slippery
linguistic notion.  I would not call them noun phrases, since (at least
in the singular, in English) they require a determiner to make them a
complete NP.  In some versions of X-bar theory, at least the
non-lexicalized ones (and maybe the lexicalized ones) would be called
N-bar (where N-double-bar = NP).

Another construction, possibly related, is used in things like "a
come-as-you-are party".  Pretty much anything can get stuck together
like that, and it functions typically in English as an adjective.  It's
not clear what you would call it from a theoretical perspective.

> The best analysis I have see of this phenomenon in English, where one
> noun modifies another, is a book by Peter Fries (1970), Tagmeme
> Sequences in the English Noun Phrase. He calls the slot where one
> noun modifies another, a margin of close-knit modification.

"Close-knit modification" might be seen as the Tagmemic equivalent of
N-bar, or maybe of "complex word."

Another reference on compounding (but from a cross-language
perspective) is the article of that name in the Handbook of Morphology,
by Nigel Fabb.

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD

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