Conventions Used

Conventions used

Quoted material is italicized and boldface ( Hungarian in italics; English in bold; other languages bold ) amid normal text, even if the original has some other highlighting. Consecutive stretches of quoted language may not be set off typographically.

Italics is also used for emphasis.

Senses are enclosed between single quotes. The same concerns quoted material where senses are originally not between single quotes.

Where Hungarian material is between single quotes, an English translation is provided: the H. napirend is used in the sense ‘napirendi pont’ (= ‘item on the agenda’).

The → sign indicates one-way directionality, between languages or dictionaries. The ↔ sign indicates two-way directionality, between languages or dictionaries, or a two-way reference work: English ↔Hungarian dictionary .

E→H, e.g., abbreviates English →Hungarian; E →H stands for English →Hungarian. H↔E e.g., abbreviates Hungarian ↔English; H ↔E stands for H →E & E →H.

Hungarian affixed forms with different shapes due to vowel harmony are referred to like this: -bAn, bÓl, nAk etc. – the capital vowel letter stands for both (or all three) allomorphs.

In whatever format senses may be numbered in a dictionary, in this paper they are given as 1. … 2. … 3. ... etc. (number with full stop).

A adjective AP Adjective Phrase Adv adverb AdvP Adverb Phrase C Complementizer E English H Hungarian N noun NP Noun Phrase O, Obj Object P Preposition PoS part of speech / word class / syntactic category PP Prepositional Phrase S, Subj Subject V verb VP Verb Phrase Material quoted from reference works (unless it is the exact original formatting that is relevant) is 10 pt Sans Serif, with the original type (boldface, italics) preserved. The same font is used for quoting non-existent but recommended entries. Irrelevant parts of quoted entries are signalled like this: […]. es·pres·so n., pl. -sos. 1. a strong coffee […]

In material from reference works, any of the following may have been ignored when not relevant: (a) grammatical information; (b) the original centred dots for word division; (c) pronunciation information. Entries have usually been condensed into one paragraph, i.e. senses do not begin on a new line: espresso 1. a strong coffee prepared by forcing live steam under pressure, or boil- ing water, through ground dark-roast coffee beans. 2. a cup of this coffee.

For a gender-neutral generic third person English pronoun, all the possible versions are used: s/he , (s)he, etc., sometimes they , as appropriate.

2 Contents

CHAPTER ONE: DICTIONARIES FROM LINGUISTS’ AND USERS’ PERSPECTIVES______9 1.1 Background and aims ______9 1.2 Coverage ______9 1.2.1 Interfaces: compromise vs. principle ______10 1.2.2 The structure of this study ______11 1.3 Lexicology vs. lexicography______12 1.4 Words and their status in linguistics ______13 1.4.1 The lexicon promoted, words demoted? ______13 1.4.2 The lexicon seen as gaining prestige ______14 1.4.3 Separation of lexical and grammatical______14 1.4.4 Core vs. periphery ______15 1.5 Lexicon, vocabulary, dictionary ______15 1.6 The user–dictionary interface ______16 1.6.1 User research (based mainly on Atkins & Rundell 2008)______16 1.6.2 Problems with user profiling ______22 1.6.3 Word lists: non-homographic, homographic, partially homographic ______22 1.6.4 “Encyclopaedic” headwords ______25 1.6.5 Proper names of various types ______25 1.6.6 Productivity and user profiling ______29

CHAPTER TWO: WHAT GOES INTO THE DICTIONARY ______31 2.1 Hedgehog vs. fox______31 2.1.1 Langue linguistics vs. parole linguistics ______31 2.2 Dichotomies and continua ______32 2.2.1 Rationalism vs. empiricism ______33 2.2.2 E-language vs. I-language ______35 2.2.3 Spoken vs. written language ______38 2.3 Theory into practice ______42 2.3.1 Rigour vs. user-friendliness ______43 2.4 Linguists’ views of lexicography, lexicographers’ views of linguistics ______45 2.4.1 Principles of lexicography ______46 2.4.2 Linguistics and lexicography______47 2.4.3 Trade-off between anecdotalism and rigour______60 2.4.4 Trade-off between coverage and accessibility ______61 2.4.5 Linguistics vs. lexicography: linguists’ voices ______63 2.4.6 The task of lexicography ______75 2.4.7 Pre-Saussurean and Saussurean dictionaries ______82 2.5 Lexicon into dictionary ______85 2.5.1 Checklist for dictionary design: Hudson’s “types of lexical fact” ______85 2.6 Lexicon into dictionary: listing in the lexicon vs. the dictionary ______89 2.6.1 Listedness and listemes ______89 2.6.2 Listedness in the lexicon: the traditional rank scale______94 2.6.3 Below the level of words ______95 2.6.4 Fine tuning the word level ______101 2.6.5 “Lexical” items of doubtful status ______106 2.7 Above the level of words ______125 2.7.1 Compounds for the linguist and the user______125 2.7.2 Synthetic compounds______125 2.7.3 Lexicon vs. lexis ______126 2.7.4 Types of lexical items in Atkins & Rundell (2008) ______126 2.8 Lexical unit ______128 2.8.1 “Phrasicon” and phraseology______129 2.8.2 Idiomaticity due to singularity of occurrence in some medium______134 2.9 A catalogue of multiword expressions (MWEs)______135 2.9.1 Cruse (2000) on compositionality ______136 2.9.2 Multiword expressions in Biber & al. (2000) ______142 2.9.3 Multiwords in McCarthy (2006) ______143 2.9.4 Multiword expressions in Hanks (2006) ______144 2.9.5 Idiom dictionaries in Dobrovol’skij (2006) ______145 2.9.6 Idioms in Ayto (2006) ______146 2.9.7 Corpus approaches to idiom: Moon (2006) ______151 2.9.8 Formulaic language in Wray (2002) ______152 2.9.9 Formulaic speech in Kuiper (2006) ______155 2.9.10 Multiword expressions in Fazly & Stevenson (2007) ______156 2.9.11 “Constructions” in Goldberg & Casenhiser (2007) ______158 2.9.12 Multiword units in Abu-Ssaydeh (2005) ______159 2.9.13 Multiword expressions in Sag & al. (2002) ______161 2.9.14 Semantic/syntactic compositionality, statistical idiosyncrasy ______163 2.9.15 Bundles in Biber & al. (2000) ______165 2.9.16 Idioms in Nunberg & al. (1994)______167 2.10 Implications for lexicography ______170

CHAPTER THREE: GRAMMAR AND LEXICON ______173 3.1 Grammar in the dictionary ______173 3.1.1 Grammar in definitions ______173 3.1.2 Number and countability ______174 3.1.3 One’s vs. smb’s : coreferentiality in MWE “slots” ______176 3.1.4 Parts of speech______178 3.1.5 Prepositions ______200 3.1.6 Small clauses ______207 3.2 Between grammar and lexicon ______209 3.2.1 Lexico-grammar______209 3.2.2 Productivity: straddling the “words vs. rules” divide______212

CONCLUSIONS AND RESULTS ______237

POTENTIALITIES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH ______240

SOURCES RELEVANT FOR FURTHER RESEARCH ______241

4 Detailed contents

CHAPTER ONE: DICTIONARIES FROM LINGUISTS’ AND USERS’ PERSPECTIVES...... 9 1.1 Background and aims ...... 9 1.2 Coverage...... 9 1.2.1 Interfaces: compromise vs. principle ...... 10 1.2.2 The structure of this study...... 11 1.3 Lexicology vs. lexicography...... 12 1.4 Words and their status in linguistics ...... 13 1.4.1 The lexicon promoted, words demoted?...... 13 1.4.2 The lexicon seen as gaining prestige...... 14 1.4.3 Separation of lexical and grammatical...... 14 1.4.4 Core vs. periphery...... 15 1.5 Lexicon, vocabulary, dictionary...... 15 1.6 The user–dictionary interface ...... 16 1.6.1 User research (based mainly on Atkins & Rundell 2008)...... 16 1.6.1.1 Serving the user with ordering of LUs...... 19 1.6.1.1.1 Kill bilingually ...... 19 1.6.1.1.2 Hungarian rend őr ‘police officer’...... 20 1.6.2 Problems with user profiling...... 22 1.6.3 Word lists: non-homographic, homographic, partially homographic ...... 22 1.6.4 “Encyclopaedic” headwords ...... 25 1.6.5 Proper names of various types ...... 25 1.6.6 Productivity and user profiling ...... 29

CHAPTER TWO: WHAT GOES INTO THE DICTIONARY ...... 31 2.1 Hedgehog vs. fox...... 31 2.1.1 Langue linguistics vs. parole linguistics...... 31 2.2 Dichotomies and continua...... 32 2.2.1 Rationalism vs. empiricism...... 33 2.2.2 E-language vs. I-language...... 35 2.2.2.1 Portrait dictionaries vs. instrument dictionaries ...... 36 2.2.2.2 Lyons and corpora...... 38 2.2.3 Spoken vs. written language ...... 38 2.2.3.1 For dictionaries, spelling is very much part of language...... 38 2.2.3.2 When orthography hinders lookup...... 39 2.2.3.3 User-friendliness, or encouragement of ignorance?...... 41 2.3 Theory into practice ...... 42 2.3.1 Rigour vs. user-friendliness ...... 43 2.3.1.1 Frawley on “format vs. form” ...... 44 2.3.1.2 Murray on prototypicality ...... 45 2.4 Linguists’ views of lexicography, lexicographers’ views of linguistics ...... 45 2.4.1 Principles of lexicography ...... 46 2.4.2 Linguistics and lexicography...... 47 2.4.2.1 Lew (2007) on semantics and lexicography...... 47 2.4.2.2 Dictionaries as ultimate tests of theories? ...... 48 2.4.2.3 Dictionary-making is a craft...... 50 2.4.2.4 Dictionaries do not change...... 51 2.4.2.4.1 Tools, not descriptions...... 52 2.4.2.4.2 Science, empirical and applied ...... 53 2.4.2.4.3 The notion of “explanatory basis” ...... 55 2.4.2.5 Points of agreement between linguists: Hudson (1981) ...... 57 2.4.2.6 Illusions of simplicity: PoS...... 58 2.4.2.7 Illusions of simplicity: “abbreviation” as PoS...... 60 2.4.3 Trade-off between anecdotalism and rigour...... 60 2.4.4 Trade-off between coverage and accessibility ...... 61 2.4.4.1 Market demands beyond users’ demand ...... 62 2.4.4.2 Descriptivism and application...... 63 2.4.5 Linguistics vs. lexicography: linguists’ voices ...... 63 2.4.5.1 Kiefer (1990) on lexicography and theoretical linguistics ...... 63 2.4.5.2 How theoretical is theoretical?...... 65 2.4.5.3 The “real world linguists” of McCawley (1986)...... 65 2.4.5.4 The case of budge ...... 66 2.4.5.5 Inside an entry: dichotomies in Hudson (1988) ...... 67 2.4.5.6 Lexical storage and the lexical entry...... 69 2.4.5.7 Just linguistic or intra-linguistic information? ...... 71 2.4.5.8 Written language...... 72 2.4.5.9 Abbreviations as special items for the written medium ...... 74 2.4.5.10 The dichotomies of Hudson (1988) in the dictionary...... 74 2.4.6 The task of lexicography...... 75 2.4.6.1 Defining collocation...... 75 2.4.6.2 Sense analysis of defend vs. protect for background...... 77 2.4.6.3 Ordering of senses...... 80 2.4.6.4 Monitoring lookup for customization...... 81 2.4.7 Pre-Saussurean and Saussurean dictionaries...... 82 2.4.7.1 Országh (1967) sees Saussure’s langue “crowded out of dictionaries” ...... 83 2.4.7.2 Ground for optimism concerning the linguistics/lexicography liaison?...... 84 2.5 Lexicon into dictionary ...... 85 2.5.1 Checklist for dictionary design: Hudson’s “types of lexical fact” ...... 85 2.5.2. Hudson (1988) tabulated...... 87 2.6 Lexicon into dictionary: listing in the lexicon vs. the dictionary...... 89 2.6.1 Listedness and listemes...... 89 2.6.1.1 “E-lexicon” vs. “I-lexicon” ...... 89 2.6.1.2 Origins of the term “listing”...... 91 2.6.1.3 On the mental lexicon ...... 92 2.6.1.4 Must or may be listed? ...... 94 2.6.2 Listedness in the lexicon: the traditional rank scale...... 94 2.6.3 Below the level of words ...... 95 2.6.3.1 Morpheme boundary types...... 95 2.6.3.2 The dictionary need only list derived, not inflected forms?...... 96 2.6.3.2.1 Hungarian nagyot and sokat : straddling inflection and derivation ...... 96 2.6.3.2.2 Adjectival and nominal illustrations: better, best, teeth ...... 98 2.6.3.2.3 Semantics vs. lexicography...... 100 2.6.4 Fine tuning the word level ...... 101 2.6.4.1 Independent words, dependent words and semiwords in Hungarian...... 102 2.6.4.2 Listedness of dependent words, semiwords and bound bases ...... 103 2.6.4.3 Independent words, semiwords, and bound bases lexicographically ...... 104 2.6.4.3.1 Left-hand members...... 104 2.6.4.3.2 Right-hand members...... 105 2.6.5 “Lexical” items of doubtful status...... 106 2.6.5.1 Onomatopoeic “words”...... 108 2.6.5.1.1 “Inarticulate” onomatopoeic words ...... 108 2.6.5.1.2 PoS-classifiable onomatopoeics ...... 108 2.6.5.2 Interjections...... 109 2.6.5.3 Sentence words...... 111 2.6.5.4 Expletives: not the four-letter kind...... 112 2.6.5.4.1 Expletives: words?...... 112

6 2.6.5.5 Interjections: definitions and classification...... 112 2.6.5.5.1 Exclamations as a PoS label in CALD (2008)...... 113 2.6.5.5.2 Goddam in CALD ...... 115 2.6.5.6 Inserts...... 116 2.6.5.7 Lexically bound words...... 120 2.6.5.8 Some lexically bounds words in CEDT and COED...... 123 2.7 Above the level of words ...... 125 2.7.1 Compounds for the linguist and the user...... 125 2.7.2 Synthetic compounds...... 125 2.7.3 Lexicon vs. lexis ...... 126 2.7.4 Types of lexical items in Atkins & Rundell (2008) ...... 126 2.8 Lexical unit...... 128 2.8.1 “Phrasicon” and phraseology...... 129 2.8.1.1 Fixed expressions, phrases, idioms ...... 130 2.8.1.1.1 Moon (1998) on problems of terminology...... 130 2.8.1.1.2 Granger (2005) on phraseology ...... 131 2.8.1.2 “Phrase” vs. “idiom”: not distinguished in CALD (2008) ...... 133 2.8.2 Idiomaticity due to singularity of occurrence in some medium...... 134 2.9 A catalogue of multiword expressions (MWEs)...... 135 2.9.1 Cruse (2000) on compositionality...... 136 2.9.1.1 Opacity and dictionary-worthiness...... 137 2.9.1.2 Noun binomials lexicographically...... 137 2.9.1.3 Whether (irreversible) binomials are nouns ...... 138 2.9.1.4 “Lumping vs. splitting” of binomials...... 139 2.9.1.5 Cruse (2000) on collocation...... 142 2.9.2 Multiword expressions in Biber & al. (2000) ...... 142 2.9.3 Multiwords in McCarthy (2006)...... 143 2.9.4 Multiword expressions in Hanks (2006)...... 144 2.9.5 Idiom dictionaries in Dobrovol’skij (2006) ...... 145 2.9.6 Idioms in Ayto (2006)...... 146 2.9.6.1 The first of Ayto’s three “intersecting spectra”: semantic opacity...... 147 2.9.6.2 The second “spectrum”: grammatical/compositional fixity ...... 147 2.9.6.3 The third “intersecting spectrum”: syntactic function...... 148 2.9.6.3.1 Dummy “ it ” idioms ...... 148 2.9.6.3.2 Dummy subject idioms...... 150 2.9.6.4 Ayto’s classification evaluated...... 150 2.9.7 Corpus approaches to idiom: Moon (2006) ...... 151 2.9.8 Formulaic language in Wray (2002)...... 152 2.9.9 Formulaic speech in Kuiper (2006) ...... 155 2.9.10 Multiword expressions in Fazly & Stevenson (2007)...... 156 2.9.11 “Constructions” in Goldberg & Casenhiser (2007)...... 158 2.9.12 Multiword units in Abu-Ssaydeh (2005) ...... 159 2.9.13 Multiword expressions in Sag & al. (2002) ...... 161 2.9.14 Semantic/syntactic compositionality, statistical idiosyncrasy...... 163 2.9.15 Bundles in Biber & al. (2000)...... 165 2.9.16 Idioms in Nunberg & al. (1994)...... 167 2.10 Implications for lexicography ...... 170

CHAPTER THREE: GRAMMAR AND LEXICON ...... 173 3.1 Grammar in the dictionary...... 173 3.1.1 Grammar in definitions...... 173 3.1.2 Number and countability...... 174 3.1.3 One’s vs. smb’s : coreferentiality in MWE “slots”...... 176 3.1.4 Parts of speech ...... 178 3.1.4.1 A bird’s eye view ...... 178 3.1.4.1.1 “Lumping vs. splitting” for word classes...... 179 3.1.4.1.2 Delicacy of analysis: the wood and the trees...... 179 3.1.4.2 “Determiner”: lexicographic lip service, no real utility...... 182

7 3.1.4.2.1 Determiners in GB syntax...... 183 3.1.4.2.2 The U turn of many : dormant adjective ...... 184 3.1.4.2.3 The anomaly of such ...... 187 3.1.4.2.3 Splitting vs. lumping: determiners...... 187 3.1.4.3 “Complementizer” in dictionaries...... 188 3.1.4.4 Parts of speech lexicographically: MED (2002) and (2007) ...... 190 3.1.4.4.1 Part of speech search and grammar search in MED ...... 190 3.1.4.4.2 The parts of speech in MED numerically considered...... 192 3.1.4.4.3 Parts of speech in MED: issues of content...... 193 3.1.4.5 Differing PoS labels for the SL and TL ...... 195 3.1.4.6 Perspective shift between SL and TL lexical items...... 197 3.1.5 Prepositions...... 200 3.1.5.1 Prepositions: a class with two faces ...... 200 3.1.5.1.1 Prepositions: one syntactic class lexicographically ...... 200 3.1.5.2 The issue of English “complex prepositions” ...... 201 3.1.5.2.1 Biber & al. (2000) on complex prepositions...... 203 3.1.5.2.2 A mystery word: ago ...... 204 3.1.5.2.3 A neologism: gone ...... 206 3.1.6 Small clauses...... 207 3.2 Between grammar and lexicon...... 209 3.2.1 Lexico-grammar...... 209 3.2.1.1 The odd thing about it ...... 210 3.2.1.2 Grammaticization: end of a lexically bound word ...... 211 3.2.2 Productivity: straddling the “words vs. rules” divide...... 212 3.2.2.1 Words and rules ...... 212 3.2.2.2 Dictionaries and productivity...... 213 3.2.2.2.1 Frequency information and its problems ...... 213 3.2.2.2.2 Productively used words...... 214 3.2.2.2.3 Combinations with well- ...... 214 3.2.2.3 Combining forms: -proof and -friendly and Hungarian -barát ...... 218 3.2.2.3.1 -proof and -friendly ...... 218 3.2.2.3.2 Hungarian -barát ...... 221 3.2.2.3.3 “Hyphenated forms”...... 226 3.2.2.4 Productivity and compounds proper ...... 227 3.2.2.5 One facet of consistency: number compounds...... 232

CONCLUSIONS AND RESULTS ...... 237

POTENTIALITIES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH ...... 240

SOURCES RELEVANT FOR FURTHER RESEARCH...... 241

8 Chapter One: Dictionaries from linguists’ and users’ perspectives

1.1 Background and aims

The study of lexicology and the work with dictionaries has always been empirical and “corpus driven” for the present author, in terms of being informed by EFL teaching, the teaching of grammar and syntax, work on pedagogical English grammars and English ↔Hungarian translation. The study draws on the background in these fields, and to the extent that it is possible, it is guided by, and dedicated to, the notion that grammar and lexis are hardly, if at all, separable. Whatever the stance taken on their separability, however, it is probably fair to say that a grammarian’s 1 view of lexicography and a lexicographer’s view of grammar will be presented.

1.2 Coverage

Dictionaries are so variegated that it is but small exaggeration that the category “dictionary” itself is one that has been likened to games since Wittgenstein: “[...] similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’”. Wittgenstein (1953:§66–7) This study is about lexicology and dictionaries, and has not such an impossible goal as suggested by the elusive nature of dictionaries, because it narrows down its objective to English lexicography and English ↔ Hungarian dictionary-making. It is the conviction of this author that the learners’ and users’ need rather than some abstract theoretical consideration should be the absolute measure in evaluating any work of lexicography. This attitude is implicit in the hackneyed phrase “user-friendliness”, which, in a good many cases, is arguably no more than hype. Still, this attitude has hardly been present, and certainly has not been in the limelight, for more than two decades in matters lexicographic. I examine how this obviously contestable endeavour, the attempt at user-friendliness, manifests itself; I explore the types of compromises between some principled, often theory-based “scientificness” and this user-friendliness in English dictionaries in general. From time to time I exemplify the successes as well as the failures of this endeavour in AM&MASZ (2000/6), an English ↔Hungarian dictionary for Hungarians. I also seek answers to such questions as: • What, if anything, do the insights of linguistic theory and description have to offer for dictionary-making: (i) where such insights may have left an imprint on the practice of Eng- lish ↔Hungarian lexicography; (ii) where there seems to be no room for such insights. • What are those areas where such insights, even if exist, (would) explicitly jeopardize this user- friendliness: where such approaches would be not just useless but explicitly detrimental. There seems to be some, but little, synergy between linguistic theory and lexicography. One wonders if this is a blessing or a curse for both of them.

1 It is readily acknowledged that the term grammarian is somewhat out of context here, but I feel that inverted commas may destroy the parallelism intended. Chapter One

This study, while it sometimes looks at competing theories or views on an issue, never with a view to solving them. It offers no theoretical solutions or answers, it does not attempt to clear up problems because it asks no such questions. What these comparisons may present rather is a clearer view of the situation of lexicography: it is in a position to cherry-pick from what theory can offer, always in a position to reject something, to choose whatever it does choose having different, possibly conflicting motives, because it is not answerable. It is theory that is applied, and its evaluation comes from its utility. The most exacting and demanding pieces of lexicography – so much so that the “dictionary” label hardly fits them – are the (obviously partial) entries of the lexicons of several languages inspired by the Meaning ↔Text model (originally: Mel' čuk 1974). These entries are so unlike the everyday notion of any trade dictionary that they do not have a user in the standard sense: their readership is limited to linguists. The Explanatory Combinatory Dictionaries are formal dictionaries whose aim is the complete specification of all syntactic, semantic and lexical information for any item. Syntactic: formal representation of all grammatical relationships that it has; semantic: an analytic definition which uniquely differentiates it; lexical: all paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations for the entry in the form of lexical functions that link it to its typical phraseology. In this sense, the notion of the ECD as a work of specialized lexicography is an unrivalled piece of scholarship; in the sense of a dictionary actually used by even a narrow section of readers, it is less of a dictionary than the OED. Being pre-theoretical is probably impossible. The most innocent-looking of terms used in the Pref- aces or the “How to” sections of dictionaries – “word”, “word class”, “auxiliary”, “idiom”, “expression”, “meaning”, “combining form”, “sense”, “abbreviation” – present insurmountable difficulty, some perhaps less, some more, and they all assume theories regarding language structure, even if this need hardly bother the compilers, and is not realized by the users. Another layer of terms, not meant for the terminology in the “How to” sections of dictionaries and introductory texts, but in more technical writing, will contain items such as “regularity”, “productivity”, “listedness”, “polysemy”, “homonymy” (a random list at the tip of the iceberg), each of which not only assumes an entire sub-theory but one which is interdependent on most of the others. Because in some form or other, dictionaries must cover the entirety of a language, this study must use lexicology as a vantage point to touch upon many facets and sub-fields of linguistics, including those just listed. It seems that the more general and varied the subject (lexicology, broadly speaking), the more fragmentary and varied the discussion. Also, it seems evident that the broader the coverage, the shallower the treatment will be.

1.2.1Interfaces: compromise vs. principle

The title and subtitle of this study could be reversed. According to the subtitle, in the broadest sense I look at the duality of compromise vs. principle, or aspects of compromise between theoretical accuracy and exigencies of application, mostly within one language pair of bilingual lexicography. As suggested by the title, I explore questions of how linguistics influences lexicography; how insights from linguistics can or should be used in the creating of (English, and English ↔Hungarian) dictionaries. I examine the issue of how bad this compromise may be, if at all, and whether it means the abandonment, as some writers worry, of intellectual exactitude. The word “interface” in the title is to be read as a non-term, an everyday expression that indicates a common point or boundary between two things. The title may have been worded thus: Theory meets application , or Theoretical meets applied in lexicography . “Interface” as a verb also means ‘design or adapt the input and output configurations […] so they may work together compatibly’ (CED&T 1992). In a discipline that may be roughly defined as lexicology, for theory to inform praxis, as well as for the practice to feed back into the theory, one had better have a clear notion of how the two are related. I will take the standard view that there is a process by which the theory of linguistics is en-

10 Chapter One acted or practised in and by lexicography; also, the more controversial view that there is a more or less self-contained domain within linguistics that goes by name “lexicology”. Just as knowledge of language is now supposed to be modular, individual linguists have standardly specialized in a particular module. The boundaries of the compartments are variously placed, however, possibly with syntax and phonology enjoying a more central and undisputed status, semantics and morphology only following suit. Controversies also surround the issue of interfaces between the modules, if indeed there are such modules. It is questionable, then, whether these compartments are rigid, or there is overlap between them in whatever form; this can arguably be conceived of in a great many ways. Not only is the issue of putative intra-modular interfaces, the subject of their book, contentious; also, as Ramchand and Reiss (2007:2) point out, the term “interface” can be “legitimately applied to the connections between the language faculty and other aspects of cognition […] or between linguistics and other disciplines”.

1.2.2 The structure of this study

Although several facets will be touched upon, some of them only tangentially. Internet-based dictionaries, both online and offline, and interactive (open, i.e. publicly edited) dictionaries will not be discussed at all, or only mentioned inasmuch as they come into play in the treatment of the “dictionary–user interface”. It is commonplace that the value of the Internet dictionaries varies, to use an understatement, and the quality of such “open dictionaries” is doubtful. The situation concerning Internet dictionaries, as far as can be judged, changes very rapidly. Dictionaries in the teaching process in and outside of the classroom will not be dealt with. Many studies have reported on experiments with dictionary use, mainly for dictionary evaluation and planning/design purposes, but the use of dictionaries in classroom teaching settings does not seem to be well documented. However important insights for lexicography may come from studies such as Horváth (2006), which look at possibilities of corpora used in the classroom, issues such as these are not relevant to the present study. While some authors always seem rightly thrilled to recognize the usefulness of the Web as a source of data and search facility, warnings of the pitfalls of this avenue of research can also be heard. At- kins & Rundell (2008:53) optimistically claim, for example, that if one is not “sure whether a particular usage is still current, a site like Google News will show how recently it has been used (which usually turns out to be within the last 24 hours)”. [In the footnote:] “One might have imagined, for example, that the phrase Beam me up, Scotty had fallen into disuse, but web data shows that it is alive and well”. Kilgarriff (2006), on the other hand, reports that an “academic-community alternative” to simple Google-based searching has been developed exactly to avoid “having to be goo- gleologists”, which would indeed require a special branch of science, because: (i) commercial search engines do not lemmatise or part-of-speech tag; (ii) their search syntax is limited; (iii) there are constraints on the numbers of queries and the numbers of hits per query; (iv) search hits are for pages and not for instances; ultimately, search engine counts are arbitrary. The device described in Kilgarriff (2006) crawls, downloads, cleans, and de-duplicates, then linguistically annotates and loads the data into a corpus query tool. All of this, while obviously relevant and exciting for (the future of) dictionary-making, is not dealt with. I will be mainly concerned with print dictionaries, and few CD-ROM dictionaries, either based on print editions or of a totally new conception, such as the MED (2002). CD-ROM versions are referred to and used for illustration for convenience of consulting, where they do not differ from their print counterpart. In a review of Kiefer & Sterkenburg (2003), de Schryver takes the authors to task for ignoring “the crucial modern backbone” of large dictionary projects, the dictionary compilation software. “Are

11 Chapter One twenty-first century students of lexicography really supposed to believe that ordinary Office tools are used for the compilation of real (electronic) dictionaries?” (de Schryver 2004b:14). This thesis does not concern itself with the actual technology, computerized or otherwise, that is used to produce a dictionary; with whether, and what, software is used in the production. In general, it says little about what is called the first phase of dictionary design, “pre-lexicography”, in the system of Atkins & Rundell (2008). These aspects, while undeniably the issues in 21st century lexicography, fall outside the scope of this work.

