Fixity and English compounds - presented by Prof. Laurie Bauer

Fixity and English compounds

Prof. Laurie Bauer

Prof. Laurie Bauer
Fixity and English compounds es
00:00
What a compound is or isn't always handcuff (verb) attorney general input (noun) before-tax (e.g. profits) London-Paris (e.g. flight) blue whale love-in-a-mist canine tooth New South Wales Monkey Pox Taskforce chicken Kiev number five Cousin Richard Oxford college easy-peasy salad-salad girl Friday singer-songwriter girls (girls'/ girl's) school upon
03:17
Some things to bear in mind About 10% of languages are reported not to have compounds Just because Schwarzdrossel must be seen as a compound in German, it does not follow that blackbird must be one in English
05:21
Preliminaries 1: Attribution In English: prototypically the domain of an adjective, occurring before the noun and modifying it ( so not heir apparent, president elect, proof positive) In English, not only adjectives (the many responses, a dog's home, the outside workshop, a can-do attitude, the then president, the city council, a no- frills airline, use-it-or-lose-it syndrome). Not used for verbs (she completely failed vs she failed completely)
08:22
Preliminaries 2: Idiomaticity Idiomaticity vs compositionality Any syntactic structure can be idiomatic Hot under the collar (AP) A king's ransom (DP/NP) Under the weather (PP) Rain cats and dogs (VP) Don't count your chickens [...] (S) By and large (???) True of words, too
11:33
Preliminaries 3: Familiarity Can't be measured directly, usu. taken to correlate with token frequency. Problems: Corpora are only a first approximation for frequency, esp. because mostly written We are all members of multiple communities, and have overlapping sets of words we know Rare expressions can be familiar (quotations, proverbs, cool as a cucumber...)
13:00
Compounds - trying to define them Two basic thrusts: phonological/orthographic and a compound is a word All the suggested criteria turn out to be incomplete in some way, and to contradict others. The discussion on English goes back at least 100 years and has not led to agreement
16:24
Orthographic criteria Writing things as 'all one word' indicates a compound, writing as two separate words indicates a multi-word structure. English spelling is (mostly) (rather) fixed, but in this particular area, variability rules: rain forest, rain-forest, rainforest coffee pot, coffee-pot, coffeepot Writing as 'all one word' tends to reflect forestress, but some forestressed items are sometimes written separately
18:49
Phonological (stress) criteria Forestress End-stress avocado oil olive oil (GB) breakfast table kitchen table cherry cake cherry pie Christmas cake Christmas pudding Oxford Street Oxford Road town house country house
20:03
Phonological (stress) criteria Forestress indicates a compound (Chomsky & Halle) End-stress indicates a phrase Forestress End-stress avocado oil olive oil (GB) breakfast table kitchen table cherry cake cherry pie Christmas cake Christmas pudding Oxford Street Oxford Road town house country house toy factory (toys made) toy factory (is a toy)
20:45
Compounds as words - some criteria Compounds inflect as units Ladies-in-waiting is not a compound, mother-in-laws might be; What about: suggestions box; gentlemen farmers Coordination New and used cars / new cars and trucks Blue and blackbirds / blackbirds and cocks
27:40
Compounds as words (2) Modification Supposedly new cars Supposedly blackbirds Cohesion She walked slowly up the hill / She walked up the hill slowly Formalisation / formisalation
29:21
Compounds as words (3) Anaphoric islandhood New cars and old ones Blackbirds and blueones People either hate oysters or love them Oyster-lovers really like them
30:09
Compounds: syntax or morphology (or both)? Lees sees compounds as syntax because in the generative grammar of the time there was no other way to view productive processes
32:06
Compounds: syntax or morphology (or both)? Lees sees compounds as syntax because in the generative grammar of the time there was no other way to view productive processes Bauer et al. see compounds a morphological because they see them as words Payne & Huddleston think that if something is a little bit syntactic, the whole is syntactic
33:09
Are we asking the wrong question? Proposal: Rather than ask what distinguishes a phrase from a compound, we should ask: what do the various criteria tell us about? My answer: not only for compounds, is that they tell us about the degree to which a particular expression (piece of syntax, idiom, compound, MWE) is fixed Fixity comes from familiarity, frequency, non- compositionality, relative shortness (Zipf), small paradigm (word family), entrenchment
36:36
How does this apply to compounds? Some noun + noun constructs are more fixed than others. If we only look at noun + noun compounds, then all we need say is that some noun-attributive + N constructions are more fixed than others - we do not need compounds at all. If we think there are compounds of other forms (blackbird, brain-dead, sleep-walk) we first need to define a compound. We can, but it is hard and the definition tends to leak.
40:06
A final proposal The syntax generates a series of syntagmatically related items, including nouns modifying adjectives and verbs modifying nouns. Some of these become fixed. Short ones are more likely to be fixed than long ones (Zipf), but long ones can be fixed to a greater or lesser extent. Although we call these fixed expressions 'compounds', 'idioms', 'MWEs', etc., what they all share is that they are fixed syntax. We can use a term like 'compound' if we must, but 'fixed expression' is enough. A compound is not a thing.
41:21
Conclusion Wish to argue not that compounds do not exist, but that there is a coherent argument to be made that we do not need this categorisation of expressions because its borders are unclear and because seeking definite criteria for a compound does not lead us anywhere. Perhaps someone else will have a reason why this viewpoint will not work, either.
43:15
Thank you for your attention
43:27
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LALS Seminar Series
Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (Victoria University of Wellington)
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L. Bauer (2022, October 14), Fixity and English compounds
DOI
doi.org/10.52843/cassyni.gwz3vy
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Video length 56:21
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