33.1150, Review: Applied Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Writing Systems: Sanchez-Stockhammer (2020)

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Subject: 33.1150, Review: Applied Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Writing Systems: Sanchez-Stockhammer (2020)

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Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2022 20:43:51
From: Jesús Fernández-Domínguez [jesusferdom at gmail.com]
Subject: English Compounds and their Spelling

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36762017


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-3189.html

AUTHOR: Christina  Sanchez-Stockhammer
TITLE: English Compounds and their Spelling
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Jesús Fernández-Domínguez, Universidad de Granada

SUMMARY

This monograph studies the nature and variables that configure the spelling of
compounding in contemporary English. The investigation considers compounds
from all major word-classes in British English, with occasional allusions to
the American variety. The book is made up of an introduction plus seven
chapters, distributed among three parts, and it comes with lists of figures
and tables, appendices, and a subject index. 

Part I (“Theoretical background”) embraces Chapters 2 and 3, and is intended
as the notional buttress for the empirical components in the remainder of the
book. In Chapter 2 (“Delimitating the compound concept”) compounds are brought
face to face with other competing linguistic entities, such as phrases, other
lexemes, multi-word items, and names. Of these, the discussion of compound
versus phrase is the lengthiest and deepest, as this dichotomy has been
present in English language studies from as early as Jespersen (1914). The
author considers formal, syntactic, structural, and semantic criteria in her
condensed discussion of this century-long debate. The following three
subsections contrast compounds with other lexemes, with multi-word items, and
with names. A number of topics are dealt with succinctly, such as difficulties
in distinguishing bound from free morphemes (i.e. forms like after-), the
blurred distinction between blends and compounds, and the possible diachronic
relevance of back-formations. Subsection 2.5 (“Compound types”) is a
noteworthy contribution, largely because of its examination of both major and
minor compound types, as presented through the discussion of their possible
length, structure, part of speech, and spelling. The classification and
discussion of English compound types is fine-grained, visually clear, and
importantly contains constant reference to whether an open, hyphenated, or
solid spelling is attested for each compound subtype (this feature is picked
up later in the monograph). The chapter closes with a summary, which presents
the author’s own views on compounding and paves the way for the experiments in
Parts II and III. Chapter 3 (“The normative background”) turns to the topics
of norm, prescriptivism, and standardization in relation to compound spelling.
In 3.1, the author builds her argumentation from the assumption that “correct”
spelling matters and that language users generally “[…] will try to comply
with norms, even if these norms are only implicit” (62-63). This subsection
brings in issues like power, control, sense of superiority, stability,
tradition, and orthography as a marker of identity and as a marketable asset,
all of which allegedly play a role in how language is perceived and used
depending on the producer, receiver, context, aims of the message, etc.
Compounds come into play more clearly in 3.2 (“The originators of spelling
norms”), which goes through the entities that, in the absence of an official
academy for the orthography and usage of the English language, have taken part
in shaping its spelling. This section is a sociocultural assessment of factors
that may have had an effect on the orthographic conventions of English, from
the death of Queen Anne (a supporter of an academy of the English language) in
1714, to the educational policies of different governments in English-speaking
countries and the role of publishers’ style guides. Relevant points in this
section are the demystification of lexicographical resources, which often mean
“a naïve trust in the truth of reference works” for the average language user,
and the recognition of the prominent role of language users, who have very
clear views about their language’s orthography as shaped historical events
(spelling reforms of German, English, and Polish are discussed). Chapters 2
and 3 serve as self-contained reviews providing complementary perspectives:
linguistic, with a focus on morphology and syntax, in Chapter 2, and normative
in Chapter 3.