Chapter One, the shortest chapter, which gives a personal background and a description of the aims , discusses the interfaces in terms of which the study explores its object; it gives a rough outline of how it uses lexicography and lexicology ; it discusses the current status of words as such outside lexicography; it broadly defines “lexicon”, “vocabulary” and “dictionary” as they are used in this study; and finally it discusses the user–dictionary interface .

Chapter Two is devoted to twin questions of what goes into the dictionary from the lexicon , and what goes into the dictionary from the linguistic enterprise , i.e. how this process is seen through the prism of theoretical linguistics and lexicography. It looks at questions of how much theory finds its way into practice. The bulk of Chapter Two examines the traditional “grammatical rank scale” and identifies its units as they are catalogued in the dictionary. The most problematic level, that of multiword units in the broadest sense of the word receives special attention in 2.9.

Chapter Three looks at the relationship of the grammatical and the lexical , by exploring, on the one hand, a few aspects of the grammatical information in a dictionary, and on the other, their affinities as they are manifested in productivity .

1.3 Lexicology vs. lexicography

The present study is an exploration in lexicography and lexicology. More space will be devoted to matters lexicological and grammatical in English, and to E → H dictionaries than to Hungarian lexical/grammatical issues and H → E dictionaries: while both English structures and meanings will be my concern, of and by themselves, Hungarian lexicology will only be explored to the extent that it is relevant for H ↔ E relation. One convenient approach to evaluating a piece of lexicography is to check against its practice whatever claims it makes in the blurb or the front matter. It can also be checked against the accumulated insights and judgements of the scholarly community (Jackson 2002). An alternative approach is to establish a set of criteria that arise from the academic study of lexicography itself. This latter, ambi- tious aim is not what I set out to do even if such broad criteria do not exist for this particular area: English ↔Hungarian bilingual print dictionaries (for Hungarians). To the extent that dictionaries register the existing words of languages, while both their potential words and their rules that generate these words are (almost completely) outside their scope, dictionaries are not products of the linguistic enterprise, and lexicography is not part of linguistics, as we see them today. The present study, because it looks into the questions of what kinds of and how much linguistic insight goes into dictionaries, and because linguistics predominantly supplies, or is

12 Chapter One supposed to supply, grammar-related information whose lexicographic presentation this study explores, it is perhaps more of a lexicological than a lexicographic exploration, and it needs to employ notions – such as that of productivity – used explicitly in morphology.

1.4 Words and their status in linguistics

1.4.1 The lexicon promoted, words demoted?

Paradoxically, while in some parts of the linguistic realm, the study of words and the lexicon seems to have recently gained more prestige, syntactically oriented work has gone down the other route and has come to see words more and more of an epiphenomenon. This is the claim made, for example, in Julien (2007), where she argues that it is syntactic structure that combines with the possibility of particular morphemic collocations to produce a distributional reality. Under this view, things that have traditionally been considered as words “derive from many possible distinct syntactic head configurations […] where move- ments and lexical access conspire to create linear adjacency and distributional coher- ence”. And “constraints on syntactic structure […] can explain the patterns and non-patterns of so-called word-formation across languages, without invoking morphology-specific modes of combination” (Julien 2007). Here, syntax is not just primary; (non-autonomous) morphology is approached syntactically, and a lexicalist concept of word is argued for. In the minimalist approach to syntax in general, pride of place has been given to syntactic features, with languages supposed to differ as to how they combine them into more complex structures, for which the usual term is words, and more broadly, lexical items. As Adger (2003:36–53) argues, words are collections of phonological, semantic, and morpho-syntactic features. Not all words, incidentally, have all these types. The set of phonological and morpho-syntactic features is part of Uni- versal Grammar (for the individual languages to choose from), while the basic semantic atoms “seem likely to be universal” ( Adger 2003:38). It is ironic that a strain of componential analysis, with its allegedly universal semantic features, which has in the meantime fallen into disfavour, should really be back within this approach. They are coupled with (more consensually universal) phonological features, to be interpreted by the syntax, along with morpho-syntactic features, which, by contrast, have not previously been termed “features” in the literature. It is also somewhat of a paradox that, seen from current syntax the lexicon – which in a more traditional and less abstract view should be a repository of listed lexical units with a sound shape and an associated (lexical) meaning – contains items that are never phonologically “spelt out” as overt linguistic objects. Unlike the “light verb” in other – lexical – approaches, the “light verb” of modern syntax, for example, which is one of the several types of verb here as well, i.e. a lexical class, is defined in such a way as to cover (i) objects that surface as affixes or (ii) have no phonological content at all, but it never covers ones at the traditional word level. Verbs, apparently, come in four varieties in these frameworks: the lexical ones, the “helping ones”, the affixed ones, and the always invisible ones. It is obvious that these last two (especially the latter) are never for lexicography to worry about.

13 Chapter One

1.4.2 The lexicon seen as gaining prestige

While mainstream generative grammar has put the most prominent focus on the syntactic component, some more recent approaches seem to have allowed more play for the lexicon, and/or more importantly, have expressly questioned the possibility of a robust separation of the lexicon and the grammar (which is largely synonymous with syntax in these approaches). Approaches which “concur in many respects with many alternative theories of generative syntax” include Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, Construction Grammar, Autolexical Syntax and Role and Reference Grammar (Culicover & Jackendoff 2005:3). This study does not discuss these, neither does it use their insights. Culicover & Jackendoff (2005), however, has affinities with them: it shares the view that, especially from a lexicographic perspective, the grammar/lexicon borderline appears to be extremely flimsy. This must be contrasted to those mainstream approaches, whose four aspects have remained constant since 1957: “The formal technology is derivational; There are “hidden levels” of syntax; Syntax is the source of all combinatorial complexity; phonology and semantics are “interpret- ive”; Lexicon is separate from grammar . (Culicover & Jackendoff 2005:14) Another relevant aspect of this difference between the mainstream and Culicover & Jackendoff’s approach is that “Semantics is served by a richly structured representation that is to a great degree independent of language.” (Culicover & Jackendoff 2005:14) which has implications for what they take to be the architecture of the mental lexicon, or the semantic component.

1.4.3 Separation of lexical and grammatical

Culicover & Jackendoff (2005) provide a neat summary of the issue of the grammar/lexicon divide when they discuss the related notions of “the continuum from words to rules” and the “core/periphery” distinction. As they argue “Mainstream generative grammar makes two divisions among linguistic phenomena, with the goal of identifying those aspects of language where deep generality and rich abstract deductive structure are to be expected. The first is the traditional division between grammar – the rules of the language – and the lexicon, which mainstream generative tradition takes to be the locus of all irregularity. Apparently, in the authors’ assessment, this mainstream view has not changed since the Aspects model, where Chomsky cited Bloomfield’s well-known characterization of the lexicon as “an appendix of the grammar, a list of basic irregularities”. For the purposes of lexicography, of course, a neat separation of the lexicon and the grammar would be ideal; just as ideal as it would be for syntax not to have to fiddle with the idiosyncratic, the irregular, the lexical, the random: phenomena originally thought to reside within the lexicon. Some examples of the relationship between lexical and grammatical are explored in Chapter Three.

14 Chapter One

1.4.4 Core vs. periphery

The second division, Culicover & Jackendoff (2005) claim, was introduced with the GB version of the Chomskian theory, and it distinguishes two components within the grammar itself: core and periphery. Thus the core rules are the deep regularities, the ones governed by parameter settings; the periphery holds the “marked exceptions”, irregular verbs, for example, for which there are no deep regularities. As Culicover & Jackendoff (2005) quote Chomsky: “The research program idealizes the study of the language faculty to the study of the core: a reasonable approach would be to focus attention on the core system, putting aside phenomena that result from historical accident, dialect mixture, personal idiosyncrasies, and the like..” Chomsky and Lasnik (1993), reprinted in Chomsky (1995:20) While Culicover & Jackendoff (2005) allow that such idealization is “reasonable”, crucially, they warn that “as always, an idealization carries with it an implicit promissory note to make good on the phenomena it has omitted.” It has often been found that this “periphery” tends to become a tempting dumping ground for any irregularity that a theory cannot explain. The authors admit that they have found themselves “taking a different track, being attracted over and over again to “peripheral” phenomena.” Culicover & Jackendoff (2005:25–26)

1.5 Lexicon, vocabulary, dictionary

To minimize ambiguity, I use “lexicon” to refer to the word stock of individuals (= their mental lexicon/dictionary); “vocabulary” refers to the word stock of a language (= its lexicon); and “dictionary” refers to the man-made product, the lexicographer’s dictionary. The expression “lexicon”, accordingly, may be used with or without any qualifying phrase; “vocabulary” is usually followed by the relevant language in an of -phrase; and “dictionary”, along with some premodifier specifying the relevant language and/or dictionary type. In the present study, most occurrences of “the dictionary”, even if without any qualifying expression, refer to English, or specifically E ↔H dictionaries. Wherever a statement concerning other languages or any dictionary is made, it is hoped this will be indicated unambiguously. When the expression “the dictionary” is used, mostly any dictionary is meant. Where claims about specific dictionaries are made, these will be indicated. Where “ the English ↔Hungarian dictionary” is used with the definite article, it is to be understood that any such dictionary is meant. Where claims about specific E ↔H dictionaries, or specific E →H or H →E dictionaries are made, these will be specified.

15 Chapter One

1.6 The user–dictionary interface

1.6.1User research (based mainly on Atkins & Rundell 2008)

The tone of Atkins & Rundell’s (2008), discussing the viability and applicability of user research in dictionary design, which is illustrated by the many quotes below, is singularly optimistic. The authors’ enthusiasm is only slightly broken at one point where they admit that “It’s true that some dictionaries have such a wide range of potential users and uses that it may be difficult to identify information specific enough to be useful.” They insist, however, that “...even in such cases, the exercise is still worthwhile.” The authors keep emphasizing, recurrently throughout the whole book, that “The most important single piece of advice we can give to anyone embarking on a dictionary project is: know your user . [The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography] invokes this mantra in every chapter, and we make no apology for this 2. This [...] arises from our conviction that the content and design of every aspect of a dictionary must, centrally, take account of who the users will be and what they will use the dictionary for.” Atkins & Rundell (2008:5) This is easy to agree with. Also, that “The [...] user is shown to play a central role in the planning process, and we illustrate the ways in which editorial decisions are influenced by our understanding of the needs and skills of our dictionary’s typical user. ” Atkins & Rundell (2008:17) “The marketing department specifies the type of dictionary needed, describes the market it will sell to and thus the type of user it is destined for , and paints a broadbrush picture of what its contents should be.” Atkins & Rundell (2008:18) “For the dictionary planners who will work within this budget to create a dictionary for a specific market, the needs of the end-user determine the extent of the book and its content (the number of headwords, the depth of their treatment, the type of material to be included in the front and back matter, etc.).” Atkins & Rundell (2008:18) They also warn that, for each policy decision [...], it is essential to be clear about (a) how much space it requires; (b) how this impacts the system as a whole; (c) whether it is in the best interest of users to devote so much space to it; (d) what has to be jettisoned to make that possible. The best way of tackling these complex and challenging issues is to think first and always of the dictionary user . “If you have a clear idea of who your user is and what they want from their dictionary, you stand a good chance of achieving the right fit between dictionary type and user need. Atkins & Rundell (2008:23) They offer a list of the things that someone who is writing, or planning, a trade dictionary [...], needs to be able to think clearly about.

2 In all frankness, the reader does at times feel that they should.

16 Chapter One

[the first 5 of these concern the dictionary; points 6–8 below concern the user] 6. the users’ language (s): is the dictionary meant for... a. a group of users who all speak the same language b. two specific groups of language-speakers c. learners worldwide of the dictionary’s language 7. the users’ skills : are they... a. linguists and other language professionals b. literate adults c. school students d. young children e. language learners 8. what they use the dictionary for : is it for one or both of the following... a. decoding [...] b. encoding [...] Atkins & Rundell (2008:24)

Their message to the effect of “know your user” is repeated over and over: “There are two ways of finding out about the user: user profiling and user research . The process is never scientific, but the only possible starting point is the targeted user group. You need a clear understanding of who will use the dictionary , what they will use it for, and what kinds of skill they will bring to the task. If you have answers to all these questions, you have a firm basis for making well-informed decisions about both content and presentation. Know your users : that way, the dictionary will give them what they need.” Atkins & Rundell (2008:28) “A user profile seeks to characterize the typical user of the dictionary, and the uses to which the dictionary is likely to be put. [...] To build a user profile, you need to think carefully about who your typical users will be, and what they will be using the dictionary for. [...] “[...] ‘User research’ refers to [..] finding out what people do when they consult their dictionaries, what they like and dislike about them, and what kinds of problem they look to the dictionary to solve. [..] It is useful to divide the field into market research (carried out by publishers) and academic research [...]. “[...] Dictionary publishers regularly carry out (or claim to carry out) market research. This can take many forms, ranging from detailed questionnaires or surveys to informal conversations with teachers, students, and other users. These are usually ‘internal’ operations and results are rarely made public. On the other hand, publishers are alert to the PR benefits of being seen to be responsive to their customers’ needs, so will often publicize the fact that they have carried out market research without being too specific about its methods or results. But there is no doubt that good market research often has direct and visible consequences for editorial policy [...].” Atkins & Rundell (2008:30) “There is a large and growing body of user research by academics and (more rarely) by practising lexicographers, and several books have been devoted to the subject. Academics tend to focus on dictionary use in educational environments. Subjects are sometimes native speakers [...]. More often, they are language-learners of varying degrees of proficiency [...]. Lexicographers, in their research, have tried to discover how actual users use their actual dictionaries in as near natural settings as possible.” Atkins & Rundell (2008:32)

17 Chapter One

“[...] it is impossible to predict all the questions that users will ask of their dictionary, so we need to take a pragmatic view about what we can achieve. A realistic goal is to meet the needs of most users most of the time . And to achieve this, we have to get the clearest possible picture of who these users are and what kinds of question they will ask of their dictionary. Creating a user profile and taking careful note of relevant user research will help you to make well-informed editorial decisions.” Atkins & Rundell (2008:32; italics mine) If user research and market research were as decisive, and the findings from them were as reliable to put into actual practice as it may appear from the multitude of descriptions above, then tagged to all this should come a list of the decisions that are affected by particular user needs, and the way they inform editorial decisions. Instead of a list of particular policies like that, however, we only get these generic pieces of content- and metalanguage-related advice: Content –Which headwords (and meanings) should be included? Other questions in this area: –How many headwords does the dictionary need to contain? –Will users want to look up literary, dated, or obsolete words? –Should dialect words be included? –Should it cover specialist terms, and if so, which domains are most relevant? –For each headword, which information categories are most important? –Do the users (need to) know about how words combine grammatically? –Do they need information about pronunciation or the stress patterns of phrases? –Do they already know how regular verbs inflect, or will they need to be told? –Do they need to know about typical contexts of the headword? Atkins & Rundell (2008:32) Presentation: metalanguage –What linguistic skills can the users be expected to have? (And, following from this:) –Will definitions need to be written in simplified language? –Can IPA be used to show pronunciations? –Are users familiar with terms relating to transitivity, countability, and collocation? –What reference skills can we assume in your users? Here we ask: –Will they understand ‘standard’ abbreviations (such as adj , phr vb , or AmE )? –Can you use ‘codes’ to indicate syntactic behaviour, or should this information be carefully spelled out? Presentation: design and layout –What is the best way to set out the material so that the dictionary is easy to use but still contains enough information? Atkins & Rundell (2008:34)

On that topic, Atkins & Rundell (2008:253) say, for example, that the “ordering [the lexical units] in a sensible and coherent manner is a challenge to dictionary writers, but we have never met any dictionary users (as opposed to metalexicographers and computational linguists) who complained of this aspect of our work.” To which can be added that again, even ad hoc decisions of ordering including, if need be, ones that fly in the face of the general arrangement of senses, may serve the user better than rigid consistency. If Atkins & Rundell (2008) are right about this ignorance of the user, then all the admoni- tions concerning technical detail will always be futile, and editors “simply can’t go wrong”.

18 Chapter One

1.6.1.1 Serving the user with ordering of LUs There may always be a good reason in a bilingual dictionary to arrange the senses according to the translation side: the user’s immediate needs may be served better on this side. This could be either when for whatever reason, cultural, pragmatic, or grammatical, the English word has a “pet” translation in the target language in question, which will not always do, which the learners/users are un- willing to let go of, or outright erroneous. This will be illustrated on four examples, the first two of which are briefly covered in this section, while the latter two – kill and Hungarian rend őr ‘police officer’ – are elaborated on in some detail in 1.6.1.1.1. and 1.6.1.1.2. • The word room is so strongly associated with the ‘area within a building/dwelling’ sense, which is translated as szoba , that it may be a good strategy for the E →H dictionary to give terem rather than szoba as its first equivalent. Terem has a similar sense description as szoba , and the basic difference is in terms of size, but they are not usually interchangeable. This placement then overrides the statistical fact that szoba is commoner. • For the word morning , giving délel őtt rather than reggel as the first equivalent may sensitize the learner to the fact that in English there is no separate word for the “ante meridiem” part of day. While it should be obvious from a particular English text that a later time of day is involved, the word reggel is often erroneously used in translations. This may be coupled with the information in the entry that early morning is not actually kora reggel but reggel , i.e. the early part of the “ante meridiem” period.

1.6.1.1.1 Kill bilingually

It is probably good policy to arrange the entry of kill in such a way as to highlight the fact, put in the simplest way, that kill does not equal murder . Kill – easily one of the most-analyzed English words, a real semanticists’ pet – is often discussed in its link to the issue of the ambiguity (or just vagueness) of the adverb almost (e.g. Kempson 1977) exactly because of a feature of its meaning. The important point bilingually is that the E →H dictionary can do justice to the meaning profile of kill and serve the user at the same time, with preference given to the latter, simply by arranging the equivalents – and the examples, preferably in different grammatical forms – so that the commonest misconceptions about this verb be avoided.

Two devices may be used to that end in the kill entry: (a) the ‘megöl’ equivalent of kill – which is the translation of murder – ought to come as late as possible (b) the passive form of kill should come as early as possible The (slightly edited) entry of kill in AMSZ (2000) illustrates this: kill (1) halált okoz, halálát okozza vkinek, elpusztít, halálos the storm killed three people a viharban hárman meghaltak, a vihar három ember halálát okozta dozens of people were killed (in the crash) (a balesetben) több tucat ember pusztult el / vesztette életét be killed elesik [háborúban] the weather killed the plants az id őjárás elpusztította a növényeket (2) (meg)öl, (meg)gyilkol if looks could kill ha a tekintetével ölni tudott volna... / tudna (3) fájdal- mat okoz my feet/shoes are killing me majd meghalok, úgy fáj (ebben a cip őben) a lábam (4) véget vet, tönkretesz, megszüntet kill the pain megszünteti a fájdalmat […] (5) leszavaz [törvényjavaslatot] (6) agyonüt, üt [szín a másikat] (7) nevettet this guy really kills me meghalok / meg kell halni ett ől a pasastól KIFEJEZÉSEKBEN: kill two birds with one stone két legyet üt egy csapásra kill time (by doing smth) vmivel agyonüti/elüti az id őt be dressed to kill kicsípte magát, ki van öltözve

19 Chapter One

1.6.1.1.2 Hungarian rend őr ‘police officer’

The English police officer may be translated first as rend őr(tiszt) , with tiszt ‘officer’ bracketed, because the average cops in the news may actually be officers in rank, but even if they are, that is irrelevant – and most likely your average rend őr is not an officer. Splitting even more radically may be a better solution, with policeman 1. rend őr 2. rend őrtiszt as the alternative order. (This may be closer to semantic reality, assuming that some such exists.) Splitting police officer for target language purposes obviously does not make the source language lexeme polysemous. It could very well be that police officer is monosemous to most speakers, and means ‘any police person’. As expected, checking police officer in several dictionaries reveals that it is seen as polysemous in some but not in others. The checking of English material for the purposes of the present study has been done in electronic dictionaries rather than printed sources. That is only because of their convenience, and usually it can safely be done since the understanding is that the e-versions contain very much the same information as the print ones, irrespective of whether the former were produced based on the latter (as in the case of all electronic products for learners before the MED 2002), or the electronic version gave rise to the print one.

CED&T (1992) defines police officer thus: ‘a member of a police force, esp. a constable; policeman. Often shortened to (esp. as form of address): officer’. This suggests that the word is monosemous. NSOED (1997) has this among compounds under police : police officer ‘a...... b. a member of a police force’ RHWUD (1999) has this: 1. any policeman or policewoman; patrolman or patrolwoman. 2. a person having officer rank on a police force. This suggests that the word is polysemous between ‘constable’ and ‘officer in rank’. Both CALD (2003 and) CALD (2008) have this: ‘a male or female member of the police force’ Both MED (2002) and MED (2007) offer this: ‘a member of the police. You can also talk about a policeman or a policewoman, but some people prefer to use ‘police officer’, which could be either a man or a woman.’

It is probable that police officer has gained ground owing to its sex neutrality, to replace the non- sex-neutral policeman and policewoman . MED’s explanation actually supports and explicitly teaches this. NSOED (1997) also has another sex-neutral variant, policeperson right after police officer ; this is a rarely used word, not even included in CED&T (1992), RHWUD (1999), and either learner’s dictionary, CALD or MED; this again suggests that police officer is simply another, but much more frequent, sex-neutral ‘policeperson’. The fact that the second member of the compound, officer , may also be used (especially as a form of address) in the ‘constable’ sense, as hinted in CED&T (1992), also suggests this. While justice to these facts can simply be best done in the Hungarian →English part if rend őr is equated with police officer first, and only then with policeman and policewoman (with the appropriate gender information added), this target-language motivated splitting in the E →H part, coupled with the tendency towards non-sexist usage, creates unfortunate complications for the police officer entry in the E →H part. Since rend őrn ő ‘policewoman’ is a legitimate member of the Hungarian lexicon, without the problems attached to policewoman , it should also be given as an equivalent in the police officer entry. The entry of a major bilingual dictionary must now recognize and register

20 Chapter One the fact that the compound either signifies a person of rank or any policeperson (cross-linguistically, this is more important), and also that it either signifies a male or female one. This innocent-looking word then may end up having an expanded entry like this (indication of the irregular plural has been ignored): police officer 1. rend őr 2. rend őrtiszt 3. rend őrn ő 4. n ői rend őrtiszt with tiszt relegated to second place, stressing that ‘policeperson’ is more frequent. Or, if less space is available: police officer 1. rend őr 2. rend őrn ő with tiszt disappearing altogether, as if ‘policeperson’ were the only meaning. Or even: police officer rend őr as if ‘policeperson’ were the only meaning, and sex were not of high relevance. Paradoxically, a shorter and simpler entry is not necessarily inferior; it may prove to be more true to semantic reality. A few English and Hungarian entries from bilingual (and bilingualized: OAMSZNY and PEHLD) are printed below for illustration in alphabetical order (none of them contains policeperson ): English →Hungarian AMSZ (2000): police officer – rend őr(tiszt) AMDSZ (2002): police officer – (köz)rend őr EHCD (1998): police officer – rend őr OAMSZNY (2002): police officer (also officer ) – rend őr(tiszt) ; has no H →E Index (PEHLD (2003): word not in; but see PEHLD H →E Index below) Hungarian →English HECD (1988): rend őr – policeman , (police-)constable GB, police officer , ...... [n ői] policewoman MADSZ (2002): rend őr – policeman (n ői) policewoman , (férfi v. n ői) police-officer MASZ (2000): rend őr police officer ; [férfi:] policeman , [n ő:] policewoman, (police) constable ..... MASZNY (2007): rend őr – police officer ; (férfi) policeman , BrE (police) constable ...... PEHLD (2003): the H →E Index has rend őr – constable; officer; PC; police constable; policeman

The bigger the bilingual dictionary, the more space it will have to provide for all, even rare senses, and compounds or multiword expressions if there are any. A learner’s dictionary may not concern itself with some of these, but must base its decisions in such a way as to explicitly strive to help avoid known learner pitfalls. Even in the biggest H→E dictionary (HECD 1988 in this case), this learner-centredness is present without distorting semantic reality. Thus police officer is (a) the commonest, thus “safest” equivalent, (b) the sex-neutral equivalent, which is partly responsible for its currency, (c) the one whose featuring early on in the entry would also be motivated by the learner’s needs. This points to the requirement that police officer be placed earlier even in larger – practically all – Hungarian rend őr entries. The other side of the coin is the other direction where it must be decided whether rend őr or rend őrtiszt should figure in entries for police officer ; if both, then in what order; whether the bracketing rend őr(tiszt) solution is adequate. These are more complicated issues where size, aim, and user of the dictionary come into play, and there do not seem to be ready answers available for a uniform kind of readership. The rearrangement of entries for different types of readers, on the other hand, is not feasible in the real world of lexicography.

21 Chapter One

1.6.2 Problems with user profiling

One wonders whether Atkins & Rundell’s claim that they have never met a single dictionary user who complained of the sense ordering aspect of their work (Atkins & Rundell 2008:253) shows that they deny the utility of user research and the tailoring of the dictionary to users’ needs. Criticism from metalexicographers and increasingly from computational linguists (who also use dictionaries as corpora) as well as other scholars working in the related domains is highly valued in lexicography partly because all these people including metalexicographers, with practising lexicographers among them, know a lot about users’ needs . Why bother indeed, if the user just never complains of aspects of dictionary work which lexicographers find most taxing, and whose products they value most highly? If the ordering of senses in a dictionary should prove so haphazard, so faulty, so below (obviously: expert ) criticism that all professional critics complain about it but users never notice – can that really be a good dictionary, produced by rigorous application of user profiling? The problem with the many dozen questions which may be asked in user profiles is (i) that they are extremely varied; (ii) that they cut across one another; (iii) that some demand just a yes/no for an answer, while some require a whole list; (iv) that the answers to many logically follow from the answer to another; (v) that a “yes” to one of the questions and a “no” to another cancel each other out. Also, and quite generally: while users’ performance in and after using particular dictionaries can indeed be measured experimentally (and experiments that aim at this are the easiest to administer), a questionnaire may be able to estimate users’ skills, but it will hardly be capable of calibrating their needs. What reference skills, one wonders, can be expected of a prospective user who wants a dictionary for crossword puzzles? Why should questionnaires be devised to ascertain, possibly for each and every dictionary ever planned, whether users are “familiar with terms relating to transitivity, countability, and collocation” – when it is common knowledge that they are not (a fact that Atkins & Rundell 2008 also do not fail to stress)? What kind of user cannot be expected, one wonders, to learn and remember abbreviations such as adj , phr vb , or AmE ? User research indicates that the “List of abbreviations” is just as ignored a part of the dictionary as the “How to use” section; that users – all users – feel ill at ease with even this much “technicality”, abbreviation, symbols etc. These have been just a few examples of how the “Know your user” principle is easier said than translated into practice. What is the point, after all, in asking this question: “What is the best way to set out the material so that the dictionary is easy to use but still contains enough information?” This is no different from asking, for the purposes of a user profile, how to make a good dictionary . And most importantly: once we have the answers to most of these question (provided this is possible, and all caveats aside), what next?

1.6.3 Word lists: non-homographic, homographic, partially homographic

Dealing with decisions concerning the planning of the macrostructure, Atkins & Rundell (2008) distinguish three types of word list for dictionaries: (a) non-homographic, where each headword is a unique orthographic form, and all lexical units with the same form are considered as constituents of a unique polysemous headword; (b) totally homographic, where each headword is a unique unity of form and content, and a single orthographic form may be shared by many headwords, none of which is polysemous; and (c) partially homographic (used in standard trade dictionaries), where a single form may be shared by several headwords, each of which may itself be polysemous.

