Riassunto esame Linguistica inglese, prof. Camaiora, libro consigliato Readings in English Lexicogrammar, Ulrych

Cap. 1 lexicography

Lexicography is the skill, the practice, the profession of writing dictionaries. The person who deals with this profession is called a lexicographer. The dictionary is still today considered as a trusted and respected collection of facts about the language and it is always very useful, both for native speakers and for learners of a foreign language.

A dictionary is a sort of big book which gives lots of different pieces of information about the words of a language. It is in fact different from a glossary, because the glossary is only a list of words belonging to specific sectors and it gives only their translation, not the explanation.

In a dictionary, we find the so-called entry, which is a piece of writing containing information about a specific word. It is also called headword and it identifies the highlighted word that we find in a dictionary.

We can find lots of different information in a dictionary, obviously depending on the kind of dictionary we are considering:

• The definition of the headword;
• The phonetic transcription of the headword;
• The grammatical characteristics of the headword: for example, the gender, the number;
• Different examples which involve the headword;
• The etymology of the headword;
• Synonyms and antonyms of the headword;
• The syntactic patterns formed by using the headword;
• The register the headword belongs to;
• The idioms that are created by using the headword.

There are different kinds of dictionaries:

• Monolingual and bilingual dictionaries;
• Dictionaries for native speakers and for language learners;
• Synonyms and antonyms dictionaries;
• Etymological dictionaries;
• Economical-financial dictionaries;
• Medical dictionaries;
• Business dictionaries;
• ...

The two main categories are bilingual dictionaries and monolingual dictionaries. The main difference between them is that monolingual dictionaries provide the explanation of the headword in the same language, while bilingual dictionaries provide its translation, explanation, and lots of different pieces of information about the headword (semantic, pronunciation, spelling, grammar, etymology).

Then, a monolingual dictionary can be either a dictionary for native speakers or a dictionary for foreign learners (such as The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary). The former gives information about the meaning of the headword, and the headword itself isn’t shown in use, the latter provides instead the explanation of the headword and also examples and grammatical characteristics.

Major distinctions between monolingual dictionaries for native and for non-native speakers are:

• For non-native speakers, a main aim is to receive information which will allow for productive use of the language: it is very important for this reason that the learner understands the syntactic behavior of a specific word, in which syntactic patterns it can occur;
• Another distinction is in the definitions: in dictionaries for learners, the definitions are always written using more simple terms, even if sometimes not all the words are particularly common and simplicity can sometimes damage accuracy.

Some dictionaries for learners tend to use a restricted number of words, not more than 200, in order to make all definitions comprehensible: on the one hand, it is very useful for the learner, but on the other hand, not all the words used are common, and often the definitions are very long (periphrasis).

There is also a particular kind of English dictionary, which is called EFL (English as a Foreign Language) or ESL (English as a Second Language), which are especially made for English learners. These kinds of dictionaries also provide information about the syntactic patterns formed by a specific word (for example: "enter" + sb. as a member; + sb. at public school; + sth. in a diary).

Learners' dictionaries have also adopted coding systems, which allow learners to check, for example, object-complement relations, transitive/intransitive patterns, whether a noun is countable or uncountable or an adjective or attributive, through the use of codes which correspond to different structures.

One main problem with such codings is that learners have to invest a considerable amount of time and effort in mastering this complex system.

There are different problems a dictionary has to solve:

• In the case of compounds and derivatives: each dictionary has to decide whether it’s better for learners to have individual items for each compound or derivative, or to group complex forms together because of spelling similarities;
• In the case of idioms and fixed expressions: in English there are patterns which are more fixed and other patterns which are instead more indeterminate; one of the most recent developments in lexicographic description of fixed expressions is in the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English. So it is complex to decide whether it is better for the learner to have numerous separate sub-entries or whether the learner in some cases can understand the meaning of the expression from the context (e.g. break the ice).

We also have to consider the existence of clines, which are gradual differentiations among expressions, in fact, some expressions can be more fixed and determined than others; we distinguish among:

• Collocational restriction: we go from unrestricted collocation to relatively restricted collocation;
• Syntactic structure: from flexible to irregular;
• Semantic opacity: from transparent to opaque.