Part II (“Empirical study of English compound spelling”), composed of Chapters
4 and 5, is an experimental enquiry into compound spelling and involves
dealing with data manipulated based on the theoretical assumptions of Part I.
As its title indicates, Chapter 4 (“Material and method”) describes the
procedures involved in the data collection and management. A common dilemma in
compounding studies is the retrieval of compounds, for which a number of
alternatives have been proposed elsewhere. In this case, the entries are
retrieved from lexicographical resources, after which the irrelevant units are
filtered out and the relevant ones are exploited by use of the tailormade
program CompSpell. The collection of compounds from dictionaries is a complex
process where the usual complexities arise, namely those related to language
varieties, the inclusion of not only established but recent compounds, and the
problem of how to give an equal treatment to solid, hyphenated, and open
compounds. The alternative is a 10,000-unit list assembled based on the
principles established in Chapter 2 and including lemmas from the following
dictionaries: Longman, Cambridge, Macmillan, Taschenwörterbuch, Oxford, and
Collins. This list is then rounded out with compounds extracted from the six
Brown family corpora, three corpora focused on chatroom messages (NPS Chat
Corpus), text messages (CorTxt) and blogs (Blog Authorship Corpus), and the ad
hoc corpus CompText, all of which are diachronically and diatopically
compatible with the study’s aims. Despite the manual filtering and
complementation with corpus material, the data are inevitably influenced by
the stance of the “lexicographical experts” (80): some compounds are included
in dictionaries to the detriment of others, with the discriminating criteria
necessarily related to the publisher’s interests (commercial, design,
compilation, target audience, etc). Similar cautions concern the corpora’s
compiling and coding systems for the use of hyphens and spelling variants,
which the author tries to systematize as much as possible in the light of the
guidelines of the corpus manuals. This effort to compensate for dictionary and
corpus bias is complemented with the PHP program CompSpell, which
automatically searches for orthographic variants of the corpus-based compound
list (occurrence of hyphens, inflection in compounds, elliptical compounds,
etc.). In Chapter 5 (“Potential determinants of English compound spelling”),
the following eleven variables potentially affecting compound spelling are
explored and statistically tested using more than sixty variables: spelling,
length, frequency, phonology, morphology, grammar, semantics, diachronic
aspects, discourse variables, systemic aspects, extralinguistic aspects, and
other general issues. This is a dense but reader-friendly chapter which
identifies and sets apart singularities often laid out in the literature but
which scholars have less frequently delved into. For example, Subsection 5.2,
on the variable “length”, targets eight related hypotheses which may affect a
compound’s spelling: having three or more constituents, having four or more
syllables, having eleven or more letters, having single-letter constituents,
length difference between constituents, etc. Here the hypotheses in question
are justified, then tested and amply exemplified, and references to other
works are added whenever required. Once all variables have been worked
through, they are coded for their subsequent study. Space limitations make it
impossible to expand on the facts presented in Chapter 5 but, overall, it is
one of the most valuable sections in the book, with its detail and empirical
insight into compound spelling and its clear presentation of results.