To illustrate the three types of arrangement, the orthographic form can will be used. Two simplifications have to be allowed for here.

22 Chapter One

First: it must be assumed that the abbreviations can. for canon and canto as well as the abbreviations Can. for Canada and Canadian are orthographically different , and do not belong here. Where they have their ideal position in relation to their non-capitalized and non-abbreviated counterparts is contestable. Second: multiword expressions such as carry the can , which may be listed in the can entry (and – irrelevantly for now – possibly under carry as well) but whose relation to the numbered senses is not clear and thus present a problem in whichever of the three word list arrangements, have just been appended and marked with italics at the end, in the case of all three types.

(a) non-homographic headword list can 1 ability (aux) 7 prison (n) 2 buttocks (n) 8 put in prison (v) 3 container (n) 9 toilet (n) 4 dismiss from a job (v) 5 permission (aux) can of worms (n); in the can (n); carry the 6 preserve in a can (v) can (v)

In this arrangement, multiword expressions are the least problematic.

In the actual dictionary, a decision would have to be taken concerning the ordering of the senses within the single can entry. That, however, is already a microstructural decision, one which is the most difficult in the case of this non-homographic headword arrangement. Nothing in effect being decided at the macrostructural level, all decisions have simply been put off until the microstructure.

(b) totally homographic headword list can buttocks (n) can put in prison (v) can container (n) can ability (aux) can prison (n) can permission (aux) can toilet (n) can dismiss from a job (v) can of worms (n); in the can (n); carry the can preserve in a can (v) can (v)

In this arrangement, multiword expressions are less problematic.

Here, the senses are followed by a PoS label and the number which they were assigned in the non- homographic alphabetical list above. Under this arrangement, the actual dictionary’s ordering of the headwords is still a macrostructural decision: a decision must be taken anyway concerning the ordering of the separate can entries. Exactly the same issue, when given different treatments, may surface as a matter of either microstructural or microstructural policy.

23 Chapter One

Depending on the basic classifying principle (the “first cut”), there are two options:

(c1) With the first cut by meaning: can can –ability (aux) –dismiss from a job (v) –permission (aux) can can –prison (n) –buttocks (n) –put in prison can can –container (n) –toilet (n) –preserve in a can (v) can of worms (n); in the can (n); carry the can (v) The multiword expressions are problematic in this arrangement too.

(c2) With the first cut is by word class: can 1 aux –ability (aux) can 3 –permission (aux) –container (n) –buttocks (n) can 2 –prison (n) –dismiss from a job (v) –toilet (n) –preserve in a can (v) can of worms (n); in the can (n); carry the –put in prison can (v)

The multiword expressions are also problematic in this arrangement.

An important and general principle which Atkins stresses and cannot be emphasized enough: if you do not want to stretch the capabilities of the theory, then any lexicographic decision that puts the least demands on a theory is a good decision, and of any two solutions, the one should be chosen that burdens the theory less. This is a very valid general observation. Atkins & Rundell (2008) warn that when making decisions concerning headword lists and entry structure, “which affect the whole impact and appearance of the dictionary, it’s as well to do a bit of market research first, to see what your probable readers prefer” (Atkins & Rundell 2008:249). To the best of my knowledge, however, there exists no market research project or study which has yielded a concrete result with regard to a concrete policy that has been followed in the design of a dictionary, then subsequently tried with a user group doing a concrete task, such that the whole process was finally repeated with the same dictionary but with another solution for the same problem carried through and tried with some other group doing the same task. In short, even in a market so huge as that of English dictionaries, these kinds of fine-grained studies simply do not exist. Need- less to say that English ↔Hungarian dictionary-making in Hungary is not better off. Also, there is no such thing as a user target group that arrangement (a) or (b) or (c) suits better than the any other arrangement.

24 Chapter One

1.6.4 “Encyclopaedic” headwords

One question to do with headword inclusion in the broadest sense is how much encyclopaedic, or semi -encyclopaedic, or quasi -encyclopaedic information will be offered, and how much of this will be entered in the body of the dictionary rather than the back matter. While the first decision may depend on user group, the latter is completely independent of it. The encyclopaedic items in the body of the dictionary (as opposed to e.g. the back matter) are mainly words, sometimes phrases. The two marginal expression types, “sentence words” and encyclopaedic items, differ in an important aspect: the former are typically spoken. This may be accompanied by a lack of a standardized written form; this makes them marginal in dictionaries, which have a bias towards the written language (in addition to the practical difficulty of spelling them) resulting in their total omission. Encyclopaedic items – if this distinction is worth making here at all – are more characteristic of the written medium. Among the (apparently) encyclopaedic headwords in the main A–Z body of general dictionaries may be found, for example, names that feature in proverbs or idioms. In bilingual dictionaries geographical names are worth entering if they diverge in the two languages and are therefore unpredictable in production: sometimes because the original name that is used in English, there being no specific one, e.g. Hungarian Lipcse is Leipzig ; or the simpler case of Hungarian Svájc , which is Switzerland ). Sometimes a term may not even be transparent passively: the Hungarian Genfi tó is Lake Constance , and while reading an English text the Hungarian learner has no clue. This is usually a happy hunting grounds for translation howlers.

1.6.5 Proper names of various types

Nicknames for geographical entities belong here: the information that Show Me State stands for Missouri is unlikely to be found in a Hungarian-language encyclopaedia, and when Hungarian users, who typically have no English encyclopaedias at hand, need to make sense of the English phrase, the inclusion of such a list seems necessary. Worse than that, no English encyclopaedia is likely to offer these unofficial nicknames as headwords, since these are linguistic, not encyclopaedic facts.

25 Chapter One

List No1

English nicknames of US states. Source: AMSZ (2000).

Aloha State Hawaii Badger State Wisconsin Bay State Massachusetts Beaver State Oregon Beehive State Utah Bluegrass State Kentucky Boomer State Oklahoma Bowie State Arkansas Buckeye State Ohio Centennial State Colorado Constitution State Connecticut Cornhusker State Nebraska** Cotton State Alabama Coyote State Dél-Dakota Diamond State Delaware** Empire State New York Állam* Empire State of the South Georgia Equality State Wyoming Evergreen State Washington First State Delaware** Flickertail State South Dakota Freestone State Connecticut** Granite State New Hampshire Green Mountain State Vermont Hawkeye State Iowa Hoosier State Indiana Jayhawker State Kansas Keystone State Pennsylvania Land of Enchantment New Mexico*** Land of Opportunity Arkansas*** Little Rhody Rhode Island*** Lone Star State Texas Mountain State Montana Old Dominion Virginia*** Old Line State Maryland Palmetto State South Carolina Panhandle State West Virginia Pelican State Louisiana Peninsular State Florida Pine Tree State Maine Prairie State Illinois Show Me State Missouri Silver State Nevada Sioux State North Dakota Sooner State Oklahoma Sunflower State Kansas Sunset State Oregon** Sunshine State Florida** Tar Heel State North Carolina Treasure State Montana** Tree Planters State Nebraska** Volunteer State Tennessee Webfoot State Oregon** Wolverine State Michigan

26 Chapter One

* In Hungarian, Állam ‘state’ must be added to distinguish it from the city (which is not usually called New York City , just New York .) ** The state has two nicknames. *** State does not feature in the nickname, which makes it even more difficult to guess that a state in the USA is involved here.

There are many subtypes of the names that may warrant inclusion in the H →E dictionary, and these may necessitate different types of treatment. Three examples may be singled out: • of Kafkaesque , Hemingwayesque and Dickensian , probably just the first is general enough to make it dictionary-worthy, and a Hungarian translation kafkai will be adequate, but it is wise to include it if only because of the rare affix. • Adonisz is rightly entered in HECD (1998), but with just the equivalent Adonis ; still, because this Hungarian word is simply used as a common noun, with an indefinite article (someone may be nem egy adonisz ‘not an Adonis’), the entry should indeed contain more. CED&T (1992) also suggests this: Adonis 1. Greek myth. […] 2. a handsome young man, while CALD (2008) defines Adonis as ‘a very beautiful or sexually attractive young man’, and exemplifies it with She walked in on the arm of some blond Adonis . • Roland and Oliver as names may be included (under both) because of the expression a Roland for an Oliver ‘an effective retort or retaliation’ (CED&T 1992). The expression, however, may seem little used and thus not really worth entering until it is found that e.g. RHWUD (1999) has the definition ‘retaliation or a retort equal to its provocation'; a blow for a blow’ for it, and NSOED (1997) also has the following: ‘an effective retort; an effective retaliatory blow; a quid pro quo’. It seems a good decision then that EHCD (1998) enters a Roland for an Oliver with the translation szemet szemért, kölcsönkenyér visszajár while give sy a Roland for an Oliver is translated as nem marad adósa (vknek) . It is difficult to guess what percentage of names are really usefully entered and will be looked up in a bilingual dictionary. The EHCD (1998), for example, returns 1,184 hits for a “Hungarian headword: Proper noun” search: these proper names are extremely varied. Of them, men’s and women’s names and geographical names with no additional information predominate, and it is difficult to find among these the ones that do contain something special beyond the translation of a name. The correspondences between Hungarian and international names are often impossible to give and sometimes misleading, but can always be argued to be culturally relevant: it may be of real cultural interest that the Hungarian for Adrian or Hadrian is Adorján . It could be objected that the right place for this kind of information is not the bilingual dictionary – but if not that, then what is? Most of these entries are like that of Zsuzsa → Susan(na), Susannah , Zsuzsi → Susie, Sue, Suke, Suk(e)y . A typically superfluous (because encyclopaedic) one is Zsolnay → Zsolnay porcelán . Items like Zsolna , that is, geographical names for one-time historical Hungarian cities (regions, riv- ers, etc.) used in Hungarian, for which the English equivalent should (also) be used, are often very useful in H →E translation: Zsolna → Žilina, town in Slovakia . Here, the added encyclopaedic information should not be included. Slightly different is the situation with often used Hungarian geographical terms like Délvidék , Felvidék , Vajdaság and the like, where equivalents such as Up- per/North(ern) Hungary are not adequate, because here, the encyclopaedic information had better be built into the translation itself: the one-time North of Hungar y [now in Slovakia]; or even: South Slovakia There are also items whose inclusion (in a dictionary this size) may be justified exactly by their encyclopaedic nature: Oliverian → Cromwell-párti : this may (arguably not very frequently) occur in English texts. Chapter One

On the other hand, if geographical names like Zürichi-tó → Lake Zurich and Adirondack-hegység → the Adirondack Mountains are included, then it is indeed impossible to say what else, and how many such items, rightly belong here. The majority of what may be useful as Hungarian (pseudo) proper name entries are not found in any Hungarian →English dictionary: Pató Pál , e.g. probably to be spelt with two lower-case Ps, has a close equivalent in the English noun do-nothinger ; EHCD (1998) actually contains the related do- nothingism . Mufwene (1988) maintains that: “proper names are linguistic signs and, just like others denoting lexical units, they are also carriers of some formal linguistic restrictions […]. They also have some idiosyncrasies regarding spelling and pronunciation, the kind of information which, like the preceding, is expected to be found in the dictionary rather than an encyclopaedia. Thus their inclusion in an unabridged dictionary is a must [...]. While it is hard to agree with the view that proper names are linguistic signs just like other lexical units, they certainly do have linguistically relevant features that warrant inclusion in dictionaries. Whether proper nouns have meaning or just reference may be a debated issue, but decisions concerning it are irrelevant for lexicography. “Idiosyncrasies regarding spelling and pronunciation”, by contrast, which are undeniable and uncontroversial – so much so that they fall outside the scope of linguistic disputes – indeed favour their inclusion. Since names may behave strikingly differently in different languages, many of the idiosyncrasies in question are displayed in inter-lingual relations, and thus a must indeed for bilingual dictionaries. In a typical case, adjectives need to be included: the process of Lebanonization or Balkanization may make the inclusion of these words necessary, even if the nouns are probably not listed in (the body) of the dictionary. Sisyphean is best included with the translation sziszifuszi, and so does sziszifuszi (with no obvious translation equivalent); the Hungarian word is actually more important because it is commoner. The word Sisyphean is not simply the equivalent of sziszifuszi in the phrase sziszifuszi munka : the Hun- garian sziszifuszi means just ‘very difficult’. That is the commoner of its meanings: it means different things to different people, depending on whether their classical education keeps the original ‘actually/seemingly endless and futile ’ sense. The name Tinseltown is not likely to be included in encyclopaedias, which makes it similar to the nicknames for the US states. One Hungarian equivalent could easily be Holivúd , in this rather non- standard spelling. This spelling is not unlike a “pseudo-eye-dialect spelling”, i.e. phonetic respelling of words, “not in order to show a mispronunciation (e.g. Eye-talian ), but merely to burlesque the words or their speaker” (Bolinger (1946: 337). Since / »hçlivu˘d/ is roughly the standard Hungarian pronunciation of Hollywood , the spelling holivúd is eye dialect, a “visual morpheme” according to (Bolinger (1946), which implies some kind of irony. Note that Bolinger’s original examples: licker , vittles , sassiety etc. suggest speaker ignorance rather than irony. Also, because the butt of the irony is not the speaker but the notion itself, the non-standard spelling suggests pejoration. A not too large group of such “pseudo-proper” nouns is that of ethnic slurs of one type: pejorative names for certain groups of people, including nationalities and races. Examples include jim crow or (South African) Jim Fish for a black person; Jerry for a German; Aunt Jemima / Aunt Jane / Aunt Mary / Aunt Sally / Aunt Thomasina (female counterpart of Uncle Tom ) ; Mack / Mick / Mickey / Mickey Finn / Paddy for an Irish person; Charlie for Vietnamese (Viet Cong) or blacks. Only one kind of name is meant here, which looks like a normal proper name for a person (excludes the likes of Geordie , Taffy or Yid on the one hand, and coon , towelhead or jungle bunny on the other – some of which may well be worth registering even in dictionaries larger than just the biggest). As in most cases of culturally loaded disparaging lexicon, there is simply no corresponding

28 Chapter One term in another language: thus, while Kike and Yid will be translatable to Hungarian, there exists no such slur, e.g. for Irishmen. Special “names” are (what are actually marked as) trademarks, and also nouns of intermediate status between trademarks and common nouns. Most English native speaker as well as learner’s dictionaries have a warning of the trademark status of certain items, and a legal disclaimer in case they omit one such. Such examples include the material Hungarocell (or hungarocell ) is polystyrene (foam ) or Styro- foam . (Both these spellings are featured, by mistake, in AMSZ 2000, while MASZ 2000 only has the capitalized variant. As this example shows, not only does the editor walk on thin ice because of the legal complications, but often also because of the geographical variation: the Hungarian word xerox 1. [gép:] Xerox machine , (photo-) copier 2. [másolat:] Xerox copy, (photo)copy is unproblematic. Kleenex , which for some reason is not entered in CALD (2008), is marked trademark and defined in MED (2008) as ‘a small paper handkerchief’ (with no provenance 3 given). If someone asks for a Kleenex , they should probably be given any papírzsebkend ő ‘tissue’ not just this brand. Mean- while, Hungarian cellux (for which there is no natural non-trademark) is sellotape , scotch tape or sticky tape , and the choice will be dialectally determined: sellotape and sticky tape are (supposed to be) British, while scotch tape , US English.

1.6.6 Productivity and user profiling

Atkins & Rundell (2008) group affixes into bound (e.g. im- , -ment ) and productive affixes, (e.g. ex- ; -gate) . Productive affixes are constantly used to create new word forms, so they must be explained in a native speaker dictionary. Productive prefixes (un- , de- , anti- ) usually appear as headwords, so it’s important to recognize them in the corpus. There are fewer productive suffixes , and Atkins & Rundell (2008:165–166) claim that it’s difficult to believe that users, having failed to find Zippergate or Italianness , would look up -gate or -ness . For that reason, some dictionaries decide to omit productive suffixes from the headword list. This wording raises a methodologically relevant point. The authors obviously cannot, as no-one possibly can, bring empirical support for claims regarding probable or expected user behaviour, such as “it’s difficult to believe that users, having failed to find word X, would (not) look up X”. Empirical support, if at all, comes through market research or academic research. Yet there hardly could exist a body of empirical research into dictionary use vast enough to yield answers to all aspects of user strategy in all bilingual pairs for all users and for all dictionary types – to name just the most important parameters. There exists a huge body of published research on dictionary use by users of all kinds of dictionaries worldwide. Atkins & Rundell (2008) – which mentions Miller & Gildea (1985) on American pupils understanding of definitions; McCreary (2002) and McCreary and Amacker (2006) on college students’ use of dictionaries; Bogaards (1992, 1998a) on language learners of varying degrees of proficiency – must be the state of the art. Lexicographers, as pointed out by Atkins & Rundell (2008:32), have tried to discover how actual users use their actual dictionaries in as near natural settings as possible. Hungary seems to be at a disadvantage. Márkus & Szöll ősy (2006) a Hungarian study, which was reported in 2006 but was conducted earlier, in spring 2004, lists several European studies which the authors say could have been the predecessors, but did not inspire them simply because they only came across them when their research was well under way. The 2004 project, the only one of its kind (and certainly the only

3 The manufacturer is the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, a USA firm; the object is apparently so international that the word is not an Americanism.

29 Chapter One such for English) appears to be the state-of-the-art publication in Hungary (at least for 2006). It is rather limited in quantity terms; it cannot build on anything domestic remotely similar in its objectives, let alone magnitude; it only covers students at diverse secondary schools but no adult learners. This indicates that in Hungary at the moment, no publisher could possibly base their strategies – their market decisions, much less lexicographic principles – on reliable comprehensive research. The market for E ↔H dictionaries in Hungary is so narrow that the average bilingual dictionary will always be practically for all learners/users, and for all tasks. More precisely: for the entire range of users, literate (young) adults, beginner-to-advanced, with an average, i.e. minimum school-acquired grammatical knowledge, using it for encoding and decoding. Learner’s dictionaries and bilingualized works may have added to the variety, but Hungarian →English dictionary publishing in Hun- gary has remained – and considering the market, will probably remain – basically monolithic.

30 Chapter Two: What goes into the dictionary

2.1 Hedgehog vs. fox

2.1.1 Langue linguistics vs. parole linguistics

The old Greek saying about the hedgehog and the fox (Berlin 1953; quoted in Widdowson 2007) tells us that “the hedgehog knows one big thing, while the fox knows many things”. The duality concerns the difference between the intellectual and the artistic personality. As argued in Widdow- son (2007:412), Chomsky, with his quest for a universal organizing principle, is the hedgehog of linguistics par excellence . He knows one big thing. The foxes, on the other hand “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory... their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of ex- periences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or uncon- sciously seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.” (Berlin 1953:7–8). Widdowson likens the second approach to Firth’s (criticizing him, incidentally, for aspiring to be a hedgehog, for not being content to focus on things “for what they are in themselves”, for wanting to fit them into “a unitary inner vision”. Both Chomsky and Firth published a seminal book in 1957, and it was the former, which advocated radical change, and not the latter 4 that was to have an enormous influence on linguistics for the next half a century: thus 1957 (as Widdowson argues) marks the beginning of the confrontation of opposing approaches to the study of language. The present study, then, is guided by the notion that lexicography is a happy hunting ground of, foxes, not hedgehogs; that within this “hedgehogs–foxes” duality, lexicography is closer to being the artistic than the intellectual pursuit; that because they are so radically different, little or next to nothing can be hoped to come from the former that may genuinely inform the latter. Worse: because lexicography is constrained by such starkly extra-linguistic considerations as the requirements – less mildly put: the dictates – of the market, it cannot be expected to attain even as much as independent art. It is thus popular art at best – and if it comes up to expectations, then paradoxically, this is not a small thing to say.

The present study takes a hedgehog’s eye view of lexical and/or semantic, some grammatical, and lexicographic phenomena, which, from a modest vista, seem inseparable . To be sure, the hedgehog’s position commands a low horizon, but it hopefully notices the detail.

4 Firth’s book “is a collection of thematically diverse papers [...] but with no explicit coherent connection between them at all. It is indeed a motley collection.” (Widdowson 2007) Chapter Two

2.2 Dichotomies and continua

The present study, looking into matters of interest to the fox , is also concerned with dichotomies and clines. At the fox’s level, phenomena are not huge, discrete entities but objects on continua melting into one another. Dichotomous phenomena vs. clines – gradiences, continua – will be investigated, and see how they are manifested in lexicography. Many decisions both in the design and evaluation of dictionaries centre around some of these dichotomies. Applied linguistic practice, with which lexicography may be classified, may either lend support to or question much of linguistic thinking in such terms. Most of these dichotomies, although their status as seen from the top – by the fox – may well be un- challenged, turn out to be better analyzed as continua, and work with them is greatly facilitated if such a stance is taken. For the lexicologist and the lexicographer there are few either–or situations in the empirical realm. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber & al. 2000) belongs to the stream of grammars (most of which, and mostly, are cognitively-based) that make it an underlying principle to operate with heterogeneous categories. Their basic argumentation is essentially this: if real world categories are not (or not exclusively) of discrete organization, then there is no reason for linguistic entities, including word classes, to be otherwise. There must, then, exist (i) more and less (proto)typical exemplars of a class; also, (ii) there must be unclear (“fuzzy”) borderlines between the features of one class and another; (iii) there must be multiple class memberships. We must, then, be “prepared to look for similarities in terms of more-or-less rather than either-or” (Biber & al. 2000:60). The present study embraces the notion that categories are fuzzy rather than discreet, and that there are prototypical and non-prototypical instances of linguistic entities and phenomena. Lexicography, by contrast, must present crisp categories; moreover, if it is to be effective, it has to work into its products an added level of simplification. The following dualities will be cropping up in the present study, more or less regularly; some of them will only be touched upon: 1 Grammar vs. dictionary & grammar vs. lexicon, as compartments of language 2 Words vs. rules as compartments of language 3 Langue linguistics vs. parole linguistics or E(xternal) Linguistics vs. I(nternal) Linguistics, as approaches to language 4 Rationalism vs. empiricism, as approaches (to language) 5 Descriptivism vs. prescriptivism, as approaches to language 6 Idiomatic vs. non-idiomatic use of language/expressions 7 Written vs. spoken, as medium of language

8 Free vs. bound forms 9 Thematic vs. functional, as syntactic categories 10 Open vs. closed classes 11 Productive vs. unproductive, as linguistic processes 12 Transparency vs. opacity of meaning 13 Word vs. affix, as grammatical units

14 Coverage vs. accessibility, as two aims of a dictionary 15 Decoding vs. encoding, as types of dictionary 16 Portrait dictionary vs. instrument dictionary, as lexicographic types

1—7 are the most general dichotomies, 8—13 represent more traditional grammatical dualities, while 14—16 are specifically dictionary-related ones.

32 Chapter Two

2.2.1 Rationalism vs. empiricism

Although more a practical introduction than a survey of theoretical issues, Atkins & Rundell do not fail to point to the fact that in the rift, if there is one indeed, between rationalism and empiricism, “lexicographers (and corpus linguists generally) are empiricists.” (Atkins & Rundell 2008:49). This is an implicit wording of the claim that dictionaries do not model the mental lexicon. There are two reasons why I do not agree with the authors that “What we are interested in is describing ‘performance’ (what writers and speakers do when they communicate). We do this by observing language in use and – on the basis of this – attempting to make useful generalizations that will account for phenomena in the language which appear to be recurrent.” (Atkins & Rundell 2008:49) For one thing, the aim of lexicography is definitely not the making of “useful generalizations that will account for phenomena in the language”. It is not the case that lexicography makes generalizations – neither is it supposed to do so. Dictionaries do not “describe performance” either, any more than photographs describe their objects: a photo may depict and represent , but for description , more is needed, and dictionaries do not typically provide that. It is also not easy to decipher who may be meant by the “we” of the claim “what we are interested in is describing performance)”: after all, the lexicographer may observe (and this is a truism), but not describe or generalize. Also, although the dividing lines are undoubtedly there, lexicography cannot be neatly categorized as either empiricist or rationalist. If having performance as its object makes lexicography empirical, then it is empirical; after all, it represents performance rather than competence. “Another major tradition in linguistics is represented by the rationalists, whose goal is to describe linguistic ‘competence’: the internalized, but subconscious, knowledge [...] of the rules underlying the production and understanding of our mother tongue. This tradition is associated most obviously with Noam Chomsky. For linguists working in this paradigm, ‘data’ derives from introspection rather than observation.” (Atkins & Rundell 2008:49) This reliance on introspection and suspicion of field work has frequently come under criticism, but few have been as heavily documented and well argued as Wasow & Arnold (2005), who succinctly summarize their point saying that “Disciplines differ considerably in the relative emphasis they place on data collection versus theory construction. In physics, there is a clear division of labor between ex- perimentalists and theorists. Linguistics, too, has subﬁelds (including psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics) in which theories tend to be data-driven and others (notably generative grammar) that focus almost exclusively on the formulation of elegant theories, with little attention devoted to careful data collection. [...] The theories are consequently of questionable relevance to the facts of language. (Wasow & Arnold 2005:1495). It is those “facts of language” that lexicography cannot lose sight of. The mainstream generativists’ suspicion of corpora, data-driven theory and “authentic text” is, however, a fact: “Until the 1950s, there was a thriving empiricist tradition in American linguistics, but ‘in a series of influential publications [Chomsky] changed the direction of linguistics away from empiricism and towards rationalism in a remarkably short time’ (McEnery and Wilson 2001:5). It is easy to caricature this major division, and there are lively debates (for example the CORPRA discussion list) in which Chomskyites are demon-

33 Chapter Two

ized as ‘the enemy’ of corpus-based approaches. As always, the truth is a little more nuanced than this neat, binary characterization implies. Nevertheless, Chomsky is on record as being sceptical about the value of corpora, and a recent interview shows that his stance has not shifted. He says: “Corpus linguistics doesn’t mean anything. It’s like saying suppose a physicist decides… that instead of relying on experiments, what they’re going to do is take videotapes of things happening in the world and they’ll collect huge videotapes of everything that’s happening and from that maybe they’ll come up with some generalizations or insights.” (p 97 in Andor, Jozsef (2004) ‘The Master and his Performance: An Interview with Noam Chomsky’, in Intercultural Pragmatics 1–1:93–111.” Atkins & Rundell (2008:49) Stubbs (2002) claims that it is surprising how many approaches to language have dismissed the idea of observing it in its quantitative aspect:. “as if chemists knew about the different structure of iron and gold but had no idea that iron is pretty common and gold is very rare; or as if geographers knew how to compare countries in all kinds of ways but had never noticed that Canada is bigger than Luxembourg” (Stubbs 2002:221, quoting Kennedy 1992: 339, 341). This is indeed no less weird than Chomsky’s vision of physicists “taking videotapes of things happening in the world”. If both positions are as absurd as this, then probably some golden mean is to be preferred. It is certainly not for this paper to contribute to an assessment of how pertinent the comparison between the linguist as such and the physicist as such is; incidentally, both physicists and linguists come in many various persuasions. But if a parallel is indeed to be drawn, and it is between the corpus linguist, or lexicographer, on the one hand and some other profession on the other, then it should be the photographer, or the cameraman, whose job it is not to get at “generalizations or insights” but to record, as faithfully as possible the “things happening in the world”. One thing is certain: lexicography does exactly that, and it cannot be blamed for it. Rather than rely on experimentation, it collects “huge videotapes of everything that’s happening”, and it does not even aim at “generalizations or insights”. “With Chomsky’s star in the ascendant, early corpus linguists like the team responsible for the Brown Corpus (…) were working very much against the grain of the pre- vailing orthodoxy. But now that technology can provide us with very large bodies of linguistic data, the empiricist tradition has moved closer to the mainstream.” (Atkins & Rundell 2008:49) It is obvious why the foxes , the “data collectors” should applaud such a surge of data. What is not clear, however, why the hedgehogs , “generalizers”, i.e. mainstream generative school should welcome corpus linguistics just because it has ever more data. If data are bad things, then lots of it are presumably very bad. Whether lexicography is empirical or rationalist, in the final analysis, is probably a misguided question because lexicography, at best applied linguistics, cannot be either. Atkins & Rundell (2008), as we have seen, base their argumentation on the following: linguistics is either empirical or rationalist; corpus linguistics is (a branch of) linguistics; lexicography is (part of) linguistics; lexicography shows multiple overlaps with corpus linguistics; consequently, “Lexicographers (and corpus linguists generally) are empiricists”. The question of whether lexicography is empiricist or rationalist is probably similar to asking, which of the two traditions the writing of medical books belongs to. It belongs to neither: a lexicographer asking that question is easily in error concerning the identity of the profession. While certain linguistic insights may be unhelpful for lexicography, many lessons not of “theoretical” but of corpus linguistics are readily utilizable, if the willingness and resources are there. Stubbs (2002:16) tells us, for example, that the occurrence of the days of the week greatly differ in corpora.