For this reason, we can distinguish between open and closed cline: if the collocation is open, the dictionary can’t get all the words;

• In the case of monosemous and polysemous words: the main difficulty for lexicographers is in fact to establish appropriate divisions between the various senses of words;
• In ordering words in the entry: another difficult decision the lexicographer has to make deals with the order in which the different senses of words have to be presented.

The COBUILD project

The COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database) is one of the largest and most ambitious lexical research projects ever undertaken. It was first published in 1987. The principal aim of the COBUILD is to investigate in as much detail as possible how the English language is actually used at a given moment in time in both speech and writing.

In fact, the COBUILD doesn’t use made-up examples and citations of lexicographers, but it uses citations taken from the most typical and sometimes even the most banal examples of language, taken from the real use of English attested in actual usage. The main innovations of this COBUILD are:

• Citations are examples of real English and don’t involve made-up examples;
• Linguistic and stylistic differences between spoken and written usage, between British English and American English usage can be separately stored and marked accordingly in dictionary entries;
• Explanations are written in complete sentences, following a strategy of clear, accessible language.

Through time, the corpus is being continually updated to include a wider variety of spoken forms and data from other Englishes around the world.

Cap. 2 collocation

Two models of interpretation

In order to explain the way in which meaning is transmitted from language text, we have to use two different principles of interpretation, because one isn’t enough. These two principles are:

The open-choice principle

This principle sees language text as the result of a very large number of complex choices: this principle is based on the operation of unlimited choices, selections. This principle is often called the “slot-and-filler” model: the text is seen as a series of slots (empty spaces) which have to be filled from a lexicon that satisfies the grammatical restraints. We talk about restraints because the more we go on with the sentence, the more closed and limited the choice becomes.

The idiom principle

We have to notice also that words don’t occur at random in a text and in fact we wouldn’t produce a normal text by using only the open-choice principle: this principle can’t in fact explain all our choices. We have in fact to consider three different levels:

• Physical reality: Language is conditioned by our experience and so two things which occur physically together have a stronger chance of being mentioned together. For example contrasts or series, such as “black or white”, “husband and wife”, “coffee or tea”: we have in mind these combinations thanks to our experience;
• Register: At this level, we use cultural structures and slots become more and more limited in choice;
• Cultural conventions: According to this principle we have groups of words which we think immediately together and the expression has to be analyzed all together and not into segments for example the expression “of course”: the two words “of” and “course” can’t be analyzed separately as a preposition and a noun, but we have to give the meaning of the entire expression.

These are the three levels of the idiom principle. Some features of this principle are:

• Many phrases allow internal lexical variation even if the meaning remains the same: for example “in some cases” / “in some instances” or “set something on fire” / “set fire to something”;
• Many phrases allow internal lexical syntactic variation, so the changing of grammatical elements: for example “it’s not in his nature to…” where the verb “is” can vary to “was” and “not” could be replaced by “hardly, scarcely”;
• Many phrases allow some variation in word order: for example “to recriminate is not in his nature” / “it is not in his nature to recriminate”;
• Many words and phrases attract other words in strong collocation (the position of a word next to another): for example “hard work, hard luck, hard facts”, where “hard” can be used either to express physical hard or difficulty;
• Many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to co-occur with certain grammatical choices: for example the phrasal verb “set about” is followed by verbs in the –ing form (e.g. Set about leaving);
• Many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment: for example the verb “happen” is associated with unpleasant things or accidents.

When we analyze a text we notice some features, such as:

• There is a tendency for frequent words or frequent senses of words to have less independent and determined meaning than less frequent words or senses, because these words or senses are used so often; this tendency can be seen as a progressive lexicalization, which is the progressive reduction of the determinate meaning of a word (the meaning becomes less and less determined);
• When words collocate significantly, which means when they are often found together, their presence is the result of a single choice: we use in fact words in groups with only one meaning;
• The “core” meaning of a word, the one which first comes to mind for most people (e.g. “back” = the posterior part of the body”), is the less used: we know that the less we use a word, the more its meaning is specific;
• We have to consider words as groups of words, as the idiom principle says, according to which words that occur together are to be interpreted together and not separately (e.g. “of course”).

These two principles, the open-choice principle and the idiom principle, are incompatible with each other, they are diametrically opposed: in fact, they offer contrasting ways of interpreting the data and so two listeners or readers will not interpret the text in the same way. By the way, the first principle we use is the idiom principle: in the case...