The concluding section of the book is Part III (“Modelling English compound
spelling”), which consists of Chapters 6, 7, and 8; it aims to reach a
thorough understanding of compound spelling by relating the theoretical
foundations of Part I to the empirical study of Part II. Chapter 6 (“Compound
spelling heuristics”) postulates several heuristics in order to ensure
accuracy in the prediction of compound spelling, for which decision trees are
employed given their computer-generated output and availability through the
statistical software R. The resulting algorithms also target a pedagogical
application for learners of English, one of the aims of the investigation.
Chapter 7 (“Modelling English compound spelling”) recapitulates the title of
Part III, since it combines the notional postulations with the findings from
the experimental side of the work, thereby achieving a holistic interpretation
of the orthography of compounds. After considering the relationship between
each of the three spelling variants, the chapter deals with compound spelling
in the light of prototype theory, analogy, other cognitive perspectives, and
language change. The survey on prototypicality is an adaptation of Rosch
(1973) and Aitchison (1994), intended for more flexibility given the nature of
the category “compound spelling”, and as such is very different from
Aitchinson’s original discussion of the class “bird”. The result is a
three-dimensional model where the coordinates of the open, hyphenated, and
solid spellings of a compound are reflected based on their frequency in
reference works. This makes it possible to observe to what degree a given
spelling is more or less archetypal depending on the variables of compounding
tackled in Part II. From this it emerges that an open spelling is likely to
act as a prototype, being more frequent in the dictionaries and corpora
considered. The conclusions drawn from the study of analogy, next, indicate
that spelling variant selection is more in relation to the compound as a whole
than to one of the constituents separately. This is probably why prediction
accuracy is low for the analogical variables, as the data focus on one part of
the compound and not on the full lexeme. Section 7.4 is an amalgam of
perspectives on compound spelling insofar as it brings together views from
valency grammar, construction grammar, and cognitive grammar, while also
incorporating the results obtained earlier in the book from the algorithms and
native speakers. The last section of Chapter 7 pays attention to factors like
the importance of diachrony in compound studies, which features of compound
spelling are more likely to be affected by language change, and how change can
be detected and accounted for. Part of speech, word length, and constituent
length are three variables regarded as influential by the CompSpell algorithm,
but are, according to the author, unlikely to undergo diachronic modifications
easily. Among the predictions set forth for diachronic change are that
compound spelling will become more regular due to a higher number of learned
language users and that more noun compounds will use an open spelling due to
the role of the media and new communication technologies. Chapter 8 (“Summary
and conclusions”) is a recapitulation not only of Part III but of the book
overall, and is useful for its abbreviated outline of the aims and main
findings of the research.

EVALUATION

The monograph stands as a far-reaching approach to the apparently negligible
issue of compound spelling, which is shown to hide more intricacies than would
at first glance seem. The investigation successfully explains why and how
English compounds are orthographically represented, and incorporates a
statistical-probabilistic approach which, to the best of my knowledge,
pioneers studies in compound spelling. This statistical component necessarily
makes some sections of the book less accessible for those not initiated in the
mathematical treatment of language. Such is the case for Chapter 5 but
especially for Chapters 6 and 7, where the hypotheses, research questions and
variables previously formulated are jointly discussed for a holistic approach
to the orthography of compounds. The rest of the chapters offer a more
theoretical and coherent picture of relevant aspects of English compounding
and, despite the space limitations of a 393-page work, are an effective
description of the intricacies of this complex phenomenon.

The book will therefore prove convenient mainly for researchers (both pre- and
postdoctoral) with an interest in morphology and the lexicon who appreciate an
empirical corpus-based approach to language. These readers will readily
recognise the vast majority of concepts and models discussed, and at the same
time they will easily become familiarized with the new ones thanks to the
clear distribution of contents, evolving from simpler to more complex. The
monograph also targets language instructors given the relevance of compound
spelling for language teaching, although in this case at least a general
knowledge of English word-formation and statistics would be desirable in order
to fully exploit the work’s potential. All in all, this publication is a
valuable resource for anyone who wishes to understand the variables affecting
compound spelling and has previous experience in corpus analysis and research.

REFERENCES

Aitchison, J. 1994. Words in the mind: An introduction to the mental lexicon
(2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Bauer, L. 1998. When is a sequence of two nouns a compound in English? English
Language and Linguistics 2(1): 65-86.

Berg, K. & M. Aronoff (eds.). 2021. Morphology 31(3) Special Issue:
Morphological spelling. Available at:
https://link.springer.com/journal/11525/volumes-and-issues/31-3 (accessed 29
Dec 2021).

Jespersen, O. 1914. A modern English grammar on historical principles, part
II: Syntax, vol. 1. Copenhagen: Munskgaard; London: Allen & Unwin.

Rosch, E. 1973. ON the internal structure of perceptual and semantic
categories. In T. E. Moore (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of
language. New York: Academic Press, 111-144.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jesús Fernández-Domínguez is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at the
University of Granada (Spain). He specializes in English synchronic lexical
morphology, especially morphological productivity, compounding and the
cognitive-semantic component of word-formation.





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