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In a corpus of 150 mn which he has investigated, they differ so considerably that Sunday appears 17,350 times, Saturday 14,600, Friday 1,065, Monday 9,500, Wednesday 8,150, Thursday 6,900 and Tuesday just 6,750 times. Now, in the design of examples and elsewhere, this may be recognized. The fact itself will be recognized anyway, if only because of their collocations: Friday night and Saturday night , and Sunday afternoon and Monday morning are typical and thus “useful” collocations, whereas, say Saturday morning or Tuesday night are not. Any linguist hostile to corpus data could, of course, claim that this juggling with numbers game is exactly what makes corpus linguistics outright harmful: it distorts the “langue”, sacrificing it on the altar of “parole”. Should such a choice indeed have to be made, lexicography clearly depends on “parole”, not “langue” linguistics, or E-linguistics and not I-linguistics. This is a good illustration, however, of how the concerns of the generative and the corpus approaches – to which broad-brush concepts we may refer by using, with gross simplification, “langue linguistics” vs. “parole linguistics” – differ. It must be added that both may need insights from the other.

2.2.2 E-language vs. I-language

Chomsky either plays down what many see as a growing interest in E-language – sometimes all up to the point of an outright denial of E-language ever having existed, as in Andor (2004:93) – or apparently sees it as a return, from the “inner mechanisms that enter into thought and action”, to the “study of behaviour and its products (such as texts)”, as in Chomsky (2000:5). Whatever changes may have happened to his thought (though not necessarily to syntactic theorizing as a whole) over the past half century – kernels vs. transforms, transformations themselves appeared and disappeared; deep vs. surface structure came and went; constructions as such, rules, X bar theory, phrase structure as such came and went, words as such came to be seen as epiphenomena, just to mention a few shifts – his conviction has remained that E-language, provided that it exists, is not a worthy object of study: “the concepts I-language and E-language are not parallel. I-language means something. […] When I introduced the term E-language, it was without any definition; just that any concept of language other than I-language we’ll call E-language, because it involves something external to the person” (Andor 2004:93–4). Once E-language does not exist, E-language linguistics might as well be equated with “performance linguistics”, because whatever grounds one may have to deny the existence of E-language, the existence of performance, i.e. language being used to certain (social) purposes cannot be denied – and this is the way the term is used in this paper. It cannot be decided generally or in a vacuum – as has been pointed out before – whether lexicography belongs to either of the empiricist or the rationalist tradition. While it has been long labelled as empiricist, one always suspects that “empiricist” as a modifier often really hides “descriptivist” (as opposed to prescriptivist). Thus, there seems to be a merging of two dichotomies into one another. McGee (1960), for instance, suggests that the following amalgamation might be taking place: “It is true that dictionary definitions are empirical reports of linguistic usage: the lexicographer is an empirical scientist, whose business is the recording of antecedent facts; and if he glosses ‘bachelor’ as ‘unmarried man’ it is because of his belief that there is a relation of synonymy between those forms, implicit in general or preferred usage prior to his own work”. McGee (1960:16), quoting Quine (1953). Ten Hacken (2009:410) quotes Sterkenburg (2003:8) who makes the claim that the dictionary “serves as a guardian of the purity of the language, of language standards and of moral and ideological values because it makes choices, for instance on the words that are to be described”

35 Chapter Two and while such guardianship may indeed be the sometimes deliberate purpose, sometimes just the unwanted fallout of the lexicographer’s pursuits, two things should be borne in mind here. The first is the aphorism widely known beyond linguistic circuits 5 and arguably not (much) less relevant for other languages: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, Eng- lish has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” The second, that for much of lexicography, upholding the linguistic standards of language L for the benefit of the community of speakers of language L makes little sense, if at all. In the case of learner’s dictionaries, any prescriptivism (not necessarily even so branded) is inevitable and neutral, and it is arguably exactly why the user, who is not sufficiently competent in language L, consults the dictionary. The same may be said about bilingual dictionaries in most of their functions. It is only native speaker dictionaries that can be exploited for the purpose of “upholding the standards”. It seems that the prescriptive bias, in English-language works at least, is carried and fostered by some kind of inertia that may run counter the compilers’ intentions, or at least motivated by market considerations, manifest in the readers’ perceived insistence on normativeness. If a native speaker feels that they need to consult a dictionary – the usage “ the dictionary” is relevant here – it is invariably because they judge its competence as being above their own, whether in the domain of spelling, grammar, meaning, usage – any matter linguistic. In their discussion of what they claim is an undoubted chronological progression from prescriptivism towards descriptivism, of Atkins & Rundell (2008:432) state that “In the earliest English dictionaries […] deﬁning styles had not yet been standardized and were quite heterogeneous. […]. In this early period, dictionaries made little claim to ‘authority’, and, for all the ambition that motivated his original Plan of a Diction- ary (1747), Johnson ended up with a realistic appreciation of the limits of lexicography, and he saw his task as a practical one.” Later on, dictionaries “aimed […] to cover the whole of the lexicon, not just a subset, and (following Trench’s characterization of the lexicographer as ‘an historian, not a critic’ […], lexicographers increasingly saw themselves as descriptive linguists, rather than prescriptive ‘authorities’. This didn’t stop dictionary users ascribing ‘authority’ to their dictionaries, however, nor dictionary publishers from claiming it.

2.2.2.1 Portrait dictionaries vs. instrument dictionaries The other problem with a blanket characterization of lexicography as empiricist or rationalist is that dictionaries are varied. One obvious example, which also ties in with another dichotomy, “portrait dictionary” vs. “instrument dictionary”, is that while a large monolingual, “academic” work that sets out to catalogue a language, i.e. be a “portrait”, is empirical in that it records “antecedent facts”. Bilingual works as such have no definitions that could be “empirical reports of linguistic usage” of any language. They invariably are “instrument dictionaries”, and in that capacity always serve as more than just recorders of facts. Their authors obviously observe, but they do not engage in the description of any language. Because, however, they establish, and present the user with (illusory, or outright false) translation “equivalents” between (tens of) thousands of lexical items for given pairs of languages, they engage in more than description . The establishment of equivalences is surely not an empirical concern: none of those are to be observed “out there”. As early as 1983, Pawley & Syder (1983) talk about evidence to the effect that “[...] syntax is not primary/autonomous; [...] the difference between native and learned commands of English is not as

5 Usually attributed to a certain James D. Nicoll; cf., for example, Kemmer (2002).

36 Chapter Two fundamental as assumed” and that native speakers do not really use the creative potential to its full extent that generative grammar credits them with. If they really did so, “they would not be accepted as exhibiting nativelike competence; merely intuition-based, creative, potentially infinite language use of the natives is, at best, only part of the story”. Most importantly, they argue that “the largest part of the speaker’s lexicon consists of complex lexical items including several hundred thousand lexicalized sentence stems (collocation patterns), and this patterned routine is all-pervading in native language use (v) authentic language is used to a large extent in and around patterns (vi) it is not the autonomous knowledge of grammatical rules which provides the rules for infinite language use, but grammar is a generalization of language use. (Pawley & Syder 1983:16) If this is indeed the case, then dictionaries are even more harmful, because they distort linguistic reality by suggesting that language is made up of words; that knowing a language is knowing the “word stock”; that this word stock can actually be counted and catalogued for each language. The grouping of dictionaries in terms of whether they are (i) primarily seen as textbooks aiding study, or (ii) registers, lists meant to represent the entire lexical system of a language distinguishes the (i) “instrument dictionary” from (ii) the “portrait dictionary” (originally the notions of Béjoint 2000:108). The dictionary-as-instrument is a more slender volume, while the portrait dictionary aims, to a certain extent, at completeness. Depending on this dominant function, e.g. expressions containing what many authors term a light verb (or support verb) and a noun phrase, such as take a walk and give a sigh or H. sétát tesz ‘take a walk’ and H. kivételt tesz ‘make an exception’, or containing any frequent collocating verb in an idiom, such as give smb the creeps or H. faképnél hagy ‘run out on smb’ (lit. “leave smb at the wooden image”), will differ in headword status assignment. As for the instrument function, it is likely that the average, at least not too under-informed, user will very sensibly look for these kinds of expression under the nominal rather than the verbal component. They are best placed in a nominal entry walk and sigh , and H. séta ‘walk’ and H. kivétel ‘exception’, as well as creep(s) and H. fakép in this case 6. It would be impossible even in the largest portrait dictionary to list in the entry for all “light verbs” each and every collocation with that light verb, e.g. provide in the entry of take all the “light verb take + NP” combinations, or in the entry of tesz all the “light verb tesz + NP” combinations. To give a full portrait of English, arguably such full listing would be desirable. In electronic dictionaries this problem is no longer there. Similarly, for the representative function it may be important to register what the large set of words is with which hagy or give collocates in some idiomatic way or other. Native speaker dictionaries are obviously closer to the register ideal, while learner’s dictionaries rather to the textbook end of the scale. Importantly, it appears that the overall trend in English dictionaries at the beginning of the 21st century, largely due to the enormous demand for learner’s dictionaries, is away from portrait dictionaries towards instrument dictionaries. It is probable also the case that the general trend in the use of reference works in general also favours this turning away from comprehensiveness and the shift towards immediate answers to problems.

6 In this case, incidentally, both the creeps and the fakép expressions are an additional challenge. The word creeps may be faster to access if entered in the plural, although it is hard to guess whether users will look for this kind of expression under a singular or plural headword. Faképnél hagy contains a lexically bound word, i.e. one not used outside the idiom. It may be decided, in keeping with the dictionary’s policy, to have the idiom itself as a headword (the less likely solution), or enter the noun as headword in this form, or alternatively in its citation form, with just this idiom provided in the entry.)

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2.2.2.2 Lyons and corpora Stubbs (2002) remarks that two textbooks by Lyons (Lyons 1968 and Lyons 1977), which were among the most influential early discussions of the main concepts of lexical semantics, do not mention, let alone use, corpus data. Indeed “in the two volumes and over 800 pages of Lyons (1977), there is not a single example of a naturally occurring text” (Stubbs 2002:50). This may make it appear as though Lyons thinks of meaning as context-independent. This, however, is not the case, and Lyons explicitly says so: “[When we] inquire about the meaning of words […] we are frequently told that ‘it depends on the context’. (‘Give me the context in which you met the word; and I’ll tell you its meaning.’)” and “It is often impossible to give the meaning of the word without ‘putting it in a context’…” More relevantly to lexicography, he adds, very much in defence of the context, that “dictionaries are useful in proportion to the number and diversity of the ‘contexts’ they cite the words” (Lyons 1968:410). Lyons is decidedly not a fox: he is not what may be termed a “langue” linguist, especially not in the sense of a dedicated generativist, yet apparently it was not impossible (albeit not justified) to criticize him for his disinterest in, or neglect of, naturally occurring text. Stubbs makes his remark in reproach, but the same may well be said appreciatingly: after all, Lyons’ is a seminal book on semantics without mentioning texts and corpora, using no naturally occurring text as illustration. If that is possible, then this feat speaks for itself. Also, the two books by Lyons in question appeared in 1968 and 1977, when corpus data as a backdrop to semantic studies were not exactly commonplace.

2.2.3 Spoken vs. written language

2.2.3.1 For dictionaries, spelling is very much part of language One dichotomy that will be separately considered is that of written/spoken language. While linguistically speaking spelling is a non-issue, or at least a very peripheral one, on the lexicographer’s list of priorities the written medium is very high. This, on the dictionary–lexicographer interface, is because of the growing share of written corpora within lexicology, and on the dictionary–user interface, because the lay notion of language is predominantly written. This notwithstanding, because the level of the user’s spelling varies, it is a frequently reported occurrence that they do not find lexical items because they look in the wrong place. Many studies of multiword units and idiomaticity, working as they are with (mostly written) corpora, apparently take an understandably one-sided, i.e. writing-oriented view of language. Three typical statements from this recent tradition will be provided: (a) Sag & al. (2002), e.g. want to develop large-scale, linguistically valid NLP technologies and classify multiword expressions (MWEs) according to whether they can or cannot be analyzed in terms of “words with spaces” (so that syntactic fixedness of an expression guarantees such analyzability).

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(b) Poß & van der Wouden (2005) refer as “words with spaces” to any expression whose feature is complete inflexibility. (c) Even more tellingly Moon (1998:8) goes as far as to say that in delimiting FEIs (i.e. Fixed Expressions including Idioms) as her object of study, she has “made orthography a criterion, in that FEIs should consist of – or be written as – two or more words.” although this, as she acknowledges, can be seen “in computational terms as an indexing problem, perhaps arbitrary, arising from the need to ascertain the extent of a lexical item.” also admitting that not all studies use this as a criterion, and that there may be a “blurring of the boundaries between single-word and multi-word (often hyphenated) cognates: break the ice , ice-breaker , ice-breaking ”. It is odd that the establishment of wordhood (even in lexicography) should be based on spelling conventions: “written as two or more words”. The indexing problem, specific to computational linguistics, thus willy-nilly carries over to linguistic analysis in general , where it has absolutely no place, especially not in a brute wording where thus even hyphens decide , and where apparently ice breaker is two words, but ice-breaker is one.

2.2.3.2 When orthography hinders lookup The spelling of what are traditionally termed Hungarian verbal prefixes, for example, is notoriously difficult: they can be separate (“open” 7) or spelt solid with their verbs. The most recent Hungarian volume on orthography (Laczkó & Mártonfi 2005) devotes seven paragraphs to their spelling. These “prefixes” present a notoriously intractable problem of describing Hungarian syntax. Native speaker’s intuition, namely that they form a compound with the verb (not in fact borne out by the most recent syntactic analysis), is reflected in the convention that requires them to be spelt as one word with their verb: bemegy ‘in.go’, i.e., the verb corresponding to go in . The verbal prefix, however, is now standardly analyzed as a subtype of a larger class of verb modifier, which includes (i) bare nominal complements such as újságot olvas ‘newspaper-ACC read’, i.e. ‘read a paper’ and (ii) oblique complements expressing different things such as goal: iskolába megy ‘to.school go’ i.e. ‘go to school’ (É. Kiss 2002:55-58). The existence of these verbal modifiers, however, is unknown to the average learner (and average school educated adult), but even if it were, the are not uniformly spelt. Also, because phrases are generally not easy to tell from compounds linguistically , native speakers cannot use their linguistic intuition, and must rely on their memory when deciding on the spelling. A telling example is the pair of words különír ‘separately.write’, i.e. ‘write separately’ and külön él ‘separately.live’, i.e. ‘live separately’: there is no criterion, linguistic or otherwise , that helps decide which of these is one word. While English multiword verbs do not present at least macrostructural lookup difficulties to any user, since both look up and look up to will follow the item look (even if microstructural placement decisions may differ), for the Hungarian “verbal modifier + verb” items the user of any dictionary must first decide what their spelling is. If users happen to know that különír is one written word, they will go to this item and hit it lucky. If they decide that it is two words, they will either look for it under the verb ír ‘write’ – and get it wrong, or they will go (very sensibly) to külön and find külön ír in its entry. If the user happens to know that külön él is two written words, they will either go to the él or the külön entry, and hit it lucky either here or there. If they decide that it is one

7 By the use of the term “open” it is not claimed that they are compounds .

39 Chapter Two word, they will look for it under különél – and miss. This way, knowledge of the right spelling may actually slow down the lookup process, because a choice must be made halfway. To this must be added the even more disturbing requirement that some, but not all (!), nominal forms derived from “modifier + verb combinations” are to be spelt as one word, even in cases where the verbal form happens to have two words: külön él → különélés ‘separately.living’ (Laczkó & Mártonfi 2005:105). It thus often happens that while the nominal expression for some notion, e.g. “legal separation” is given in one entry, the related verbal expression is in another, alphabetically remote, one: különélés under K, but külön él under É.

Another example is provided by the H. ott|ragad , which corresponds to be stuck there, be ma- rooned (the | just signals the place where the spelling may be a problem). Neither the solid nor the “open” variant is in Laczkó & Mártonfi’s spelling guide (2005:1149), so we cannot find out whether the standard spelling is ott ragad or ottragad. Luckily, if – but only if – a given H →E dictionary does contain multiword entries in the blind sense of “word-with-spaces”, and if – but only if – it uses a strict alphabetic ordering of entries, then in this particular case finding the word is not a problem, because the two – ottragad and ott ragad – would be in the same place anyway. Users will not even necessarily notice that the dictionary uses a different Hungarian spelling from what they would have used.

Similar problems arising in connection with the spelling of the prefix ott- do get registered in Lac- zkó & Mártonfi (2005:1149), with verbs such as ott|felejt , ott|fog , ott|hagy , ott|marad and ott|vesz . These are supposed to be spelt as one word in one meaning and two words in the other: e.g. ottfelejt when it means ‘lose/forget’ but two words – ott felejt – in the meaning ‘forget smth there’. If this may indeed be so grave a spelling problem as to justify inclusion in a spelling guide, users of H →E dictionaries ignorant of such niceties of Hungarian spelling will certainly be at a loss trying to find English equivalents. This is no small problem: the number of such prefixed verbs is enormous; the pattern is very productive. The “one word vs. more words” issue of the orthography, of which the “solid vs. open” spelling of compounds is one manifestation, raises a rarely made point: while spelling cannot be but an either– or thing, grammatical judgements, on which spelling is or should be ideally based, are gradational. This is a battery of inherent problems for spellers, especially if they are not native speakers of a language. If one considers the forms of Hungarian -nek ‘to’ in expressions such as neki megy ‘go to him’ 8 vs. nekimegy [run/bump into], their grammatical difference (and the reason for them to have just these different spellings), which may be clear to the linguist, is by far not obvious to the lay person. One difference is prosodic, which the average Hungarian speaker has practically no explicit knowledge of: the latter word, nekimegy , is pronounced with one stress. Also, the difference which is seen here will not easily carry over to similar cases, partly because it is hard to establish what those “similar cases” are. Moreover, because the linguist also finds borderline cases beyond the clear ones that the distinction is based on, it is not fair to expect lay the user to be always able tell them apart. It is equally or more unfair, and not very reasonable, to expect lay dictionary users to find their way around by using information they do not have. For instance, nekimegy ‘run/bump into’ is spelt as one word in Laczkó & Mártonfi (2005), and is also given in HECD (1998), also with “solid” spelling. Other personal forms with the -nek prefix (nekem- ‘to me’, neked- ‘to you’ etc) are not given in HECD (1998); neither are any other verbs given which are produced with these prefix forms. Since neki- is not separately listed as a verbal prefix in HECD (1998), only as “adv/pron”, forms such as

8 E.g. in the sentence Neki ment a csomag ‘The parcel was (meant) for him / went to him’.

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(a) neked|megy and (b) nekem|jön will not be found anywhere – whatever their meaning, whatever their structure, and whatever their spelling: either under (a) neked megy or nekedmegy and (b) either under nekem jön or nekemjön . Incidentally, besides neki ‘to him/her’, HECD (1998) includes the form nekem ‘to me’, but no other form ( neked, nekünk, nektek, nekik ‘2 Sg and 1/2/3 Pl forms of -nek ’). It is easy to see why the nek-i- forms should be given to the exclusion of the other persons ( nek-em-, nek-ed- etc): being “a hidden” 3rd person, neki- is the “dictionary or citation form”. Apparently, in the practice of Hungarian dictionaries – which, incidentally, is not explained anywhere, not even in the notoriously unconsulted Prefaces and Introductions – not just nouns and verbs have “citation forms” (nom. sing., and 3rd pers. sing.) but also grammatical forms that do not even have a standard name by which to refer to them. Thus, the nek-i- forms are the quotation forms of all the inflected forms nek-em- ‘to me’, nek-ünk- ‘to us’ etc. The 3sg form nek-i- is to -nek- as the 3sg megy ‘goes’ is to menni ‘go-Inf’. By including the neki- derivatives ( neki|megy, neki|lök, neki|ad etc) as lemmas, however, dictionaries contribute to a situation whereby users encounter significantly more of these 3sg variants than any other forms, and will consequently be willing to spell the nek-i- variants but not e.g. the nek-em- or nek-ik- variants as one word: while nekiad ‘give (smb)’ or nekimegy ‘run/bump into’ look perfectly normal, the forms ?nekünkad ‘give us’ or ?nekikmegy ‘run/bump into them’ are impossible spellings. What has been termed the “hidden 3sg forms” of such “prefixes” as the bele- ‘into’ in bele-harap ‘bite into’ are thus lexicographic shorthand for all the personal forms: belémharap ‘bite into me’ , belédharap ‘bite into you’ etc. Are all of these forms supposed be written as one word? Probably not: the longer the resulting word, the less likely that this is the case: ?belétekharap ‘bite into you (pl.)’ ?beléjükharap ‘bite into them’ are bad spellings. This suspicion is borne out by the entry ?ne- kiajándékoz ‘give [as a present]’ in Laczkó & Mártonfi (2005:1104): the “quotation form” is spelled as one word; ajándékoz itself is being longer, however, nobody would spell e.g. ?nekedajándékoz ‘give you [as a present]’. The point is that no decision concerning such spelling issues can be argued for in a remotely principled way. If users do not know the spelling (and have no knowledge of the grammatical machinery behind it), they cannot be expected to do successful lookups. This is not meant to be criticism of Laczkó & Mártonfi (2005) or HECD (1998), which are not to blame; it is not implied that any guide to Hungarian orthography or H →E dictionary could handle these issues in a more consistent and theoretically sound, let alone a more consistent and more user- friendly way. Rather, it illustrates the fact that even the vagaries of Hungarian orthography create difficulties or, as in this case, compound the ones caused, in effect, by Hungarian morpho-syntax. A dictionary is supposed to provide words as translations for words ; where derivation produces a word , it will be included; inflectional forms are obviously excluded. The facts, however, may be as puzzling as in the morpho-syntax of, e.g. nekemjöttetek ‘you bumped into me’ – where a verb in- corporates both subject and complement (NP jön NAK- PP), and where the -NAK affix of the PP (beside displaying vowel harmony) is inflected ( nek-em ). Also, grammatical phenomena abound whose workings even educated Hungarian speakers know nothing about.

2.2.3.3 User-friendliness, or encouragement of ignorance? This raises the issue of user-friendliness to the extent of “helping the user at all cost”: if user- friendliness is indeed to be valued above all else, and dictionary editors do not wish to punish users for bad spelling but give them every possible help at all costs, then in an electronic dictionary all such items may be entered with both types of spelling, right and wrong. In print dictionaries, there obviously is not enough room for this double entering of the same information. In the case of dictionaries of Hungarian, most Hungarian lexicographers would probably judge this to be too much help, opining that ignorance should not be encouraged. (This is true of electronic dictionaries, and

41 Chapter Two even more so of printed ones.) This device, however, is not an impossible way of improving lookup, for example, in online or other electronic dictionaries, just as some kind of auto-correction of the “Did you mean...?” or “Try this alternative spelling” kind are good devices that facilitate lookup in web-based searches as well as existing e-dictionaries.

2.3 Theory into practice

In the widest sense, this study explores the multifarious relations of theory and practice in E ↔H bilingual and monolingual English lexicography. Looked at from the product, this means trying to find the imprints of linguistics in dictionaries, identifying ways in which it enriches them with its novel features, and searching for traits that betray the difficulties of breaking with tradition. In the title of a review of AM&MASZ (2000), a critic (Heltai 2001) actually asks the question if user- friendliness is really above all. While the article generally endorses the novel concepts of AM&MASZ (2000), the question suggests the need for careful scrutiny. Frawley (1988), for example, discussing form vs. format in dictionaries, actually wonders “why we ought to make dictionaries more user-friendly by changing them to be more in accord with users’ needs. No other book caters to its users in such a way – least of all a reference book – and I’m not yet convinced that such changes will increase the ‘usability’ ” (Frawley 1988:208).

I think Frawley is in error on two accounts: there do exist books that cater to readers by being “in accord with users’ needs”; one is inclined to say that all non-fiction is like that. If, however, no other reference books sought to so please their readers indeed, there is no reason why just dictionaries should not be “user-friendly”. It may, of course, be worth asking whether it is normal for reference works to move towards user-friendliness if this happens at the cost of precision . In his broad review of lexicography books, Peth ő (2004) quotes Landau (2001) as saying that a distinct evolution could be observed in the practical lexicography of the 1990s including such aspects as the recognition of the importance of user-friendliness. None of the authors involved in the study complain that any of these shifts has occurred to the detriment of accuracy. When setting up the guiding principles of a dictionary, a host of issues await to be decided, in binary or other terms, and most of the solutions given influence one another to the extent of coming into conflict. The bigger part of those answers – the “philosophy” of the dictionary – are directly, others less directly, visible in the product. The solutions to some, by contrast, are such that they are impossible to read off the selection, the arrangement of entries, the treatment of senses, i.e. to trace in any other feature of the end product. There exist aspects of dictionary-making that have turned out to be irrelevant, and yet others which have been deliberately ignored in the making of AMSZ (2000/6) and MASZ (2000/6). A commercial dictionary is the upshot of linguistic thinking and applied linguistic exploration, but is commis- sioned with entirely non-scientific objectives in mind: before anything else could have a say, the business aspect decides much in the conception of a dictionary. Many researchers have contended for a long time (one of the earliest being Ilson 1985) that there is a welcome two-way flow of information between the theory of linguistics and lexicography, with not only linguistic thoughts and insights shaping a lexicography, but the experience of the lexicographer also enriching linguistics. This also will be investigated in this study.

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2.3.1 Rigour vs. user-friendliness

The following sections discuss monolingual dictionaries, but their point is valid for bilingual lexicography. In their discussion of dictionary definition, Atkins & Rundell offer what turns out to be an important discussion of “academic rigour” vs. “intelligibility”. «Frawley (1988) criticizes Ayto (1983) for “a dubious inclination towards vagueness”, and “preferring to abandon rigor so as to avoid definitions that are merely ‘dumb monuments to arcane speculations’ ” (Ayto’s phrase)”» (Atkins & Rundell 2008:45) 9.

To Frawley, theorists abandoning “rigor” abandon intellectual standards. Ayto, by contrast, has the user in view, who just attempts to find out what a word means. «“We do not see the dictionary as a rigorous, exhaustive, theoretically consistent account of a subset of the words of a language. (We would have to be mad to believe that such an account can be accomplished in the confines of one book.) If to be rigorous means to be opaque, then rigor must be sacrificed to intelligibility. As Hanks (1979) puts it: “Precision in lexicography is a matter of style and judgement, not construction by theory.” Zgusta (1971) is more explicit: “The lexicographic definition overlaps to some extent with the logical definition, but there are some striking differences... whereas the logical definition must unequivocally identify the defined object... in such a way that it is both put in a definite contrast against everything else that is definable, and positively and unequivocally characterized as a member of the closest class, the lexicographic definition enumerates only the most important semantic features of the defined lexical unit, which suffice to differentiate it from other units”. (252)»

The dictionary, however, is not necessarily to be seen as an account of a (subset of the words of some) language. If rigour is not an absolute requirement in the case of these “accounts”, then it is even less so in the case of those that aspire to be less . Béjoint’s distinction between “portrait dictionaries” and “instrument dictionaries” (Béjoint 1994:107) illuminates this fact. It is only the former type, portrait dictionaries, that are supposed to be comprehensive in the sense of “recording and capturing” a language and being a “treasury of information”. Instrument dictionaries, not necessarily but most frequently, aid language learning, or “answer questions about words for users of different levels of ability”(Béjoint 1994:107). Hanks (2006:113), discussing the types of dictionaries, distinguishes: (1) scholarly dictionaries of record; (2) practical dictionaries for everyday use; (3) pedagogical dictionaries; (4) dictionaries of linguistic phenomena such as slang or idioms; and (5) special-subject dictionaries. All of these are monolingual. To these are added: (6) bilingual dictionaries; (7) onomasiological dictionaries (the- sauruses, synonym dictionaries); and (8) term banks. (There are also hybrid dictionaries, e.g., monolingual ones for language learners with marginal glosses in a relevant foreign language.) Hanks’ classification suggests that of all dictionary types only (1) above, for which, significantly, he actually uses the word “record”, may be termed “accounts of the words of a language”. Whether dictionaries are “accounts” in the first place will, of course, depend on whether “account” is understood to contain at least some explanation : if so, then dictionaries are just marginally accounts of a language. If, however, “account” merely means “description”, then perhaps more types of the ones given by Hanks above qualify.

