[Lexicog] Re: Lexical Relations vs. Etymology

[maxwell at LDC.UPENN.EDU]

Quoting David Frank <david_frank at sil.org>:
> 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.

True (more below).

> Just about any combination of two

--or more--

> nouns could be called a compound noun, where one modifies the other.

> Some linguists' approach to grammar is purely functional. Mine is not.

Mine either.  I'm one of those hard-core generativists :-).

> 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.

Agreed.  And in fact I believe that sequences like "inspection team" 
behave entirely the same as "bookshelf" (or for that matter, like a 
simple noun like "team" or "shelf") when it comes to their paradigmatic 
behavior (both take plural morphology on the head noun, which is the 
final noun of the sequence of nouns in both cases) and syntagmatic 
behavior (both can show up in the same places, apart from semantic 
differences).  So I think in terms of their morphosyntactic behavior, 
they're the same.  The only differences are (1) whether they get 
written with a space character in standard English spelling, and
(2) how common they are.
(There are other semantic differences, which boil down to the idea that 
there are no predictable semantic behaviors: a 'bookshelf' is a shelf 
where you commonly put books, whereas a 'manhole' is a kind of hole in 
a street designed for people to access pipes etc. under the street.)

> 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 don't know about the stress patterns here (and I'm not even sure what 
a 'book shelf' would be).  One possibility is that they're a product of 
how common the terms are, but as I say I really don't know.

> I personally would tend to write 'churchgoer'
> as a single word for the same reason

My personal opinion is that orthography can't be used as a standard.  
My fallback position would be that the spelling conventions are just a 
matter of (perceived) frequency: frequent compounds get spelled solid, 
infrequent compounds don't, and there's a lot of personal variation 
(including hyphenation) with words in the middle of that spectrum.

> 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.

I was about to say that 'brisas' was plural and 'parabrisas' ambiguous 
between singular and plural, hence 'brisas' couldn't be the head in the 
same sense that 'shelf' is the head of 'bookshelf' (cf. shelves/ 
bookshelves); but my Spanish dictionary lists it as 'parabrisa', which 
breaks that argument.  Oh, well, I can make the same argument from 
'paracaidas' "parachute", lit. "for falls".  There's also 'parabien' 
"congratulations", lit. "for well" ("well" in the sense of "good"), 
which acts as a noun without any noun inside.

> 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?

Certainly I would agree with the second half; I don't think I would 
agree with the first half, but in any case it's an empirical issue, as 
Chomsky would say.

> Anything having to do with recursion, I would think would go under 
> syntax rather than under morphology.

Again, I think that's an empirical issue, but this may not be recursion 
in the usual sense (as opposed to finite state).  Although I guess 
that's open to argument...

   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD

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