9 I use « and » signs in the subsequent paragraphs to quote Atkins & Rundell (2008), leaving the original double/single quotes intact.

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Landau (1984:131) goes further to defend practical applicability when he points out that “[...] if a definition fails in its basic purpose of giving the reader enough immediate information to enable him to surmise, at least approximately, its meaning in context, it is of no value whatsoever.” What this means in this context is that such a definition is of no value even if it is rigorous. Landau makes the same claim more poignantly when he comments on the lexicographer Gove’s advice to “rigorously avoid the broadening of definitions” that he does not “think it was the function of a dictionary to rigorously avoid anything that might help the reader gasp meaning better.” (Landau 1984:131)

It is, to be sure, not easy to ascertain what exactly corresponds to such good, reasonable practice in the case of bilingual dictionaries; all the comments in 2.3.1 above concern definitions of monolingual works, but the maxim-like advice that is also emphasized in (Atkins & Rundell 2008:212), “Make sure that TL words given as direct translations are general enough to suit most contexts”, is probably such a guideline.

2.3.1.1 Frawley on “format vs. form” Frawley (1988) comments that one of the things that can readily be said about lexicographic practice is that it rarely changes :

“alphabetization of entries, choice of entries by frequency, definition by analytic peri- phrastic formula, labeling of usage variation” have been with us for a long time with little deviation. Zgusta’s (1971) handbook remains a seminal work […] also because little has changed over the years in lexicographic practice” (Frawley 1988:189). This also means, as Frawley observes, that whenever lexicographic practice is scrutinized, “the very deeply foundational questions are rarely asked”, and that “A change in form is not the same as a change in format. Format changes are cosmet- ic; form changes are foundational. Changes in the format of a dictionary have often been attempted, such as in a reverse dictionary or even in a thesaurus. And questions of adjusting dictionaries to be more user-friendly are also concerned with format , not form” (Frawley 1988:190; italics mine)

This is serious and justified criticism, but it comes in 1988, a period that predates most of the changes that have happened to English monolingual learner’s dictionaries. It is worthy of note, incidentally, that Frawley’s claims do not specify what kinds of dictionary he means. When he quotes Hartmann (1983) –mentioning, in all fairness, that other researchers have published “slightly different findings” – to the effect that “[..] users access a dictionary for two main reasons: to find synonyms and to find proper spellings”. Not only are such uses NOT things for which one even needs a dictionary – all one needs is a thesaurus – but also, if one wants to change dictionaries to meet such users’ needs, one has only to change the format and do nothing to the dictionary form that has been passed on unchanged for centuries.” then this only concerns native-speaker monolingual English dictionaries. In that narrower domain such criticisms may have been right. The reverse dictionary or the thesaurus, however, are hardly

44 Chapter Two just variations on format, and not form, hardly just minor modifications on “the dictionary”. If only those two things – synonyms and spelling – were indeed what users use a dictionary for, then changing them into some more user-friendly form(at) would really not make sense. Some of Frawley’s criticisms aimed at change being slow or not radical enough (in some sections of lexicography) may be well-founded indeed, while others may be contestable. There hardly exists a standard, however, by which the pace of change in lexicography might be measured.

If such change really has been slow, i.e. slower than expected, the present study looks at some of the reasons that make it more difficult for theoretical linguistics to have acted as an accelerating force.

2.3.1.2 Murray on prototypicality Discussing the coverage of the term “English language”, Murray (1989) writes: “The Vocabulary of a [...] language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits. That vast aggregate of words and phrases which constitutes the Vocabulary of English-speaking men presents [...] the aspect of one of those nebulous masses familiar to the astronomer, in which a clear and unmistakable nucleus shades off on all sides, through zones of decreasing brightness, to a dim marginal film that seems to end nowhere, but to lose itself imperceptibly in the surrounding darkness. In its constitution it may be compared to one of those natural groups of the zoologist or botan- ist, wherein typical species forming the characteristic nucleus of the order, are linked on every side to other species, in which the typical character is less and less distinctly apparent, till it fades away in an outer fringe of aberrant forms, which merge imperceptibly in various surrounding orders, and whose own position is ambiguous and uncertain. For the convenience of classification, the naturalist may draw the line, which bounds a class or order, outside or inside of a particular form; but Nature has drawn it nowhere.” (Italics are mine)

Presumably all scientific disciplines invariably assume a double task: (i) that of imposing order on the observed world, i.e., finding fixed entities “circumscribed by definite limits”; and (ii) that of a finer-grained analysis, wherein the limits between these entities will be shown to be rather non-existent. The actual purposes at hand, the dominant methodologies, the changing of “paradigms” and other factors will affect the way in which the pendulum swings. Linguistics employs dozens of central notions for dozens of phenomena that are intuitively graspable but turn out to be hardly delimitable with any “scientific precision”. Dictionaries, however, are supposed to represent many of these phenomena, along with even more that are based on, or otherwise linked to these, as matter-of-fact, without the slightest trace of doubt, and in many cases present them in a pedagogically sound, teachable way.

2.4 Linguists’ views of lexicography, lexicographers’ views of linguistics

This section adds more detail to the question of to what extent, if at all, linguistic theory informs lexicography. The answers come from various sources, and it ought to be stated right here that they are more optimistic than warranted by the facts.

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The proponent of a really extreme view, Wierzbicka has argued that “lexicography has no theoretical foundations, and even the best lexicographers, when pressed, can never explain what they are doing, or why.” (Wierzbicka 1985:5; quoted in Atkins & Rundell 2008:8) This stern observation may be too general: we do not know which those process(es) are that lexicographers are so blatantly ignorant of – unless the remark means that this blindness marks dictionary-making from beginning to end.

2.4.1 Principles of lexicography

Granting that such reproof may have rung more true at the time of writing, it may be admitted (as indeed it is in Atkins & Rundell) that Wierzbicka’s remark has a good deal of truth to it. It is a question, however, whether “this absence of theory [is] such a bad thing”, and Atkins & Rundell’s answer is that as long as there are “principles that guide lexicographers in their work”, this is not a problem. They offer a summary of such principles: “Our objective [...] is to create a description of language which is faithful to the available linguistic evidence, and optimized to take account of the specific needs and skills of those who will use the dictionary. [...] this process entails the exercise of subjective judgement – consider, for example, the way that we all (as lexicographers or ordinary language-users) go about the task of finding meaning in texts. But we recognize (and welcome) the fact that this subjective element can [...] be made more objective, either through the contribution of intelligent software or through the application of linguistic theory. This interaction between lexicography, linguistics, and language engineering has helped to make dictionaries more systematic, more internally consistent, more complete, and simply better [...].” (Atkins & Rundell 2008:9) This is the description of a kind of lexicography that is not just “optimized” for the user, but also allowed to be guided by subjective judgement. Objectivity is desirable, and it is actually supplied by both linguistics and language engineering. Objectivity and rigour, however, seem to be suspended when the authors acknowledge that in the end they share Johnson’s view that “»in lexicography, as in other arts, naked science is too delicate for the purposes of life«. Natural languages are dynamic systems, which tolerate a good deal of invent- iveness, idiosyncrasy, and deviation from »normal« behaviour. Consequently, efforts to make them conform to one particular way of looking at language, efforts – in short – to describe language »scientifically«, have usually foundered when they have come up against what Landau (1993: 113) refers to as »the stubborn diversity of actual usage«.” (Atkins & Rundell 2008:9) Also, they point out, classifying lexicography as applied linguistics, that “[b]y the nature of the work they do, lexicographers are applied linguists. Yet many people working in the field have no formal training in linguistics. Does this matter? Our experience [...] suggests that good lexicographers operate to a large extent on the basis of instinct, sound judgement, and accumulated expertise. A grounding in linguistic theory is not a prerequisite for being a proficient lexicographer – still less a guarantee of success in the field. (Atkins & Rundell 2008:130)

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True, in their view there do exist “certain basic linguistic concepts which are invaluable in preparing people to analyse data and to produce concise, accurate dictionary entries. An awareness of linguistic theory can help lexicographers to do their jobs more effectively and with greater confidence. In short, a good lexicographer will become a much better one with an understanding of relevant theoretical ideas. (Atkins & Rundell 2008:130) Apparently, then, it is not quite easy to form a clear view of the level of linguistic rigour that can be expected of lexicography: lexicography is, and needs, no theory but has well-definable principles; dictionaries will be subjective but objectivity must still be aimed at; it is user-centred but must be observant of basic linguistic concepts and aware of theory; lexicographers need not be linguists but knowledge of a theory is a help.

2.4.2 Linguistics and lexicography

2.4.2.1 Lew (2007) on semantics and lexicography The dual nature of the terms “semantics” and “lexicography”, and the relation of the two will be addressed, developing the argumentation of Lew (2007) that “the relationship between linguistic semantics and lexicography is a troubled one”, General semantics has concerned itself with the study of how words (and other expressions) mean rather than what they mean. Lexical semantics, by contrast, has concentrated on lexical relations between these expressions, as well as decomposition into primitives. The gap that has resulted is rather wide: the description of actual lexical meanings – the question of the what – has been attended to less than adequately. Linguists have given up this domain to lexicographers, who have been happy to busy themselves with those questions because those are exactly what they see as their concern.

Lexicography covers two distinct enterprises: practical lexicography (dictionary-making) and lexicographic research (sometimes termed metalexicography). As pointed out by Lew (2007), it is not always clear in which sense lexicography is claimed to belong within linguistics, although it is usually regarded as part of it. Some see lexicography as an autonomous discipline, which, however, uses insights from linguistics. Lexicographers have often been censured by semanticists (such as Wierzbicka 1985:5 referred to in 2.4 above) for having no theory behind, and an inability, to explain, what they are doing. However harsh this may sound, it says nothing about why lexicography is incapable of benefiting from linguistic insight. Wierzbicka also wryly reminds us (eight years later, when lexicography must have made nearly one decade’s worth of advance) that “If modern linguistics were to be judged by the contribution it made to lexicography, it would be hard to understand why linguistics is said to have made dramatic advances in recent decades.” (Wierzbicka 1993:45) However, while semanticists have often provided recommendations for the treatment of meaning in dictionaries, these have proved to be less than viable in day-to-day lexicography, so that the semanticists rightly come in for even harsher criticism: “Wierzbicka’s own efforts to offer such a contribution are taken to pieces by Hanks (1993), who systematically demonstrates how very unrealistic and impractical the linguists’ view of lexicographic practice may be, if they have not themselves extensively engaged in real dictionary writing.” (Lew 2007:7)

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Another obstacle in this cooperation may well be what Lew (2007) refers to, illustrating what he calls “the rift between semanticists’ proposals and real-world lexicography”. He claims that some semanticists “give themselves the privilege of abstaining from defining the meaning of [..] semantic primitives or undefinables. Now, lexicographers are constrained in their work by the expectations of dictionary users as well as the restrictions imposed by the publishers. Because of this, lexicographers normally cannot afford the convenience of leaving out the “troublesome” words from the dictionary.” Lew (2007:7)

2.4.2.2 Dictionaries as ultimate tests of theories? Atkins makes the following relevant comment: “most lexicographers would argue that a good dictionary is the ultimate test of any theory of lexical semantics; they sometimes become impatient with criticisms from theorists who have never worked as lexicographers. As one lexicographer has put it, “most of the words one has to deal with when working through the alphabet turn out to be more recalcitrant than those chosen as examples in works on semantic theory” (Atkins 1993:19; quoted in Lew 2007:7). This, however, to my mind, is no less than three independent claims: (i) a really weighty one: that “a good dictionary is the ultimate test of any theory of lexical semantics”; (ii) a general but perhaps trivial one: that the practitioner is bound to be suspicious of the aloof theorist, who is to be envied for being in a position to make convenient decisions arbitrarily; and (iii) a methodological one: that the examples chosen by (introductory?) works on semantics do not by far reflect the level and types of difficulty presented by most words encountered by the lexicographer on a day-to-day basis. While (ii) and (iii) are unequivocally true, (i) simply cannot be: there is not a single dictionary that were the test of any theory of lexical semantics – or any other theory, for that matter – exactly because of (ii) and all that has been said above about the “troubled relationship” between semantics and lexicography. (The lexicographic products of the Meaning ↔Text project may be exceptions. It would be misleading, however, to call these dictionaries, since they are the theory, not produced or tested by one.) I risk the claim that this is partly why the relationship of lexicography and linguistics as such is such a troubled one. The best dictionaries are not the tests of any semantic theory, least of all of lexical semantics. Though they can be measured on some scale of success, success will be mostly determined by utility, not linguistic merit; and if they may be the test of any theory, then it must be one of methodology, or metalexicography . Lew claims that if anything, the success of the Meaning ↔Text Theory proves the possibility of cooperation between semantics and lexicography. I find this point only valid to the extent that the complex descriptions, or even accounts , of particular languages, even language generated within the bounds of this theory, can rightly be called dictionaries. These “dictionaries” are lexically rather than syntactically based accounts of language, closer to being theories themselves. If they are not like normal dictionaries, as it should be clear is the case, then this argument of Lew’s also loses weight. Corpus linguistics, on the other hand, which is usually mentioned as a component of linguistics that has been beneficial for – and has undoubtedly had a favourable influence on lexicography – is not itself a theory in the sense of a unified theoretical model, rather “a bundle of methodological approaches” (as also pointed out in (Lew 2007:7), and in that sense is not a compartment of linguistics.

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Moreover, linguists of different persuasions have now turned to corpora, and this suggests that at least partly, the corpus-driven approaches to linguistic study reflect a contribution of lexicography to linguistics rather than vice versa. Atkins & Rundell’s 2008 book, the most comprehensive such volume to date, the authors claim, is not about theoretical lexicography because they do not believe that such a thing exists. Neverthe- less, they welcome the fact that “there is an enormous body of linguistic theory which has the potential to help lexicographers to do their jobs more efficiently and with greater confidence” and remind us that lexicographers “can’t hope to remain fully abreast in every area, but fields of field of particular relevance to our work include lexical semantics, cognitive theory, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics”. (Atkins & Rundell 2008:4) Syntax, which has dominated the linguistic scene for over fifty years, and is largely associated, if not equated with mainstream (theoretical) linguistics, is conspicuous here by its absence. Atkins & Rundell (2008) keep emphasizing that linguists do not address lexicographic issues directly; they focus on language, not dictionaries. Nor do they tell lexicographers “how to solve problems”. Rather, “they show us different ways of looking at language, which we can take and adapt to our needs. Lexicographers have a great deal to learn from linguistic theory, and many of the recent improvements in dictionaries can be attributed to the intelligent application of theoretical ideas.” This is beyond doubt. Just as with the utility of being clear about user profiles and their direct reflection in dictionaries, however, which latter is missing from Atkins & Rundell (2008), here again, it would be good to see some concrete points that illustrate how these linguistic ideas have been applied, intelligently or otherwise. Rundell (1998) quotes a typical grumble by a fictitious, but very likely, dictionary user-character: I have to look in the dictionary to find out what a virgin is. ... The dictionary says, Virgin, ‘ woman (usually a young woman) who is and remains in a state of inviolate chastity’. Now I have to look up inviolate and chastity and all I can find here is that inviolate means not violated and chastity means chaste and that means pure from unlawful sexual intercourse . Now I have to look up intercourse and that leads to intromission ... I don’t know what that means and I'm too weary going from one word to another in this heavy dictionary ... […] Rundell (1998:315) 10 This kind of justified criticism, of the circularity fallacy, no longer holds for certain types of dictionary . It is also a fact, however, that it has never affected bilingual dictionaries. Also, that it has always characterized learner’s dictionaries to a lesser degree than native speaker dictionaries even those that do not operate with a simplified (graded, controlled) vocabulary. So if one is to be realistic – others might say, pessimistic to the point of gloominess – about the “enormous body of linguistic theory” of Atkins & Rundell (2008:4), then perhaps all that can be claimed about lexicographers being able to do their jobs “more efficiently and with greater confidence” is that it is to be thanked to this enormous help that lexicography has succeeded in weeding out a type of perverse definition from one kind of the many types of dictionary. To be sure, even improvements such as this may well have come from other quarters than linguistic theory, and the idea of simplified defining vocabularies does indeed stem from H. E. Palmer’s, M. West’s and A. S. Hornby’s work back in the 1920s (Rundell 1998:316). The contributions of these people, who were

10 The book is Irish-American author Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996: 333). The highlight and the “academic” punctuation are mine – the original has no boldface or single quotes.

49 Chapter Two not (theoretical) linguists in any sense of the term, but pioneers of a modern ELT profession, significantly predates linguistic science in whatever sense of that term. Controlled vocabulary (in a dual sense: (i) a carefully selected subset of the lexicon covered, and (ii) the restricted defining vocabulary, which is of relevance here) was seen as central to the creation of any learner’s dictionary (the term “learner’s dictionary” itself is indeed Palmer’s own, cf. Cowie 1999:36). Wierzbicka’s harsh words suggesting the non-existence of theoretical linguistic foundations for lexicography allow, after all, for the domain of ELT to be foundations.

2.4.2.3 Dictionary-making is a craft Landau, who is a proponent of dictionaries being practical tools, claims that making dictionaries “is not a theoretical exercise to increase the sum of human knowledge but practical work to put together text that people can understand” (Landau 2001: 153). Discussing the issue of logical definition vs. lexical definition, for example, Landau (2001:153) claims that “… lexicographers – all of them – pay a great deal of attention to the needs of their readers. For lexicography is a craft, a way of doing something useful. It is not a theoretical exercise to increase the sum of human knowledge but practical work to put together text that people can understand.” When Atkins & Rundell (2008) reiterate that “the most important [...] advice we can give to anyone embarking on a dictionary project is, “ know your user”, they do not simply mean user-friendliness. Rather, they too voice their conviction that “the content and design of every aspect of a dictionary must, centrally, take account of who the users will be and what they will use the dictionary for.” Atkins & Rundell (2008:5) That the ultimate measure should be the user was succinctly put by Samuel Johnson 250 years ago in a quote already referred to above. He claims that “...in lexicography [...] naked science is too delicate for the purposes of life. The value of a work must be estimated by its use” and that “it is not enough that a dictionary delights the critick, unless, at the same time, it in- structs the learner; as it is to little purpose that an engine amuses the philosopher by the subtility of its mechanism, if it requires so much knowledge in its application as to be of no advantage to the common workman.” which Atkins & Rundell interpret thus: “no amount of theoretical rigour is worth a hill of beans if the average user of your dictionary can’t understand the message you are trying to convey”. This raises the issue of how certain – semantic, lexicological, and grammatical – notions and terminology find their way from linguistic science into dictionaries that must “delight the critick” and “in- struct the learner”. This is far from easy. It is clear that when we assume the existence of down-to-earth or everyday notions such as Noun, Subject, or Sentence (and even more so if we assume that some consensual view on them may be arrived at), we are moving in a highly theory-laden field. There still is, many linguists believe and perhaps even more lexicographers hope, a non-theoretical core grammar which makes it possible to speak to Johnson’s “common workman” about the linguistic phenomena of the world, in the same way as there exists a vocabulary that lay people can use to talk about physics, biology, or genetics. There should be a pre-theoretical, or theory-neutral, strain of linguistics that lexicography should be able to rely on. It seems, however, that even if this grammar exists (which itself is very doubtful, as is hoped transpires from this study), it does not (always) deliver. In Chapter Three I look in some detail at some grammatical points where lexicography does not seem to be able to count on the kind of help it ought to be getting from linguistics.

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2.4.2.4 Dictionaries do not change Stark (1995) has the following comment on the previous edition, Béjoint (1994), of Béjoint (2000): “B[éjoint] investigates the rather limited and sometimes forced reflection of linguistic theory in recent dictionaries... [he] questions the structures of existing dictionaries, in particular the objective that a dictionary should be representative of the lexis of the language, the relationship between lemmata and meanings, and various approaches to definition. He concludes that, despite some progress, dictionaries have really changed very little over the last two centuries and that insights in linguistics (e.g. Anna Wierzbicka’s and George Lakoff’s work) should be integrated into lexicography in order to create substantially new dictionaries.” Stark (1995:637; italics mine) Although the point made by Béjoint (1994), that lexicology is not a recognized branch of linguistics, may not be true anymore, his claim can be accepted that the dictionary shared in the relative lack of prestige of the lexicon and of semantics within linguistics in the 19th century and first three quarters of the 20th. These, however, are not the point now: the real issue is what Béjoint himself also raises, wondering whether the linguistic knowledge of the lexicographer really shapes the dictionary. The answer he gives is rather negativistic: he argues that it is a commercial product; that it is without linguistic theory; it is unscientific; an “impure byproduct of linguistics” ( Béjoint 2000:169). This is slightly different from the way Atkins & Rundell (2008) phrase the question: lexicographers may be linguists themselves, and may possess nor not possess certain linguistic knowledge, but this does not affect the end product; the reflection of linguistic theory in dictionaries is at best “limited and sometimes forced”.

With the kind of general vagueness that has been mentioned above with reference to Atkins & Run- dell (2008) above, Béjoint (2000:171) also emphasizes that lexicography could benefit from linguistics, but he does not quite say how. The controversial relationship between linguistics and lexicography is forcefully illustrated by Béjoint accusing linguists, on the one hand, of being disinter- ested in lexicography, and on the other, of being “afraid to see their theories put to the test by the practical work of compiling a dictionary” Béjoint (2000:171). Here, the notion of “dictionary-as- test-of-theory” emerges again. Linguists’ conviction (even if they were as monolithic from this point of view as they likely are not) that lexicography is no test of any of their theories, coupled with their (surely reasonable) belief that lexicography is not interested in, or capable of absorbing, insights from linguistics, would partly justify their “disinterestedness”. Béjoint (2000:173) completely divorces lexicography from linguistic tradition when he reminds us that dictionaries had been produced for centuries while linguistics, certainly not by today’s standards, was not yet practised. After all, Johnson’s fresh-sounding and principled remarks are more valid today than most of linguistic theory from such a long time ago. If the fact that there has been no linguist among the authors for centuries has not meant that here has been no linguistic knowledge in the dictionary, then this may not be such a grave problem today either. The point, as Béjoint (2000:173) unflatteringly suggests, is that all dictionaries transmit some points of view on language “even if the lexicographers are not aware of any”. It appears that the only realistic view of their relationship is that theoretical linguistics is not easily applied to lexicography, particularly new approaches, which are “ill-fitted for a general-purpose dictionary that is meant to be used by the man in the street” Béjoint (2000:173). For some reason that he does not explain, he suggests that “lexicographers are wary of jumping on the linguistic bandwagon” Béjoint (2000:173). Even if this were not the case, however, these theories, as they trickle down, as it were, would be weakened by the time they arrive, and in the final analysis, then, lexicographers would be out of the reach of linguistic doctrines anyway.

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2.4.2.4.1 Tools, not descriptions

It is probably widely accepted that dictionaries are tools for solving problems: users consult them to answer questions they have about vocabulary. Such a view, as ten Hacken argues, is compatible with most definitions of dictionaries in theoretical discussions of lexicography (ten Hacken (2009:399). While lexicographers do not necessarily reject any contribution from linguistics, ten Hacken argues, Chomskyan linguistics is certainly not the first place they turn to. As Béjoint also states, “The influence of transformational and generative grammar has been even more limited” [i.e. than the influence of Bloomfieldian structuralism] (Béjoint 2000:175) When Atkins & Rundell (2008) mention domains of linguistics of potential use to lexicographers, their list includes lexical semantics, prototype theory, pragmatics, and frame semantics. As ten Hacken also argues, most linguists working in these are non-Chomskyan; moreover, some of the fields have an obvious anti-Chomskyan general orientation. Drawing partly on Ten Hacken (2009:409–411), four approaches to lexicography will now be sketched out: Zgusta (1971), Hausmann (1985), Sterkenburg (2003), and Atkins & Rundell (2008); the emphasis is mine throughout. • Zgusta (1971:197) praises the following definition as “one of best definitions I know”: “A dictionary is a systematically arranged list of socialized linguistic forms compiled from the speech-habits of a given speech community (b) and commented on by the author in such a way that the qualified reader understands the meaning ... of each separate form, and is informed of the relevant facts concerning the function of this form in its community . • Hausmann (1985:368–369) explicitly defines lexicography as “the scientific practice aiming to bring dictionaries into existence” and about the dictionary, he writes that it is “a collection of lexical units (mainly words), presented by means of a particular medium and giving particular information for the benefit of a particular user. The information is ordered in such a way that fast retrieval of individual details is possible.” • Sterkenburg (2003:3) offers a definition of what he considers as the prototypical dictionary (the alphabetical, monolingual general-purpose dictionary), which is the following. A dictionary is “a reference work and aims to record the lexicon of a language, in order to provide the user with an instrument with which he can quickly find the information he needs to produce and understand his native language ” • Atkins & Rundell (2008:2) view a dictionary as a “description of the vocabulary used by members of a speech community (for example, by speakers of English”. And the starting point for this description is evidence of what members of the speech community do when they communicate […]. But between the raw linguistic data and the finished dictionary, a number of other factors come into play.” and state that “All dictionaries are incomplete, and come under the heading ‘work in progress’.”

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Apparently, throughout his discussion ten Hacken deems irrelevant the distinction between native and non-native users, which, however, is of great importance. It is also worthy of note that only one of these texts, Sterkenburg (2003), refers explicitly to the type of dictionary that it defines, and yet the same “prototypical dictionary – the alphabetical, monolingual general-purpose dictionary” – is assumed in all of them. With the features of lexicography and the dictionary tabulated we get the following scheme:

Language is where? User type Dictionary & its aim Lexicography Zgusta social: community qualified ; list of forms; com- — native?? ments to facilitate understanding Hausmann — ? collection of lexical scientific units; gives information ordered for fast retrieval Sterkenburg — native reference work; ? records lexicon of language; gives user instrument to find information Atkins & Rundell speech community —* description of vo- ?** cabulary

In the boxes, “—“ indicates non-relevance of the given feature, while “?” shows that although this feature it would be possible to be included, it nevertheless is not. *Although this excerpt does not reflect this, Atkins & Rundell keep both types of reader in mind, even if – understandably – non-native users (as well as monolingual dictionaries) are given priority. **The wording ‘incomplete’, and ‘work in progress’ suggest that they do not consider lexicography as a science. The fact that “a number of other factors come into play” between the “raw linguistic data and the finished dictionary” probably also implies that lexicography as (either exact or empirical) science is out of the question. Importantly, the terms science/scientific and lexicography are not used in conjunction in Atkins & Rundell (2008).

2.4.2.4.2 Science, empirical and applied

Whichever way lexicography and the dictionary are defined, ten Hacken claims that lexicography is not a scientific field “within the scope of Chomskyan linguistics” if we take its object as producing dictionaries that ‘record the lexicon of a language’ or are a description of the vocabulary of a language: this is the very point of his argument. It is not a science because language (i) cannot be taken as E-language, since there is no empirical object corresponding to E-language; (ii) it cannot be taken as performance, since we need a reference to the competence in order to identify errors; and (iii) it cannot be taken as competence or I-language, since competence is the knowledge of an individual speaker. (Ten Hacken (2009:411) “In Chomskyan linguistics, there is no object such that a dictionary can be taken to describe it. Therefore the idea should be abandoned that a dictionary is the description of an object in order to interpret dictionaries in Chomskyan linguistics.” Importantly, however, this does not exclude that lexicography is scientific , ten Hacken argues further. Sciences that require an object in the real world in order to describe it are just one type. As- tronomy and medicine are both sciences, but their statuses are different. Astronomy explains phenomena that are treated as given; the purpose is to describe the system underlying them. Medicine,

53 Chapter Two by contrast, has as its first aim to cure ; making observations and constructing theories to describe and explain them only 11 serve this goal. Ten Hacken contrasts empirical to applied science, and the purpose of the former, such as astronomy, is supposedly understanding ; that of the latter, such as medicine, it is solving problems (of a more practical nature). Medicine, unlike many other types of problem solving, is seen as scientific because of the basis on which its solutions are founded. Applied science differs from other types of problem solving due to its search for explanations , a property that it shares with empirical science. It differs from empirical science, though, in that the focus of the explanations is not the phenomena as such, but the effectiveness of the problem solution. Given that “the core business” of Chomskyan linguistics is in empirical science, ten Hacken’s hypothesis is that lexicography should be viewed as an applied science. The components needed for an applied science are thus (i) a practical problem, (ii) the solution of this problem, and (iii) an explanation for this solution. In lexicography, the most immediately observable of these is the solution; this is also reflected in the definitions above. Zgusta’s observation that a dictionary must be “commented on by the author in such a way that the qualified reader understands the meaning ... of each separate form" is all-important whether a native or a non-native user is being meant. While the dictionary is the most obvious link in the “problem–solution–explanation” chain, the user is the weakest one. As with any tool, effective solutions depend not just on the tool but also on the interaction between it and the user’s experience, although for lexicography this happens in ways different, and ignored by ten Hacken, in the native and non- native user’s case. Using ten Hacken’s scheme of the “prototypical dictionary use scenario” (ten Hacken 2009:415) in slightly modified form, the following can be established: U(ser) identifies P(roblem); → relates it to some L(exical Item); → D (ictionary) provides I(nformation) about L; → U finds I in D and interprets I to solve P. (Note that this scenario contains no “explanation”, and it would be hard to insert it anywhere.) If, as has been pointed out above, the Chomskyan – or any other (theoretical) strain of – linguistics is unhappy with the idea that the dictionary describes a language , or records the lexicon of a language, or describes the meaning of a word – because these efforts are not compatible with its premises – and finds that lexicography is not scientific in its terms, it need not be indeed; nothing ever done lexicographically has ever stood or fallen by whether lexicography has been regarded as a science, empirical or otherwise. Ten Hacken’s scheme does not assume scientificness either. For applied science, his scheme can be used to gauge whether some dictionary is good. True, the quality of information is only partly, and to a lesser extent, determined by how close the dictionary data is to some ostensive (easily non-existent) E-language or I-language. It is rather influenced by (obviously: relative) completeness and transparency of presentation. Completeness, although just an ideal, is important because it adds to the number of problems potentially solvable in the final analysis. Transparency, which aids lookup and thus increases efficiency, is the more obvious feature.

11 Ten Hacken tells us how the inventor of the telescope was accused of an unethical attitude because of this exclusive concentration on diagnosis: despite the inadequacy of available therapies, it was not accepted that observation (of the natural course of a disease) was good medical practice.

54 Chapter Two

One aspect to the quality of information is undoubtedly authenticity. Here, too, however, accepting that quality is determined by the degree to which it contributes to successful use also implies accepting that quality will be measured not (so much) by how true the content of a dictionary is to some particular language . Rather, it hinges on how efficiently that (ideally complete and transparent) content contributes to solving particular problems . In the perspective advanced in this study, this can be put even more succinctly: adequacy at the dictionary–user interface is more important than adequacy at the dictionary–language interface. One of the most obvious manifestations of this is the moderate use of un-tampered-with authentic examples, whose use ought to be minimized accordingly. Examples, after all, are there to serve problem solving rather than description or explanation.

In the case of bilingual dictionaries, authenticity of examples is less of an issue. Here, however, it should be obvious that being true to the language is not only secondary at best, but that it only makes sense in some “oblique” sense. Bilingual dictionaries (i) involve more than one language; (ii) are, and always have been, evidently tools rather than descriptions as far as their function is concerned; (iii) cannot possibly be expected to describe both their languages, but especially not the target language, whose data is only represented to the extent that it is elicited, or activated, by the source language. In short, bilingual works can hardly be true to both languages.

The fact that chronologically (and conceptually), bilingual dictionaries are the precursors of monolingual ones and not the other way round (Cowie 2009:31), while both of them obviously predate learner’s dictionaries, is relevant here 12 . The first dictionaries were conceived of as practical instruments in the first place – as instrument, not portrait dictionaries: they have certainly never been meant to be descriptions of linguistic systems. All bilingual and learner’s dictionaries are still used as tools without exception. Just a portion of monolingual dictionaries aspire to do more than that, and be a portrait dictionary, but there is no question of even these being compiled in order to provide a description of the language in question, let alone a coherent theory . Sheer size may suggest comprehensiveness, but it does not make for description of the language : neither the OED nor Webster’s Third can or do make such a claim.

2.4.2.4.3 The notion of “explanatory basis”

Ten Hacken argues that lexicography only achieves the status of an applied science if, in addition to providing solutions to problems bearing on language, it also explains how these solutions work . This, he states, is the most challenging condition of the three: even in established applied sciences, the bulk of their praxis may not have an explanatory basis that lives up to standards in empirical science. In medicine, ten Hacken (2009:417) claims, explanations are rooted in anatomy, biochemistry and physics (although some observers consider that medicine is not a science because it does not have its own explanatory basis). Comparing medicine to lexicography as both applied sciences, ten Hacken states that “it should be a priority to identify the fields and the theories in these fields that can serve as a basis for explanations . The role of Chomskyan linguistics in this effort may

12 Hüllen (2009) writes about these early dictionaries that “Synonyms are used here in the simplest way possible. They are treated as semantically identical without any reflection on the differences. Earlier Latin–English and English–Latin dictionaries had also mainly depended on such simple equations. In the hard-word dictionaries, the interlingual synonyms of the bilingual (or multilingual) works were replaced by intralingual ones. The two registers of English were, thus, treated as two languages. To that extent, the monolingual hard-word dictionaries can be counted as crypto- bilingual .

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perhaps be compared to the role of physics in medicine. It provides knowledge about the reality in the background, matter in medicine, language in lexicography. Howev- er, biochemistry and anatomy are much more important in explaining how diseases arise and can be cured. It remains to be determined which fields of knowledge can take this role in lexicography.” A useful assessment may be made, for the purposes of this study, by tabulating ten Hacken’s train of thought.

Applied Aim Related empirical Own explanatory Basis of explanations: the science science basis related empirical science medicine cure par- anatomy biochem- none ← anatomy ticular dis- istry ← biochemistry eases physics ← physics lexicography help solve linguistics in gen- none Chomskyan linguistics? particular eral? problems

It is doubtful, and has been repeatedly and rightly questioned, whether of all the possible linguistic schools, the Chomskyan should be singled out as the one that has been, or even simply could be (this is not clear from ten Hacken’s article) the one to (have) serve(d) as the basis for the explanations of lexicography. Not only must a question mark be featured after “Linguistics in general” in the “ Related empirical science” box, because, as argued repeatedly in this study, the existence of linguistic science at large as a backdrop for lexicography is far from taken for granted. Also, because lexicography certainly offers no explanation for “what it is doing” in the aggregate . Even more obviously, it does not, and cannot, explain why it has a particular solution for a particular problem. The table cannot be filled in adequately exactly because ten Hacken’s use of “explanation” in two, incompatible, ways. Still, interesting conclusions for this study offer themselves, and these will be drawn below. Explanations of how these solutions provided by the dictionary actually work can be thought of in two ways: First (ten Hacken 2009:413), claims that the “necessary components of an applied science are a practical problem, the solution of this problem, and an explanation for this solution”; here, the term “explanation” refers to the solution of one particular problem 13 . Later, “explanation” is replaced by “basis of explanations”, and this no longer refers to why/how one particular solution is offered to one particular problem, but rather to what the underlying basis of the whole applied science is. Physics and Chomskyan linguistics can only be seen – although I hardly think they should be – as “explanations” in this latter but not in the former sense. In no sense may lexicographers be expected to explain why their dictionaries – monolingual or otherwise, native-speaker or otherwise – have this or that particular solution for this or that particular problem. Neither can lexicography in the narrow sense, i.e. the actual production of dictionaries, be occupied with “why it is doing what” in general: that is the job of metalexicography (whether it considered a part of lexicography or a sister science). If ten Hacken compares the role of Chomskyan linguistics to that of physics in medicine because it provides knowledge about the reality in the background (“matter in medicine, language in lexicography”), then the only, albeit not

13 The parallel of medicine suggests the following. The problem : scurvy on long sea voyages. The solution : adequate doses of vitamin C. The explanation : the way vitamin C works on the human body. The selection of the problem is far from trivial. In medicine, it consists of identifying which symptoms have to be interpreted as belonging together. The solution by itself is not sufficient: the importance of fresh vegetables and fruits was known long before vitamin C was discovered. Only with an explanation does the solution become a part of applied science (the parallel is developed in ten Hacken 2009:413).

56 Chapter Two trivial, question is, why just Chomskyan linguistics, when it is arguably the least suited to be the fosterer of lexicography. More important, however, is the question, ‘What takes the place of biochemistry and anatomy for lexicography?’ – what are the analogues of these two for language? This is an especially vexing question since, according to ten Hacken, they are much more important in explaining how diseases arise and can be cured, so there must be some (exactly two?) entities that can take this role for the relation of linguistics and lexicography. The question, of course, must only be answered if the parallel that ten Hacken has developed is really worth pursuing. There is no disease/cure scenario at all for the linguistics/lexicography dichotomy, so the analogy may break down right at the outset. Two solutions, then, offer themselves. The first: that ten Hacken’s analogy is inadequate as a whole, though it may be worth going down the path of some of its useful insights separately. The second: that there indeed are factors, which may actually be domains of knowledge, that influence lexicography at least as much as theoretical (in ten Hacken 2009: empirical ) linguistics, even if it is not easily placed side by side with either anatomy or biochemistry. Ten Hacken does not finish the task of “determin[ing] which fields of knowledge can take this role”. It is highly likely that while there are indeed such factors , there is no such field of knowledge . Lexicography is surely influenced by its contact with reality in dozens of ways: by the perceived needs of the user – whether arrived at by profiling, research, or the pressures of the market; by the vagaries of the market, which are influenced by factors quite external to the language teaching/learning enterprise; by the extra-linguistically motivated fashions in teaching methods; or even by dictionary-making fashions; probably even by a need to internalize in some way what are sensed as changes in linguistic theories or linguistic thought at large; but not by some domain of knowledge that explores, describes, or explains this reality. As argued repeatedly in the present study, which looks at how grammatical information and multiword lexical elements are treated in up-to-date dictionaries, the influence of theoretical linguistics seems to be negligible. The imprint both of the “grammars” (of whatever hue) on the grammatical apparatus of dictionaries and of the enormous literature on multiword lexical units is insubstantial for practice; considering the rapidly changing nature of the potential “theory input” in all areas, it is hardly noticeable in lexicography.

2.4.2.5 Points of agreement between linguists: Hudson (1981) Hudson (1981), a linguist with a deep concern for lexicography, neatly summarized the points on which there seemed, at the time, broad agreement among linguists of different creeds, presenting them in three large fields, each with many subfields: (1) “The linguistic approach to the study of language”; (2) “Language, society and the individual”; (3) “The structure of language”. (I have no knowledge of this kind of list having been taken seriously to the extent of being repeated at regular intervals; I do not know whether the list would be shorter or longer if one were produced now; I suspect that it would both lose and gain items, but it would be a leaner one now.)

Of the three, only (3) is relevant for us now, and I have freely used the device of the […] to indicate irrelevant omissions. There is no highlighting in the original, but the claims that are of relevance to us have been italicized. The areas of agreement within (3), “The structure of language”, (where I have completely ignored pronunciation and writing) are as follows:

3.3. (a) The relation between meaning and pronunciation (or spelling) is usually arbitrary . (b) Items of vocabulary include not only single words but also idioms […] and other longer structures [...].

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(c) The specification of a lexical item must refer to at least the following: its pronunciation […], its meaning, syntactic and semantic contexts […], and how inflectional morphology affects its form […]. (d) There is no known limit to the amount of detailed information of all such types which may be associated with a lexical item. Existing dictionaries, even large ones, only specify lexical items incompletely. (e) The syntactic information about a lexical item may be partially given in terms of word-classes […]. However, a complete syntactic specification of a lexical item needs much more information than can be given in terms of a small set of mutually exclusive [...] parts of speech. (f) Many of the boundaries between word-classes are unclear even when defined by linguists.

The importance of (a) and (b) – both hardly controversial for any linguistic school – for the present study will be especially relevant in the sections on idiomaticity and multiword expressions below. Points (c) and (e) need not be separately commented on.

2.4.2.6 Illusions of simplicity: PoS Point (d) above simply suggests that it is to be expected that dictionaries cannot cope because, to put it simply, the (lexical) facts are too complicated. Point (f) states, without much equivocation, a very important fact: that part-of-speech boundaries are not things that lend themselves to easy analysis. If so, lexicography will be in a quandary. After all, if linguistic schools will differ on most of their details (and explanations, and the methodologies of presenting these details), and consensus exists only regarding lack of clarity, then no wonder that lexicographers are left to themselves when they try to catalogue words in PoS terms. The dictionary may opt for not labelling parts of speech at all, but it obviously cannot afford the luxury of labelling the odd word, much less whole classes of words, as “of uncertain part of speech”. So, as a minimum, tradition dictates that PoS labels must be there. The user does not want scientific rigour, just the “simple facts”, partly because s/he is used to PoS facts being simple, as this is suggested everywhere that s/he encounters “grammar”. What then is the problem? This will be illustrated on the example of two prepositions: ago and than . Two illustrations suffice at this point (a closer look at ago will be taken in 3.1.5.2.2.). The Hungar- ian learner will not be particularly interested in the PoS status of ago . It will not even have to be PoS-labelled unless it has multiple PoS status (which is not the case). Marking it as a preposition is thus no help for anybody. Provided that such words are ever looked up in the first place (and the literature seems to suggest otherwise), users never search for the preposition ago , just the word ago . (If pressed, the learner may be able to guess that this is a preposition; experience shows that the lay answer will be rather “adverb”.) The linguist/lexicographer, on the other hand, if s/he wants to provide grammatical information too, will have a difficult job explaining how/why this is a very wayward preposition, which fact at least some of the learners intuitively grasp (so the explanation may be in order). But the practical lexicographer may also be justified in asking, “why not let sleeping dogs lie, and ignore this syntactic quirk, when ago can simply be marked as Prep?” As another word that may be problematic from the PoS point of view but causing different head- aches for the lexicographer, let us look at than . Most modern schools of syntax, up to some fairly traditional approaches, now agree that it is always a preposition (with differing complementation patterns). Some traditional accounts still distinguish a preposition than and a conjunction than ; while dictionaries on the market display a wide range of approaches, from the traditional above to some quite eccentric sets of PoS labels, and obsolete purist advice. No dictionaries, however, not even the most recent ones, show than to be the syntactic item that probably all contemporary analyses claim it to be: preposition requiring either (i) a NP, (ii) some kind of clausal or (iii) zero complement.

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Four sources – CED&T (1992), RHWUD (1999), COED (2004) and CALD (2008) – have been selected to illustrate the treatment of than:

• CED&T (1992) uses the quite aberrant set of labels (coordinating) adv., pron, conj., n They are given indiscriminately at the top of the entry of than . (Which of the four (!) corresponds to which sense – and which might be the nominal one – is not made clear.) The three “senses” are illustrated thus:

1. shorter than you ; couldn’t do otherwise than love him ; he swims faster than I run 2. rather than be imprisoned... 3. other than

• RHWUD (1999) distinguishes two PoS’s for than : conj. and prep. It is supposed to be conj. in taller than I am and prep. only “in the old and well-established construction THAN WHOM : a musician than whom none is more expressive ”). The authors, quite perversely for 1999, insist that in “informal, especially uneducated, speech and writing, THAN is usually treated as a preposition and followed by the objective case of the pronoun: younger than me .

• COED (2004) distinguishes two parts of speech, conjunction and preposition. than conjunction & preposition 1 introducing the second element in a comparison. 2 used to introduce an exception or contrast. 3 used in expressions indicating one thing happening immediately after another.

The than entry offers no examples; it is hardly possible to match the senses to the examples provided in the other three dictionaries. It is hardly possible to think of any use that this entry can be put to in a native speaker dictionary, and it would be useless in a learner’s one.

Interestingly, the entry offers a serious and reliable Usage section, the only one of the four sources, which, it must be admitted, would be missing without some (admittedly vague) inspiration from modern linguistics:

Traditionally, it has been said that personal pronouns following than and as should be in the subjective rather than the objective case: he is smaller than she rather than he is smaller than her . This is based on an analysis of than and as by which they are conjunctions and the personal pronoun (in this case, she ) is standing in for a full clause: he is smaller than she is . However, it is arguable that than and as are prepositions rather than conjunctions, similar grammatically to words like with or for . By this analysis the personal pronoun is objective, and constructions such as he is smaller than her are perfectly acceptable in standard English.

• CALD3 (2008) distinguishes two PoS’s: preposition, conjunction . than 1. [...] taller than my daughter [...] walk faster than I do [...] earlier than usual 2. [...] more than I intended to [...] less than I expected

Ironically, then, since the sense breakdown of than here is the same as in any dictionary twenty or thirty years earlier, the only novelty of the CD version of CALD3 (2008) is that the PoS labels are written out in full. That advance, however, is to be thanked to technology, again not to linguistic analysis or methodology.

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PoS fact are not simple, but their seemingly unproblematic handling in dictionaries only goes to perpetrate the common perception that clear-cut cases are involved. In this sense, lexicography greatly hurts the cause of linguistics, suggesting simplicity where there is none. It is also its own gravedigger: users do not mind language being complex and fuzzy; that could remain the worry of the linguist. They do, however, insist on dictionaries providing sharp images of its facts.

2.4.2.7 Illusions of simplicity: “abbreviation” as PoS In MED (2007), a search possibility allows one to find items of the “abbreviation” part of speech. The problem is again manifold: not only is the term “abbreviation” itself highly ambiguous (this may be a fact the user has no knowledge of), but it is certainly not something that has ever been termed a part of speech in any descriptive framework. “Abbreviations” (whatever their definition) are certainly not one word class , not even one class: minimally, they comprise two subgroups, initialisms and acronyms. While abbreviations are by no means a separate class, it is hardly questionable that the inclusion of all kinds of abbreviations serves the user. This clearly compromises theory: no definition of “abbreviation”, be it based on distribution, form or semantics, will put them in one class. This is more than simplification; this is a grave distortion of the facts. It is, however, welcome simplification from a lexicographic point of view. Moreover, it is one that may be utilized pedagogically: while no learner is likely to want to get all the nouns or even all members of a closed class such as prepositions listed in a dictionary, it is good to have the possibility of listing all the abbreviations, as they may deserve a slot of their own in the ESL teaching process. Abbreviations, but not for instance nouns, may be chosen as the topic of a separate session at the appropriate level. Such a search possibility in an electronic dictionary, then, is a welcome feature. It is the job of metalexicographers to scrutinize dictionaries with points like this in mind. Serendipity might bring forth such welcome simplifications as the labelling of abbreviations as one searchable subgroup of words even at the cost of losing exactitude.

2.4.3 Trade-off between anecdotalism and rigour

Linguistics has obviously never been a monolith. Reviewing Cruse (1986), Aitchison (1990) describes linguists as belonging to two types: accordingly, and relevantly for us “... some linguists believe in theory, others in description. Theoreticians tend to get airborne on their own fantasies, and take off towards Never-Never Land. Descriptiv- ists tend to get entangled in the tropical jungle of their own multifarious observations” and states that Cruse falls into the latter category. Cruse’s 1986 book “...takes us [...] through the complexities of the lexicon [...] since Cruse ‘does not believe that any currently available formal theory is capable of encompassing all the facts concerning word-meanings that have a prima facie claim on the attention of linguists’ [...]. Faced with a choice between ‘ theoretical rigour combined with descriptive poverty, and descriptive richness combined with a lower degree of theoretical control ’, he has opted for the latter...” (Aitchison 1990:147; italics mine) Cruse himself professes his aim in writing the book to have been “an exploration of the semantic behaviour of words which, methodologically, is located in the middle reaches of the continuum stretching from mere anecdotalism to fully integrated formal theory.” (Cruse’s 1986:xiii).

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Lexicographers may on occasion be “airborne on their own fantasies” but – understandably – they are constant inhabitants of the “tropical jungle of their own multifarious observations”. Admittedly, rather than being located in the middle reaches of the continuum, they even often engage in “mere anecdotalism”. This “anecdotalism”, or fragmentation, however, which might appear to be lack of a unifying vision, when seen from the user’s point of view, may be just the thing that lexicography needs. This stance of Cruse as a theoretician may be simply motivated by his embracing of Geo- the’s anecdotal suspicion of theory: “All theory [...] is grey, but the golden tree of life springs ever green…”. The attitude, however, surely suggests that he may be one of the linguists that lexicography can turn to not for the “big picture” provided by “theoretical control”, which it is not in need of anyway, but for “descriptive richness”. Wierzbicka’s observation that lexicography has no theoretical foundations, and “even the best lexicographers [...] can never explain what they are doing, or why” may have a good deal of truth in it, but in the praxis of lexicography, as has been suggested, this absence of theory is not necessarily a bad thing. As Landau (1933: 113) puts it, efforts to describe language “scientifically” usually miscarry when they come up against “the stubborn diversity of actual usage”. It is natural that theoretical linguistics, at least of the generativists’ markedly anti-empiricist strain, should have no such bogeyman to count with as the stubborn diversity of actual usage . This, unfortunately, also makes it harder for their more ethereal, intangible stock to be imported into dictionary-making. Lexicographers, by contrast, are not (or markedly less) constrained by the straitjacket of theoretical rigour, or encum- bered by the shifts in paradigms. This, fortunately, makes it easier for dictionaries to be geared to users’ real needs.

2.4.4 Trade-off between coverage and accessibility

There is always a trade-off between coverage and accessibility: dictionaries have evolved strategies to maximize the use of limited space, e.g. by the use of codes, abbreviations, and a special defining style (Atkins & Rundell 2008:21). But all this has come at a cost: they have become increasingly harder to access. Then since the 1970s an offsetting tendency has stressed user-friendliness, and this has led to a re-evaluation of the packing of large amounts of information into a small space. Apparently, then, lexicography is torn between the four requirements of provision of richness of detail (“anecdotalism” above), attaining theoretical perfection, maximizing coverage, and increasing accessibility. These interact in all types of dictionaries, but the profile of the users aimed at obviously influences many of the choices along these four axes. This is what Atkins & Rundell (2008:23) give extreme attention to: “if you have a clear idea of who your user is and what they want from the dictionary, you stand a good chance of achieving the right fit between dictionary type and user need”. Users’ skills influence the information in the entries; this is true of every type of dictionary, but (as in so many respects, as also recognized in Atkins & Rundell 2008), the bilingual dictionary is “more complex, and less amenable to clear explanations, than all but the most scholarly and sophisticated of the monolinguals” (Atkins & Rundell 2008:43). Bilingual dictionaries are even more obviously “tools”. Nevertheless, working with Hungarian ↔English dictionaries for Hungarian users, one surely is in a good position to know one’s user: the well-delimitable circle of school-educated user/learner with negligible linguistic knowledge to take for granted. In lexicography for the E ↔H relation in the case of a small market like Hungary, however, there is really not much room for manoeuvre. This also means, paradoxically, that the H ↔E lexicographer is in a singularly fortunate position in not having much elbow room: less latitude understandably goes with less responsibility. It is obviously

61 Chapter Two more difficult to compile and continuously update, e.g. French ↔English dictionaries for both French and English users than Hungarian ↔English ones for only Hungarians. The mundanely practical flip side of this, unfortunately, is that with this admittedly lighter responsibility comes the bad news of a relatively narrow market with the correspondingly meagre resources. That, in turn, has an unwelcome impact on profiling as well as user research, market research, and academic research budgets.

2.4.4.1 Market demands beyond users’ demand It is convincingly argued in Coleman (2007) that “most dictionaries are commercial products, and have to meet market demand. An example of the clash between lexicographic theory and customers’ collective wishes came with the publication of the third edition of Webster’s dictionary of American English”. These wishes are not to do with individual customers’ needs but are somehow there en masse . The makers of “Webster’s 3rd”, as now generally, wanted to reflect the way the language was, not how it should be, used. Buyers expected to be told what was right and wrong and did not want to see usages regarded as wrong legitimized by inclusion in such an authoritative work (Stein 2002:34–35, quoted in Coleman 2007:593). Although most lexicographers who produce general dictionaries now steer clear of prescriptivism (being in a position to do so partly because many publishers today also cater for this section of the market by publishing various style manuals, usage guides and dictionaries of hard words and con- fusibles etc), it is still the sentiment that you can turn to a dictionary for information, or actual guidance on language. Worded in this more careful way, this is understandable. There is an even more natural expectation on part of the language learner to turn to bilingual dictionaries for information, in which case a moderate amount of prescriptivism is inevitable. The attitude-related mess that “Webster’s 3rd” created is thus less of a problem for Hungarian ↔English, and any other, bilingual lexicography, for source language speakers do not have strong views on the target language. Learners are probably not aware of the shock that they would get to find, in their Hungarian explanatory dictionary, the Hungarian equivalents of many of the English forms which they are happy to find in their English dictionary, and whose lack there they would complain about. The inclusion of (non-standard) forms such as ain’t and gonna and wanna is justified because readers of English texts will encounter them (and they are unpredictable from the standard variants). So is the inclusion in most general dictionaries of slang and taboo terms. The lack of their counterparts in Hungarian, however, is less of a problem: the learner does not have to use these in English but can always replace them with a stylistically neutral expression. Thus except for some (ostensibly rare) translation tasks which must be stylistically true to the original, the lack of vulgarisms, non-standard forms and those of doubtful status (sometimes of even dubious word status) such as the H. nem t’om ‘dunno’, naná! ‘sure’, ja ‘yep’ and ö-ö ‘unh-unh’ etc. (to provide a very mixed list) may be no problem for the average user, while, e.g. the lack of dunno , unh-unh , nope , yep , you bet! (a similarly motley list, in addition to the grammatically non-standard forms like ain’t mentioned above) would be regrettable. The principle of description (as opposed to prescription) paradoxically suffers with every piece of warning for offensive vocabulary in learner’s dictionaries. On the one hand, English lexicographers today would not like to be seen as prescriptivist, but on the other hand, not indicating style and social connotations or not giving some general warning for “swearwords, racist, sexist, and homopho- bic vocabulary, would be to do a disservice to their buyers” (Stein 2002: 159–68, quoted in Cole- man 2007:594). In bilingual lexicography, this is no problem at all wherever the translation itself adequately takes care of it, but it must be signalled somehow if no equivalent that matches stylistically can be offered. Extreme caution, and constant updating, is obviously needed in this area to avoid instances such as meleg in HECD (1998). For the adjectival meleg it offers the translations bent , flit , faggy

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(only followed by a warning: “all taboo”) and enters gay only following these. For the nominal meleg , the following are given: nancy biz [colloq] , flit , ginger-beer , [homosexual or effeminate man] Nelly , ponce (again only followed by a warning “all taboo”). Thus, not only are disparaging and offensive words and “derogatory slang” offered for the neutral word, but these dominate: the unabridged RHWUD (1999) does not enter either ginger-beer or Nelly in this sense.

2.4.4.2 Descriptivism and application Any insight that lexicography may choose to use comes from descriptive (not as opposed to prescriptive but to theoretical ) linguistics. Explanations supplied by more theoretical, e.g. generative approaches being largely irrelevant, the kind of contribution that linguistics may offer is observation and description, and perhaps analysis (part of which, as attested by grammar books of various kinds, come from theory , of course). When, however, not monolingual but bilingual dictionaries are edited, two sets of data from two languages are matched against one another, the result no longer being a descriptive product. It is an applied linguistic product, more than a monolingual dictionary, and it is also prescriptive (if only) in the sense of not finding these matches but rather establishing them (on the basis of observable correspondences, though). Attempts are constantly made to apply principled decisions to link a body of language to another, necessarily singling out, highlighting and playing down phenomena and establishing the notoriously non-existent “equivalences” between languages, even to a larger extent than in the case of monolingual works. Obviously, prescriptivism is out of place in the handling of the data of the two “corpuses”; but bilingual dictionary writing without intervention would be impossible. That is nothing to worry about: as Crystal (1989) claims, discussing foreign language teaching, but with arguments relevant here: “what was wrong with traditional pedagogical prescriptivism was that the prescrip- tions bore little relation to the facts of usage, and seemed to fly in the face of those facts. That was why the word gained its pejorative overtones. We [...] should now distinguish clearly between ‘old’ and ‘new’ prescriptivism. It is in this sense that bilingual dictionaries invariably are, monolingual ones may be to a lesser extent, while native speaker dictionaries barely are, prescriptive.

2.4.5 Linguistics vs. lexicography: linguists’ voices

It appears a commonplace that lexicography ought to and (or because) it is in a position to, adopt linguistic findings. Just what exactly those points might be and how lexicographic practice should espouse those ideas, on the other hand, are not usually discussed: lists of such theory-informed decisions do not seem to have been published. It is difficult to identify, and catch in real time, as it were, the points where lexicography has taken some advice of theoretical linguistics, and has acted upon it. It is even harder to identify points, of which there surely must be no fewer, where some lexicographic enterprise, having weighed the pros and cons and the implications that some theoretical discovery would have for lexicography, has decided in favour of ignoring, or outright negating.

2.4.5.1 Kiefer (1990) on lexicography and theoretical linguistics I will examine, with the wisdom of hindsight, some of the claims made in favour of theoretical linguistics and lexicography being each other potential helpers. Kiefer (1990) claims that although “theoretical linguistics and lexicography […] do not seem to show much interest in each other’s preoccupations and their relationship is far from intimate. [...] The lexicographer’s attitude towards language is often a-theoretical and they reproach lin-

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guists for producing theories which are not very useful in practical work; theoretical linguists, on the other hand, blame lexicographers for keeping aloof from theoretical questions, for being satisfied with a kind of fiddling job”. If these claims (not far removed from Wierzbicka’s criticism) were valid almost twenty years ago, they still ring true. “Theoretical linguists construct theories [...]”, the argument in Kiefer (1990) goes on. “They also construct theories concerning [...] the lexicon of a given language. [..] An adequate theory of the lexicon has to take into consideration the requirements of other modules as well. Therefore, a lexical item need not be a word of the language: it can be a stem morpheme, a phonologically not fully specified sequence of segments or even an abstract entity with no direct relationship with the actually occurring elements of the language. In most cases the lexicon is not considered to be a simple ag- glomerate of lexical items, it is at least in part rule-governed”. (italics mine) These exclusions show that lexicography is not concerned with a theory of the lexicon: while both such non-specified or abstract items and rules as such do belong to a theory of the lexicon , none of this has a place in traditional dictionaries, and certainly not in most modern general, or trade dictionaries. An ECD-type of dictionary, one that is inspired by the Meaning ↔Text model, although it has no room for abstract entities and rules, is much closer to being a model of the lexicon. Kiefer (1990) goes on to say that in spite of the hostile attitudes of theoretical linguistics and lexicography, the two disciplines can be reconciled: “[...] no theoretical work on the lexicon is possible without appropriate data which can, at least to some extent, be supplied by lexicography” If this was true almost twenty years back, it could be much more so today, with natural language processing and word sense disambiguation heavily relying on dictionaries. To be sure, some strains of theoretical linguistics simply do not believe in such data being relevant to their enterprise. Kiefer, then, suggests not only that linguistic science, semantics in particular, has implications for lexicography, while the latter can prove useful for the former by providing empirical material, but also that the two have a common target . It would be good to have more examples of such synergy, because unfortunately the only example mentioned – “the problem which both the theory of the lexicon and lexicography have to tackle” – is the distinction between linguistic and everyday knowledge, which is a question is for semantics or language philosophy but not the practical pursuit of lexicography. Overall, Kiefer (1990) sounds optimistic that “dictionaries could certainly be made more adequate by making use of some of the insights gained by theoretical research”. Again, this is surely so in the abstract (as in Béjoint and Atkins & Rundell), but where exactly can we find the results? It would be hard, or often impossible, to trace back to its ultimate source every single insight of linguistics that has ever gone into dictionary-making. One small example may suffice: the realization that certain lexical items were predominantly found in negative contexts came a long time both before the advent of modern syntax and corpus linguistics. It is not impossible that the elaboration of this suspicion does credit to corpus linguistics even if the suspicion itself was not first articulated, and supported with evidence, by a corpus linguist. If so, is it then the case that theoretical linguistics supplied material for lexicography here, and many similar cases? If John Sinclair, for example, to whom many such insights can be attributed, is regarded as a semanticist, and his discipline of “empirical semantics” (as Stubbs 2009 refers to it) is credited with existence, then the insights of Sin- clair and scholars of a similar persuasion do come from “theoretical” linguistics. The answer is a “yes” only because the internal borderlines of linguistics have (been) moved to fit.

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2.4.5.2 How theoretical is theoretical? As Stubbs (2009:115) also argues, Sinclair’s corpus-assisted search methodology and work had found empirical evidence for an innovative model of phraseological units of meaning, which, in turn, provided new findings about the relation between word forms, lemmata, grammar, and phraseology. If something, then conceptualizing the workings of language in a new light along Sinclair’s lines certainly qualifies as theoretical linguistics. Because, however, he also made major contributions to applied linguistics in language education and discourse analysis, Sinclair especially laid himself and his corpus-assisted lexicographic approach open to criticism from the generativist side. To the extent, then, that the boundaries of linguistics are being moved and redrawn, questions of how “theoretical” linguistics informs lexicography become outright elusive. While the relationship of theoretical linguistics and lexicography was one of hostility as early as around 1990, twenty years earlier, when A. A. Hill gave a Presidential Address for the Linguistic Society of America, he had some “suggestions for dictionary-makers”, and he hoped that (para- phrasing President Lincoln) “most linguists would agree with some of them, and some would agree with all of them”. Yet surely there was a reservation, he argued, “that must occur to many. Dictionaries are made by publishers and professional communicators, not by linguists . So how can we make our criticisms felt , presuming that we have them? The answer lies in the fact that very many of us are frequently engaged in the making of little dictionaries [..]. Or we are called on to produce bilingual dictionaries of various sizes; or we make studies of usage, that is, of speaker–writer attitudes towards words. If these specialized works are made coruscating examples of improved methods, we can be sure that eventually, perhaps with glacial slowness, but also with glacial inevitability, the dictionary-makers will follow.” Hill (1970:258; italics are mine)

Apparently, in America at least, dictionary-making was not thought of as the business of linguists, not even by philologists, but “publishers and professional communicators”. However, as Hill visu- alizes the scene, linguists critical of dictionary-making, who often had lexicographical jobs “on the side”, were to slowly take over, first by setting an example. Many scholars have followed those models, and many linguists globally have taken an interest in the dictionary on both sides of the divide.

2.4.5.3 The “real world linguists” of McCawley (1986) Two major although by far not recent works by theoretical linguists who have had their criticism felt and whose work thus has direct relevance for lexicography, are McCawley (1986) and Hudson (1988). The title of the publication where his work – The real-world linguist – appeared throws some light on the way lexicography was regarded by McCawley, no lexicographer but predominantly a highly original syntactician, himself very much a theoretician. Hudson, on the other hand, explicitly ad- dresses many of the more practical issues of the two-way traffic between linguistic theory and dictionary-making.

One point made by McCawley (1986) is that “current dictionaries are problematic because they do not indicate the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of a word”. This is surely a field where enormous progress has been made: if there exists an area which is no longer “problematic”, especially in learner’s dictionaries, which have a growing share of the market and whose features are emulated by native-speaker dictionaries, then it is exactly the provision of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of words. If in 1986 McCawley spoke about this as a lexicographer’s dream

65 Chapter Two only hoped to be realized in works that were as abstract, and for as narrow a readership, as the explanatory combinatorial dictionaries, then today in learner’s dictionaries this is very much reality. Where this is coupled with search possibilities offered by the electronic dictionary, it is probably no exaggeration that this domain of lexicography has achieved the height of its possibilities . On an optimistic note, Frawley (1988), discussing the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary, suggests that “an [Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary] of English will address almost all of McCawley’s (1986) [=McCawley 1986 above] insights into the problems with current dictionaries, most of which center on vagueness. For instance, the ECD will show that an entry has negative polarity [...] because this is a critical syntactic and semantic constraint on the entry. Thus, budge is specified for negative polarity (*Harry budged the desk ), unlike in ordinary dictionaries which, by not specifying the negative polarity, are vague as to budge , though most certainly lexicographically accurate (see McCawley 1986: 4-5).

2.4.5.4 The case of budge The case of budge and its handling in three sources will be used to illustrate the impact of a linguistic insight upon lexicography, and to show that linguistic analysis is often lost on the user. When almost ten years on, in a famous case study Sinclair (1998) discusses the verb budge , the author no longer has to point to the “negative polarity” feature, which seems to be established by this time and probably recognized in some dictionaries as well. Sinclair goes beyond this, and looks at how the meaning is created by the construction itself ; what the typical subjects are; and what the semantic preferences of the verb are. “The whole construction is used to tell a little narrative whose typicality we all recognize: the speaker has tried repeatedly to do something, has failed, and is now annoyed. This overall evaluative ‘semantic prosody’ is the communicative function of the whole unit” (Stubbs 2009:124).

One of the difficulties, however, involved in assessing whether a particular dictionary has become “more adequate by making use of some of the insights gained by theoretical research” is that it is not at all obvious when some linguistic or grammatical insight becomes an unavoidable fact, part and parcel of lexicography. The verb budge has been handled as follows: CED&T (1992) explicitly states this: budge (usually used with a negative) This, however, does not mean that this “usually with neg” feature of budge , the explicit mention of which is no doubt missing from (many, or most) earlier dictionaries, has become common lexicographic knowledge by this time.

In AHD (1994), based on the paper version of 1992, the entry does not explicitly mention this feature, only defines and exemplifies the verb:

budge v. [...] --intr. 1. To move or stir slightly: [...] 2. To alter a position or attitude: [...] --tr. 1. To cause to move slightly. 2. To cause to alter a position or attitude: [..]

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CC (2003), a Collins COBUILD dictionary, defines and illustrates budge , explicitly calling attention to this syntactic feature. However, it uses a rather cryptic formula which may question the point of the whole endeavour: VERB with brd-neg, V, V n This overuse of grammatical and other formulae, now commonly regarded as a teething trouble, was a typical early Collins-COBUILD feature, which is supposed to have been removed; apparently this 2003 electronic edition still has them. It may take some time indeed to find out that the really user-unfriendly brd-neg “stands for broad negative, that is, a clause which is negative in meaning. It may contain a negative element such as ‘no-one’, ‘never’, or ‘hardly’, or may show that it is negative in some other way”: this is the actual text of the Cobuild Help section of the CD’s Help feature (notoriously unconsulted as front matter of this kind usually but also, unfortunately, buried very deep in Help in this case). Not only is the formula quite unfriendly. Brd-neg , on the one hand, is not really longer than broad neg would be, so it does not save space even in a print dictionary, but in a CD-ROM dictionary this space-saving is quite superfluous. On the other hand, “broad neg” is not more informative than would be neg by itself (or the full negative in itself) would be without the modifying “broad”. The meaning of the qualification “broad” is not easy to work out anyway: it is probably needed to allow for cases where it is not the element not (or no ) that signals negativity but some other element such as hardly , or the clause is “negative in some other way ” – as explained in the Help. The user, however, will not know what these “other ways” may be, so this sounds rather like a small-print disclaimer, not included for the sake of the user but for the linguistic community, in the worst case scenario, for some gravely ill-conceived and misguided scientific rigour. These three entries that span over a decade provide substantial proof that there may be lexico- grammatical points of medium or relatively low generality that owe, if not their discovery but their elaboration, to theory, which are adopted by lexicography where they get handled variously, from (a) being explicitly mentioned in an easy-to-understand way (CED&T 1992); through (b) being registered by means of examples only (AHD 1994); all the way to (c) explicit mention in the form of some abbreviation or formula which may be hard or next to impossible to decipher, and thus of questionable use (such as CC 2003). From this point in time onwards, the only potential path of improvement is only made possible by technology, not some other advance in linguistics or lexicography. The Cobuild range, e.g. has all the necessary grammatical information, and making this more user-friendly (e.g. by expanding the abbreviations, which Cobuild have actually been striving to do) may eventually lead to an optimum solution of such issues.

2.4.5.5 Inside an entry: dichotomies in Hudson (1988) Writing about linguists traditionally falling into two types, those who think of language as a mental phenomenon – the mentalists – and those who think it is “out there”, Hudson (1988:288) establishes that the former have not only taken over, but that all linguists agree now that language is at least a mental phenomenon. The question arises, he claims, whether this mental reality is of interest to lexicographers: after all, “historically a great deal of lexicographic work has involved combing through written texts where questions of psychological reality appear somewhat remote”. Hudson also convincingly argues – concurring with Landau (2001) in this respect – that the dictionary is inevitably prescriptive to some extent because users consult it as an authority. This means that a dictionary “takes on a kind of external objectivity that goes beyond the mental structures of any individual”: the point in having one is to have access to a wider range of linguistic knowledge than one individual, you, have built up. In that sense, a dictionary is by definition an E-language rather than an I-language object. Nor should a dictionary limit its capacity “to whatever we think is

67 Chapter Two the maximum available to a human ”: the OED, e.g. obviously has more information on more words than any human could possibly have. Arguing from a slightly different set of facts, which seem less convincing, Hudson also claims that linguists and lexicographers are in pursuit of the same goal: “the truth defined in terms of psychological reality”. This, however, is not relevant for the balance of his argumentation, which runs like this: Mainstream linguistics has three general tenets (each concerning an issue of boundary), which are relevant to lexicography: (a) the lexicon is a distinct component of the grammar (b) there are discrete lexical entries (a) and (b) will be covered in this section (c) the lexico-grammar contains only intra-linguistic information (c) will be discussed in 2.4.5.6. Hudson, by contrast, argues that there is no boundary between these things: no distinct lexicon and grammar; no boundary between lexical entries; no separation of language and other kinds of knowledge. Of these, (a) is a distinction that dictionaries strengthen and foster by their very existence, and thus has relevance in the present study. The second, (b) is also supported by the form and format of any lexicographic work, and thus also relevant. The third, (c), which is very much in the focus of cognitive linguistics, has no direct relevance (even if some types of dictionaries offer encyclopaedic, i.e., extra-linguistic, information).

(a) Lexicon vs. grammar Hudson claims that lexicography treats all these boundaries in and ad hoc and atheoretical way. “If they are unreal, this is both right and inevitable – lexicographers have specific practical concerns which guide them in their decisions, and they neither need the help of theoretical linguists in making them nor (in this case) would they benefit from such help if it rested on the main-stream assumptions. If it turns out that lexicography is better if dictionaries are separated from grammars and encyclopaedias, or if dictionaries are divided into discrete entries, then so be it; but if not, then lexicographers should have no theoretical compunctions in jettisoning the boundaries in question.” Hudson (1988:291) This passage is a perfect summing up of the issues at hand; the way they may be raised has apparently not changed in the past twenty years. As concerns linguistics, there is no consensus even on issues of this import; neither is it suggested that there ought to be, or even can be, such a consensus. Consequently, there is no such thing as a unified view of language that lexicography could adopt for its purposes. As concerns lexicography: it is to be expected that lexicography treats in ad hoc ways boundaries whose existence has been called into question, especially given that its “specific practical concerns which guide them in their decisions” are a serious burden anyway. As concerns the relation of the two: inevitably, one of those boundaries, which has to do with the status of the individual entries themselves, must be kept because of such mundane things e.g. as alphabetization and the two-dimensional paper and two-dimensional computer display. The lexicographic approach to the ostensive boundary of “linguistic knowledge” vs. “encyclopaedic knowledge” differs from dictionary to dictionary, as their encyclopaedic nature/content varies. Finally, the grammar/lexicon boundary is really blurred and, to a growing extent – as the realization that syntax and meaning are inseparable – this has been duly given a representation in dictionaries.

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(b) Discreteness of lexical entries Hudson (1988:295) sketches an average lexical entry of what he claims to be a mainstream theory, one that is which is standardly supposed to have four kinds of information: phonological, syntactic (sub)categorial, morphological, and semantic. (Some theories will have more complex ones than in GB, such as GPSG or LFG, but this is largely irrelevant here.) Hudson argues that in the boundary-between-entries system, many problems cannot be handled. The sufficient similarity problem: (i) how similar two meanings ought to be treated as belonging to the same lexical entry: the polysemy–homonymy issue. (ii) how similar two forms should be to be treated as belonging to the same lexical entry: the issue of irregular, even suppletive forms; and the problem of the distinction between derived and inflected forms. There do not seem to be clear principles to which one can point as a guide to making these decisions, which, as Hudson (1988:296) argues, suggests that mental reality is not structured like that. Also, the standard view of lexical entries is problematic because it makes no explicit connections among lexical entries: two lexical items in two different entries are effectively denied any relatedness, since relatedness is an all-or- none-matter. As has been shown experimentally many times since, the mind is very likely not structured that way (Martin, Newsome & Vu 2002 offers a synthesis).

2.4.5.6 Lexical storage and the lexical entry A whole tradition of semantic exploration, which may be given the umbrella term “polysemy research”, has grown out of this realization that the mind is not structured in the fashion of the “boundary-between-entries” models. Windisch Brown (2008), besides presenting the author’s own experiment, a semantic decision task, also offers a recent summary of these developments from Cruse (1986) and Geeraerts (1993) through Hanks (2000) and Kilgarriff (1997) to Nunberg (1979) and Pustejovsky (1995), makes no secret of it that nothing can be known with any certainty. In general terms, this is what the author claims about senses : “The semantic ambiguity of lexical forms is pervasive: Many, if not most, words have multiple meanings. [...] Despite the frequency of this phenomenon, how human be- ings store and access these meanings is an open question. Do we have a separate representation in our mental lexicon for each “sense,” or do we store only one very gen- eralized or core meaning for each word? If the latter, do we generate the nuances of each separate sense by rule or by accessing subrepresentations? To even speak of senses in this way implies that we can clearly identify the separate senses of a word. In this study we [...] investigate the effect of different levels of meaning relatedness on language processing. [...] These results suggest that the distinction between a single phonological form with unrelated meanings (homonyms) and a single form with related meanings (polysemes) may be more one of degree than of kind. They also imply that related word “senses” may be part of a continuum or cluster of meanings rather than discrete entities. In addition, results from specific comparisons between groups do not support the theory that each sense of a word has an entirely separate mental representation.” (Windisch Brown 2008:1)

The results of Windisch Brown’s (2008) study refine linguistic understanding of the connection between form and meaning. When a single form is used to represent multiple meanings, these can be semantically unrelated, or show different degrees of relatedness. Several theories have been proposed as to the storage and processing of these meanings. Under one, every sense has a separate semantic representation in the lexicon. Another theory holds that while related senses share a portion of their semantic representation, unrelated ones have separate representations. These theories have been primarily tested by comparing differences in processing time between noun homonyms and polysemes. Windisch Brown (2008) uses a semantic judgement task to assess the ease with

69 Chapter Two which subjects switch between senses that display four degrees of sense relatedness, and used verbs, not nouns because of the greater variability of verb meaning. Windisch Brown (2008) has not found support for a theory in which each sense connected to some form has a separate mental representation. (Such a theory would predict no difference in processing time when switching between senses, whether related or unrelated.) Significant differences have been found, however, in processing time/accuracy between processing related and unrelated senses. Even distantly related senses were processed faster and more accurately than unrelated ones. Com- patible with Windisch Brown’s findings are theories that postulate separate representations for homonyms, and single but subdivided representations for polysemes. Moreover, the marked linear progression through relatedness of sense which was found “most strongly supports theories in which related meanings share varying portions of their semantic representation, or in which related meanings overlap in semantic space. One can imagine varying portions of shared meaning among different degrees of relatedness. Closely related senses could share a large portion of their semantic representations, while distantly related senses would have minimally overlapping representations. The sharing of semantic representations may dwindle until no semantic overlap remains, as in the case of homonyms. [..] This sort of structure is compatible with cognitive linguistics theories of family resemblances and fuzzy boundaries in word meaning and concepts (Lakoff 1987; Rosch 1975).” (Windisch Brown 2008:10) These theories claim that a category cannot be defined with necessary and sufficient conditions, but that its members – and polysemes are seen as members of a category – can be more or less prototypical. Also, the boundaries between categories may be fuzzy. A structure in which the semantic representations overlap may explain the smooth progression from same-sense usages to more and more distantly related usages. It also provides a simple explanation for semantically underdetermined usages. Although separate senses of a word can be identified in different contexts, in some contexts both senses (or a vague one indeterminate between the two) seem to be represented by the same word (as in the now well-known case of newspaper ). “Linguists have attempted to discriminate varying degrees of ambiguity [...and ] to develop criteria for determining when ambiguity indicates either simple vagueness or different senses. Geeraerts (1993) revealed the inconsistency and unreliability of such tests, suggesting that a sharp distinction between vagueness and distinct senses may not exist. A theory of semantic representations that allows for overlapping representations or shared core representations helps explain this phenomenon. When encountering a word, one can simply access the core representation or activate the center of the semantic space, and only access further nuances if it is necessary.” Windisch Brown 2008:11) The findings of Windisch Brown are not inconsistent with a two-level semantics, or for that matter, with approaches to polysemy in any of the theories of lexical semantics set forth, e.g. in Peth ő (2001). It is noteworthy that Peth ő also mentions that the experiments which have been carried out with the aim of learning if speakers have strong intuitions about identities and differences of words (and therefore of senses of words) have not returned conclusive results. Speakers, as argued in Peth ő (2001:8), where differences between systematic and non-systematic polysemy are also discussed “have strong intuitions that homophonous instances of words that are prototypical cases of systematic polysemy are definitely to be considered to belong to the same word. They also have strong intuitions that homophonous instances of words that are clear cases of homonymy belong to different words. However, there were cases where speakers had no clear intuitions about this at all and where their answers were also

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statistically very uneven. These cases were homophonous words that would be considered instances of non-systematic polysemy.” These results [..] confirm that there is indeed an intuitive distinction between systematic polysemy, non-systematic polysemy and homonymy, so it may be assumed that these classes are not just artefacts of polysemy research but have some independent motivation. On the other hand, the results [...] do not allow clear dividing lines to be drawn between any two of the three phenomena.”

Many decades of linguistic research, then, has not yielded conclusive results concerning boundaries between lexical entries; between homonymy and polysemy; between systematic and non-systematic polysemy; whether senses overlap or are discrete rather; whether grammatical information may be separate from lexical information; whether linguistic knowledge may be separate from non-linguistic, or world knowledge. By contrast, there seems to be a preponderance of prototypicality and fuzziness as opposed to crisp discreteness not just within semantics but visibly in syntax as well. To all this may be added what is also a problem for polysemy research (Peth ő 2001), but may be much more general than that – just omit “polysemy” from the argumentation that follows below: the poor communication between the strands of research. “The result of this [...] is that different approaches usually concentrate on different aspects of polysemy without really knowing about those aspects that have been noted and examined by researchers in the other branches. Another further result is that different researchers often find sets of data, modes of representation or generalisations that they believe to be new but which in fact have already been known for some time to researchers working in another branch or even in another community within the same branch. All this leads to a fragmentation of research that is quite pathological because it hinders both the accumulation of empirical knowledge on the topic at hand and the effective discussion of new theoretical proposals. (Peth ő 2001:2)

2.4.5.7 Just linguistic or intra-linguistic information? Hudson has also argued against the mainstream dogma that the lexico-grammar contains only intra- linguistic information, and that language and other kinds of knowledge are separate. This has been referred to as the (c) of Hudson (1988) in 2.4.5.4 above. The mainstream view is that the

(c) Lexico-grammar contains only intra-linguistic information The issue here is whether there is a boundary between language and other kinds of knowledge. Hudson (1988) claims that it is assumed, without discussion, that the lexicon deals with nothing but phonological, syntactic and semantic, and sometimes morphological, information – that is, strictly linguistic structures – but not encyclopaedic knowledge . This raises two issues at once: (i) the problem of why encyclopaedic information should not be referred to in the lexicon, and (ii) that of how clear and important is the distinction is between language and other kinds of knowledge. Hudson’s examples are all relevant from a lexicographic angle. Information concerning contextual restrictions that have to do with “the kind of person who is speaking”, e.g., is standardly excluded from the (traditional) lexicon. Speakers, however, know that sidewalk is used by Americans, and dictionaries too should reflect this. This information, however, cannot be included in the mainstream lexicon, because “American”, even “speaker”, is not a linguistic category. (Hudson 1988:299)

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What are some of the kinds of information which got thus excluded from the lexicon at the time that Hudson wrote (allowing, of course, that they may no longer quite, or no longer universally, be excluded from more recent approaches)? Hudson (1988:300) offers a list of such information (his original examples will be given): (1) Social constraints on the use of words, including restrictions on type of speaker, type of addressee (e.g. gee-gee ) and formality of social situation ( attempt vs. try ). These are usually excluded. (2) Encyclopaedic information about referents. (3) Etymology, which usually gets excluded because it refers to non-linguistic categories (e.g. names and dates), and because this information is “unevenly distributed through the population”. (4) Spelling: because though phonology is, spelling is not part of language structure.

Importantly, and lending further support Hudson’s claim, it might be added that – although Hudson only mentions this in connection with (3) – all of the information in (1)–(4) is “unevenly distributed through the population”. Although (3) requires special education indeed, education also greatly influences both (1) and (2). For (4), simple literacy is required, but that cannot be taken for granted either. Sure enough: the only linguistic knowledge that is universally recognized to be “evenly distributed” is (morpho)syntactic information: native speakers are in possession of their entire (core) syntax, and the whole of (regular) and most of irregular morphology.

2.4.5.8 Written language The “unevenly distributed knowledge” of spelling raises challenging theoretical questions which have all to do with “how linguistic” a status that written language is allowed to have within some linguistic approach. In probably the majority linguistic opinion today the written medium has such a secondary role in the shadow of the more fundamental spoken one that some would actually prefer to see dictionaries arranged in some non-alphabetic, vocally-arranged ways (which, incidentally, would facilitate lookups in the case of spelling uncertainties). It is to be expected that scholars who (also) work with dictionaries will give more prominence to the written medium, and ask such questions (and probably answer them in the affirmative) as: Is it possible to know a word which one only has seen, not heard? Is it not the case today that even average- educated English speakers spend more time surrounded, thanks to computers and the internet, by the written language than ever before? Aren’t the majority of English speakers literate now? Is it not the case that although the first few years of one’s life, which of course largely overlap with the years of language acquisition, are spent without visual language, life and language later on will be unimaginable without it?

Hudson’s “liberal” stance is all the more interesting since there is a scholarly tradition, exemplified by an early work by Bolinger (1946), which takes a much more careful position on this issue. Bolinger’s is a study devoted to what he terms “Visual morphemes”; it begins with the claim that “The fact that most writing is the graphic representation of vocal–auditory processes tends to obscure the fact that writing can exist as a series of morphemes at its own level, independent of or interacting with the more fundamental (or at least more primitive) vocal–auditory morphemes. Recognition of visual morphemes is also ham- pered by the controversy, not yet subsided, over the primacy of the spoken versus the

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written; the victory of those who sensibly insist upon language as fundamentally a vocal–auditory process has been so hard won that any concession to writing savors of retreat.” Bolinger (1946:333) Since, however, for dictionaries the written medium is a fact of life even at an age when the physical medium often is cyberspace, lexicographers do not really have an operative need for support from linguists who are “more permissive towards the written variety”. It is still comforting to find views such as the following (Bolinger 1946), which “defends the written medium” distinguishing three types of visible arbitrary signs according to their connection with speech:

“We may distinguish three types of visible arbitrary signs, according to their connexion [...] with speech: 1. Signs existing independently of vocal-auditory morphemes [...]. Such are the [...] death’s-head on bottles of poison, lines [...] to mark the direction of highways etc. 2. Signs which supplement audible morphemes [...] 3. Signs which, under certain conditions (such as silent reading), to a greater or less extent supplant the audible morphemes [...]. The most important class is obviously the third, for it embraces the whole of writing. If we grant it, we grant that lose and beat are different visual morphemes just as /lúwz/ and /bijt/ are different vocal-auditory morphemes.” (Bolinger 1946:334; italics are mine)

Bolinger describes two mini experiments of his own design which (although obviously very limited) demonstrate that the “visual side” may have legitimate existence in a “lexical entry”, whatever the exact form of such a lexical entry might be. In the first experiment, he offers a set of matching homonyms to his subjects, and directs them to fill in any word with identical sound [...]. “Two sample pairs were first presented – bard-barred and sighs-size – and then the following list was distributed to the class: plane , to , vain , gourd , phrase , rein , grate , prey , peak , board , wee , and led . [...] The number of those who did [this] successfully was, for each word in the order given, 23, 24, 24, 12, 4, 24, 21, 24, 21, 18, 17, and 24. The significant result is, of course, that of phrase . Here, despite the exist- tence of TWO homonyms (of identical spelling), frays ‘ conflicts’ and frays ‘makes or grows ragged’, at least one of which everyone knew, almost ninety per cent were dis- tracted by the total dissimilarity in spelling.” (Bolinger 1946:335) Bolinger’s daring conclusion (1946:340) is as follows: “[i]t is probably necessary to revise the dictum that ‘language must always be studied without reference to writing’. This in no way detracts from the value of that dictum as applied to all languages at some stage of their development and to largely illiterate speech communities today; it is merely a recognition of a shift that has taken place in the communicative behavior of some highly literate societies.”

Although around 1946 the issue as such was nowhere near imaginable in linguistic thought, Bolin- ger’s experiments mentioned above involve the problem of storage-and-retrieval. It does not ask the standard questions of such studies of the late 20th century concerning the intricate ways in which sound shape and sense may be stored; it adds another dimension – the written medium – and the answer which it provides suggests that the “visual shape” also may be separately stored. This, of course, complicates matters even further, but as Hudson himself would argue, if that is what reality is like, then that is the way to look at it. It also ought to be added at this point that space, including experimental data, is devoted to written language in the section of lexical processing in Martin, Newsome & Vu (2002:633).

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2.4.5.9 Abbreviations as special items for the written medium A special function of most types of dictionaries is to provide abbreviations of all kinds. Although the present proliferation of abbreviations is largely due to the spread of IT, and the IT-related ones will predominantly be needed by people with good access to the Internet, where exactly this kind of vocabulary can easily be checked, so dictionaries are not needed, abbreviations are still a huge area where (especially non-native) users need guidance. Quite a few have gained currency thanks to IT language but have spread on and become part of everyday language, even imported by other languages in different ways: the English items imho , wrt , rtfm , otoh , wtf , lol and their likes are very much part of communication in many languages, not just English. Abbreviations also pose a challenge because many of them often get written, and many exist only in the written medium. Abbreviations are extremely diverse grammatically (cf., however, the healthy effort at simplification in MED (2007) by listing abbreviations under the same PoS label “abbreviation”).

2.4.5.10 The dichotomies of Hudson (1988) in the dictionary How all the information that has been discussed in (a)–(c) above concerning Hudson (1988) can or should be reflected in “the dictionary”, if the effort is worth at all, is a complex question, one that requires a fine-grained approach.

(a) Whether the grammatical aspect of language will be separated from the lexical is no longer an issue in most modern lexicography; rather, it is a given that the two are often inseparable, and they are presented as such in these dictionaries. Many of these decisions will needs be ad hoc, but this is not necessarily a bad thing given that the organization of linguistic information is itself far from being as neat as some theories may hypothetize.

(b) Information about the mental lexical entries (and the mental lexicon as such) is not something that users of a general dictionary want from any lexicographic work, whatever be the form of that mental lexical structure. There is no escaping the fact that in a general dictionary the lexical entries (whatever their form within the human mind) will inevitably have to be presented in a fragmented and atomistic, linear, non-hierarchical, and writing-centred way, very unlike psychological reality, which is probably none of these.

(c) Whether dictionaries should include other knowledge about lexical items than strictly linguistic information is a foregone conclusion. Most dictionaries, simply by labelling their words for style, context of use, formality, the temporal dimension etc., have always attempted to be faithful to much of this information as well, and they have performed rather well. While encyclopaedic information in the case of monolingual works is willy-nilly part of the definition, from bilingual dictionaries it is also unavoidably absent. Spelling is an aspect of language that any variety of dictionary could not possibly avoid providing information about, even if they wanted to. Etymology may or may not be a part of them, but here, decisions will again depend on dictionary type. That the bilingual dictionary does not, as a rule, offer it, while some monolinguals may clearly shows that when it comes to being used as an instrument (of translation), i.e. an instrument (as opposed to portrait ) dictionary, etymology is surely irrelevant.

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2.4.6 The task of lexicography

Hanks (2006) claims that the “four issues of general principle that must be considered for all serious types of dictionaries in any language are: (1) breadth, not depth; (2) consistency; (3) descriptive versus prescriptive approach to the language; and (4) historical versus synchronic approach.” I cannot agree more with the idea that “Unlike other kinds of scholarship, lexicography generally aims at breadth rather than depth. A dictionary does not say everything that could possibly be said about a particular word or linguistic phenomenon. Instead, it tries to present a reasonably comprehensive inventory of the vocabulary and to state just those facts that are most salient or most relevant about each word. [...] [A]s far as the entries themselves are concerned, it is necessary for dictionaries to idealize – and often simplify – word meaning and word use. To attempt to account in detail for all possible uses of words would be to attempt the impossible, for usage is open-ended and shades of meaning are determined by context. Furthermore, if a dictionary presents too much information about a particular word, there is a danger that the user may not be able to see the woods for the trees. Hanks (2006:113) Just as (according to Hanks) there are principled as well as practical reasons for dictionaries to be economical with space, there are both principled as well as practical reasons for dictionaries not to aim at depth, and be content with breadth. It must also be emphasized that if lexicography has just this feature – aiming at breadth rather than depth – as opposed to all “other kinds of scholarship”, then this in itself would be enough to exclude it from the realm of scholarship. We will argue that the very reasonable “breadth, not depth” slogan characterizes the whole of the lexicographic enterprise – and does so deservedly – and excludes lexicography from “the sciences”. Furthermore, although this does not logically follow from a characterization of lexicography such as given above, towards the end of this chapter it should be stated that lexicography does not seem to be able to absorb – or worded more fairly: readily absorb – input from any genuine linguistic discipline (the ones sharing borders with lexicography being lexicology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse, provided that these are all recognized), which, unlike lexicography, aim at depth and explanation but whose insights are too elusive to be put into practice. It will be shown on one small example (Apresyan 1980) of English synonym sets including defend and protect how the almost thirty years since the publication of this study are not enough for most up-to-date English dictionaries to register the most relevant differences between the two. The example is undoubtedly typical.

2.4.6.1 Defining collocation Some of the most often occurring terms in the study of the lexicon are used without definitions, or have too many senses, of which authors do not specify theirs in a given work. “Collocation” is a case in point. Two standard reference works of linguistic terms, Crystal (2003) and Trask (1993), will first be consulted for the use of “collocation” (and “semantic prosody”). Crystal (2003) defines collocation as “the habitual co-occurrence of individual lexical items”; e.g. auspicious collocates with occasion, event , sign etc.; [...] letter collocates with alphabet . Thus, collocation is a syntagmatic lexical relation but one that may work at a distance ; it is “linguistically predictable to a greater or lesser extent: the bond between spick and span is stronger than that between letter and pillar-box ” [...] there are many totally predictable restrictions as in eke + out spick + span , and these are usually analyzed as idioms, clichés etc. Collocations are formal, not semantic statements of co-occurrence: green collocates with jealousy ( as opposed to, say, blue or red ) even though there is no referential basis for the link. A related notion is “ semantic prosody ”; collocational restrictions are analogous to “ selectional restrictions ” in generative grammar (italics are mine).

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Semantic prosody is a term used in corpus-based lexicology to describe a word which typically co- occurs with other words that belong to a particular semantic set. E.g. utterly co-occurs regularly with words of negative evaluation e.g. utterly appalling (Crystal 2003:410). There are three problems with the above definition. (i) While it is true that there is a syntagmatic link between the members of the pairs in both cases, the wording “the bond between spick and span is stronger than that between letter and pillar-box ” blurs the most important difference between them: the former but not the latter may be considered a linguistic, or lexical, unit. If any two lexical items appearing anywhere in the same sentence (same discourse?) are collocates, then the term becomes vacuous. (ii) Another problem is that, contrary to what the definition suggests, most collocations are semantic “statements of co-occurrence”. Green and jealousy , where there is no referential basis for the link, is a stock example, but – sticking to adjective + noun collocations – most such statistically important pairs obviously do exhibit semantic relatedness (or motivation) as well. (iii) The third difficulty with the definition is that although this is suggested, “collocation” may by no means be equated with “semantic prosody”, not because the term “semantic prosody” is unfortunate, but because it only makes sense for items with some kind of evaluative aspect. These three ills of the definition in Crystal (2003) leave one without a guideline as to the real nature of collocation. To this might be added, as Rundell & Atkins (2008) also warns, that Mel' čuk, a linguist whose insights lexicography has “benefited hugely”, uses the term collocation differently: “Mel' čuk’s use of the word “collocation” is slightly different from the way we use it [...].” (Rundell & Atkins 2008:150). Ironically, however, the term “collocation”, which occurs 57 times (ignoring the form “collocational”) in the volume, is not defined. Instead it is claimed, quite appropriately, that “its definition is not stable” (Rundell & Atkins 2008:369). Stock examples of collocating pairs suggest that in these cases the only difference involved between two items is their chance collocating potential and not their meaning . That is, according to the usual account, in pairs such as V1 N 2 as opposed to V 3 N 4, it is the V 1 that collocates with N 2 and not the V 3, although the V 3 has much the same meaning as the V 1 (or the other way round: V 3 collocates with N 4 and not V 1, although V 1 has much the same meaning as V 3). This is in conformity with the aspect of collocations just seen, that they are not semantic statements of co-occurrence: thus, e.g. grill is supposed to collocate with meat but not with bread ; toast with bread but not with meat . The same is supposed to be true of adjective–noun pairs: A1 N 2 as opposed to A 3 N 4, where, under the standard account, A 1 collocates with N 2 and A 3 with N 4, though A 1 has roughly the same (cognitive) meaning as A 3: e.g. handsome and beautiful supposedly have the same sense ‘good-looking’, but while a man would be described as the former, a woman, as the latter. Other staple collocations (from mixed PoS combinations) include pairs such as high mountain and tall tree , both with the meaning ‘of more than average height’. Get old and get tired are fine collocations, but with bald and grey only go collocates, not get : go bald and go grey . It is get that collocates with sick but fall with ill . Different things are carried out , performed , and conducted , although the meanings of these verbs are supposed to be very similar. Not all of these stock examples, however, are collocations with a chance collocating potential: the meaning of one collocating word in one collocation is often incontestably different from that of the collocating word in the other. (A weaker version of this statement would be that the difference can be expressed in terms of meaning). True, in the case of the lexical verb examples above, grill can be paraphrased as ‘cook (meat, fish, etc.) by direct heat, as under a grill or over a hot fire’ 14 , and this is not much different from toasting (‘brown under a grill or over a fire’) but they collocate with, or

14 The definitions in this paragraph have been modified from CED&T 1992.

76 Chapter Two select as argument, different things. The same probably goes for tall tree vs. high mountain . The adjectives handsome and beautiful , however, may be claimed to have different senses because they collocate with, or select as their subject, NPs referring to males vs. to females. The rest of the verbal examples above, which are genuine instances of collocation (with what has been called chance collocating potential) in that get and go as well as fall are used in the “resulting copula” function here, meaning ‘become’. Thus they are a phenomenon somewhat easier to pin down; which of them is selected with which adjective, however, is a matter of sheer convention, idiosyncratic in the sense of unpredictable: a particular copular verb is used to the exclusion of others that might do equally well. Similarly, for what may be termed “light verbs” carry out , perform , and conduct : their roughly identical meanings require various collocating objects. In view of the fact that in all probability, “context makes meaning” rather than the other way round, it is but small wonder that collocation and meaning should shade into one another.

2.4.6.2 Sense analysis of defend vs. protect for background The verb pair defend and protect has often been quoted as an example of the delicate dividing line between collocation and other not-so-easily, or even less easily, definable types of word combination. The difference between them, as in many cases, can be couched in terms of meaning or in terms of collocational restriction; this time, they do differ in both. Whether collocational differences are responsible for the meaning difference or the other way round, however, is a chicken-and-egg issue, as demonstrated by many authors, cf. Hanks (2000); Kilgarriff (1997). What will be show below is that although for this pair of verbs, exact and exhausting semantic analyses have been available for almost thirty years, they have not found their way into most lexicographic descriptions. Apresyan (1980), a dictionary of English synonyms containing 400 synonym sets on nearly 500 pages, clearly draws the line of semantic distinction between defend and protect 15 mainly, but not exclusively, in terms of the real/existing vs. potential danger/harm. This distinction, just one of the possibly many thousand that can be made between members of synonyms sets, has no sign of being made in any of the dictionaries scrutinized below. You can only defend smb against real/existing harm, while you can also protect them against potential danger. Both the verb protect in the entries for defend , as well as the verb defend in the entries for protect have been underlined: apparently, the entries for both verbs employ the other one as a synonym, as part of – or instead of – the definition. Works consulted have been grouped into native speaker and learner’s dictionaries.

Native speaker dictionaries: • CED&T (1992) defend 1. to protect (a person, place, etc.) from harm or danger; ward off an attack on 2. support in the face of criticism, esp. by argument or evidence protect defend from trouble, harm, attack, etc

• AHD (1994) defend 1. make or keep safe from danger, attack, or harm. 2. support or maintain, as by argument or action; justify. protect 1. keep from being damaged, attacked, stolen, or injured; guard. See Synonyms at defend .

15 In an entry including defend and protect as well as guard , shield , and safeguard .

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• RHWUD (1999) defend 1. ward off attack from; guard against assault or injury (usually foll. by from or against ) [...] 2. maintain by argument, evidence, etc.; uphold [...] 5. support (an argument, theory, etc.) in the face of criticism; prove the validity of (a dissertation, thesis, or the like) by answering arguments and questions put by a committee of specialists. protect 1. defend or guard from attack, invasion, loss, annoyance, insult, etc.; cover or shield from injury or danger

• MWUD (2000) defend 1 [...] 2 [...] 3 : drive danger or attack away from : secure against attack : maintain against force : PROTECT, GUARD often used with from [...] 4 : to maintain against argument or hostile criticism : UPHOLD, JUSTIFY; specifically : to prove valid (as a doctoral thesis) by answering extempore questions asked by experts in an oral examination protect 1 : cover or shield from that which would injure, destroy, or detrimentally affect : secure or preserve usually against attack, disintegration, encroachment, or harm : GUARD [...] Synonyms see defend

While the Synonyms sections of two of the native speaker dictionaries involved, AHD (1994) and MWUD (2000), provide several features that help distinguish the synonyms defend and protect (plus: guard, preserve, shield, safeguard ), they give no clear indication of the major semantic difference between these two verbs. They do, however, use a wording that makes it possible, if difficult, to identify the major difference.

• AHD (1994), defend entry SYNONYMS : defend, protect, guard, preserve, shield, safeguard. These verbs mean ‘to make or keep safe from danger, attack, or harm’. Defend implies the taking of measures to repel an attack [...] Protect often suggests providing a cover to repel discomfort, injury, or attack [...] Guard suggests keeping watch [...] To preserve is ‘to take measures to maintain something in safety’ [...] Shield suggests protection likened to a piece of defensive armor interposed between the threat and the threatened [...] Safeguard stresses protection against potential or less imminent danger and often implies preventive action. [Examples have been cut]

• MWUD (2000), defend entry Synonyms PROTECT, SHIELD, GUARD, SAFEGUARD: DEFEND may imply warding off what actually threatens or repelling what actually attacks or securing against attack [...] PROTECT is somewhat wider and may imply shielding or guarding, sometimes as with a cover, from anything that might injure or destroy [...] SHIELD suggests interposition of or as of a shield, screen, or other protective intervention against attack somewhat more imminent and specific than that suggested by PROTECT [...] GUARD implies protecting with vigilance, force, and strength [...] SAFEGUARD applies to any strong and careful protective measures against potential dangers and threats [...] [Examples have been cut]

It is only MWUD that highlights “actually existing threat” by using the expression “actually threatens or [...] actually attacks”.

Learner’s dictionaries: • OALD (2005) defend PROTECT AGAINST ATTACK 1. defend (sb / yourself / sth) (from / against sb/sth) to protect sb/sth from attack: SUPPORT 2. defend sb / yourself / sth (from / against sb/sth) to say or write sth in support of sb/sth that has been criticized protect 1. protect (sb/sth) (against / from sth) to make sure that sb/sth is not harmed, injured, damaged, etc. [...]

The Word Finder feature of OALD (2005) provides several clues for distinguishing between the synonyms defend and protect (plus: keep safe, look after, take care of, save from, shelter

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from, guard etc) along with a host of example sentences, but it gives no indication of the major semantic difference between those two verbs.

• LDCE (2000) & (2005) defend 1. do something in order to protect someone or something from being attacked : defend sth against/from [...] 2. do something in order to stop something being taken away or in order to make it possible for something to continue [...] 3. use arguments to protect something or someone from criticism, or to prove that something is right [...]:| defend sb against/from [...] | defend yourself [...] protect 1. keep someone or something safe from harm, damage, or illness : protect sb/sth from sth [...] protect sth [...]| protect sb/sth against [...] 2. [usu pass] keep something such as an old building or a rare animal safe from harm or destruction, by means of special law

The Activator function of LDCE (2005) specifically says that defend means ‘use physical or military force to protect a person or place that is being attacked ’, while protect means ‘ prevent someone or something from being harmed or damaged’ [italics mine].

• CALD (2003) defend 1. protect someone or something against attack or criticism. [...] Compare attack . 2. ‘try to prevent the opposing player or players from scoring points, goals, etc. in a sport’ protect 1. keep someone or something safe from injury, damage or loss [...] 2. If a government protects a part of its country's trade or industry, it helps it by taxing goods from other countries. • CALD3 (2008) defend verb PROTECT 1. protect someone or something against attack or criticism. [...]. Compare attack protect verb 1. keep someone or something safe from injury, damage or loss

Here, both CALD entries refer the reader to the antonym attack (without being explicit about its status as one) rather than the (quasi)synonym defend .

• MED (2002) defend 1. protect someone or something from attack [...] 2. prevent something from failing, stopping, or being taken away [...] 3. say things to support someone or something that is being criticized [...] protect 1. keep someone or something safe from harm, injury, damage, or loss [...] 2. if an insurance policy protects you, it will pay money to you or your relatives if particular bad things happen [...] • MED (2007) defend 1. protect someone or something from attack [...] 2. prevent something from failing, stopping, or being taken away [...] 3. say things to support someone or something that is being criticized [...] protect 1. keep someone or something safe from harm, injury, damage, or loss [...] 2. if an insurance policy protects you, it will pay money to you or your relatives if particular bad things happen [...]

None of the definitions given above seems to substantiate any of the concrete claims of Atkins & Rundell (2008) below, referred to earlier, about the beneficial influence of linguistic theory on lexicography. “There is an enormous body of linguistic theory which has the potential to help lexicographers to do their jobs more effectively and with greater confidence. [...] we refer to theoretical discussions whenever they illuminate the task in hand and help us to inject more ‘system’ into our work. People whose day job is writing dictionaries can’t hope to remain fully abreast in every area, but fields of particular relevance to our work include lexical semantics, cognitive theory, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics. [...] lexicography has benefited hugely from the insights of scholars such as Charles Fillmore, Igor Mel' čuk, John Sinclair, Juri Apresjan, Alan Cruse, Eleanor Rosch, Beth Levin, Annie Zaenen, George Lakoff, and Douglas Biber (to name just a few).” This pair of verbs may be a small example, but they are typical of the state of the art: there is no trace of the insights of Apresyan (1980) in the definitions of defend and protect .

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It is beyond doubt, as Atkins & Rundell (2008) contend, that these linguists don’t address lexicographic issues directly; they focus on language, not dictionaries, and they don’t tell lexicographers how to solve problems; they show different ways of looking at language, which can be adapted to the needs of lexicographers, who have a great deal to learn from linguistic theory; and “many of the recent improvements in dictionaries can be attributed to the intelligent application of theoretical ideas.” There is reason to believe, however, that the bulk of these (recent) improvements have not, on the one hand, come from “theory” but from quite pragmatic quarters, possibly having to do with market demand rather than anything of principle. On the other hand, statements that lexicography has benefited (or, with a more careful wording, can benefit) from an interaction with theoretical linguistics appear to be no more than exercises in lip service. The treatment of grammar does not seem to have benefited at all. In just one of the most important and fastest developing domains, learner’s dictionaries, new insights for sense elaboration and discrimination can never be applied in practice because of the straitjacket of the defining vocabularies.

2.4.6.3 Ordering of senses One field where insights from theoretical linguistics, in particular psycholinguistics, could indeed be hoped to shape the philosophy of dictionaries is the structuring of meanings, i.e. ordering of senses within entries, of which three (i) the “(supposed) frequency or commonness of use”; (ii) the (theory-laden) semantic ordering that progresses from ‘core/central’ to marginal; (iii) the “historical” are distinguished, all of them under several aliases. As about much else concerning the handling of (psycho)linguistic facts in the dictionary, little is known about whether e.g. the frequency-based ordering of meanings is a reflection, in any sense, of the mental storage of the typical speaker, which would thereby mirror and document a supposed meaning profile, claiming psychological reality. It does not seem clear whether the terms frequency-based and “logical” ordering (a designation also encountered) are the same thing; it is unlikely, for some would want to capture this “logic” in the chronological progression of meanings down time, others in a strictly synchronic sense. Neither is it obvious whether ranking by “commonness of use” or “ordering by usage” amounts to the same thing as either of those previous two. Experience suggests that they may not, although they can probably be strung on a trio of frequency–familiarity–commonness. One also wonders whether centrality-of-meaning-based ordering (“centrality” being another term floating around with no stable definition) is the same as “logical” ordering of senses. And, even more importantly, it is a question whether either of them is to be equated with ordering based on what is “most commonly sought” – which, in the final analysis, is what the dictionary maker is concerned with. Writing about the often radically differing ordering of senses or lexical units in dictionaries, Stock- well & Minkova (2001) also note that the only order that is “determinate” is the historical one. The historical one, paradoxically, is the one that is farthest removed from speakers’ knowledge of language and thus not just from the main, or only, concern of modern linguistics but also from the concerns of lexicography. For the judgements for the frequency-determined order to be reliable, by contrast, there are not enough frequency studies. More than that, for this frequency information to be taken seriously, the counts would have to be continuously updated, and the entries rearranged accordingly from time to time – a project very unlikely to be afforded, even if the willingness is there.

Their ultimate conclusion (Stockwell & Minkova 2001:188) is that “the ordering really depends on the shrewd guesses of the editors. They will differ”.

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Atkins & Rundell go even further when they claim that “You can’t be too inflexible about this [secondary ordering of dictionary senses]: it’s always better to end up with a sensible entry than a weird one that follows the rules blindly.” Atkins & Rundell (2008:250) One wonders whether the problem of the “right” ordering has not been solved with the advent of corpora. One look, however, at the frequency information in different learner’s dictionaries convinces one that it has not. If that solution were so simple indeed, and also, if differences between corpora were negligible and if the statistical findings of one publishing house were acceptable to all parties involved, then there would indeed no longer be a need for new calculations. However, new counts are required because of language changes; publishers can hardly be expected to agree on their statistical findings from different corpora anyway. This means that this would place an impossible burden on the editors unless and until software programmes are capable of updating frequency information virtually at a click. It is, of course, hard to say whether some such technology now smacking of science fiction becomes reality in a few years’ time. If one reviews the technological progression harnessed in the service of lexicography in recent decades, it will be apparent that the “dreams of lexicographers” yesterday are reality now – cf. for example (de Schryver 2003). A less developed aspect of the ordering-of-sense issue is that ideally , in different dictionaries, for different purposes, and for different kinds of word different sense orderings may be desirable. To get a full picture, however, of how these are perceived by users, experiments (which otherwise do not at all guarantee safe and reliable results) would be needed on such a scale that rather makes them impracticable.

2.4.6.4 Monitoring lookup for customization There are probably no studies, if at all, of users of paper dictionaries that were as fine-grained as to yield reliable results concerning the lookup strategies of individual words, but there is certainly a complete lack of such studies concerning grammatical words. It is, to be sure, often mentioned that grammatical words and (long and carefully crafted) grammatical entries are seldom searched by users. If so, then there is little point in finding principled ways to motivate the ordering of the meanings in these one way or another. Yet it has been suggested, for example, that where the ordering of senses is based on frequency, it ought to be exactly the opposite of what has been the consensual one, i.e. from the more to the less frequent (reported by Lew in Pajzs 2008:7). What may motivate such a move is that it is just the most typical/frequent meanings of words that users will know by the time they consult a dictionary. There may be new solutions to these and other problems approaching soon, but not from the linguistic domain. Lew (2009) suggests that in future electronic dictionaries, the user should be able to decide which ordering s/he prefers. He proposes, perhaps futuristically for e-dictionaries but certainly unviably for print ones, that “we move beyond static ordering in electronic polyfunctional dictionaries of the future, to dynamically adjust the ordering to the currently dominant function. Another future possibility that I explore is that Artificial Intelligence systems in electronic lexicographic products could conceivably monitor individual users’ lookup behaviour and thus customize sense ordering on an individual user basis, for example by depri- oritizing senses known to have already been acquired by the user, when in the text re- ception/decoding mode. (Lew 2009:1) Similar suggestions have been made earlier based on experimental evidence – e.g. de Schryver (2006), which presents an innovative online Swahili–English dictionary project, where “a careful study of some of the log files [...] reveals some hitherto unknown aspects of true dictionary lookup behaviour, which results in the depreciation of the importance of corpora for dictionary-making”.

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De Schryver & Joffe (2004) inform us that proposals to use log files for the improvement of (electronic) dictionaries were circulating as early as 1985. They also remind us that very “few reports have been published of real-world dictionaries actually making use of this strategy. Notable exceptions are Löfberg (2002) and Prószéky & Kis (2002)”. Interestingly, “electronic dictionaries cum log files seem to be more popular in research environments focusing on vocabulary acquisition” (de Schryver & Joffe 2004:187). The kind of context-sensitive search championed in Hungary by the MobiMouse software range may be the solution for the electronic medium (Prószéky & Földes 2006). De Schryver & Joffe (2004) show that “a real-world electronic dictionary can be simultaneously compiled and its use studied” and demonstrates that “the results of the dictionary use study may be successfully fed back into the compilation”. Their study shows that the analysis of the use “reveals how electronic dictionaries are really used”. They achieve this with an [...] integrated log file [that] tracks every single action of every single user – date and time stamping each lookup, ordering founds and not-founds, monitoring long-term vocabulary retention, etc. Because the summaries of these are presented to the lexicographers, “the parameters of various user profiles could be pin- pointed, with which self-tailoring electronic dictionaries could be built” (De Schryver & Joffe 2004:187). While novel and genuinely revolutionary options like these, and the monitoring of user strategies in general are possible in the electronic medium, this will never become viable with paper dictionaries. It may very well be, as could indeed be anticipated in the 1990’s, that “the advantages of the electronic dictionary and the familiarity of today’s young people with electronic devices will eventually relegate the printed notion of ‘dictionary’ to a secondary sense” (Sharpe 1995: 49). Monitoring users’ use of print dictionaries is doomed to be a losing battle if only because paper dictionaries themselves may be phased out, and as they become so, it will be less and less worth anyone’s while to investigate their use. One user habit that is certainly much too difficult to track, in a print dictionary at this point in time, is whether at all and how, users search and handle grammatical items.

In summary: one can indeed visualize the plight of the dictionary editor standing as s/he is in the centre of a triangle, with determinate and tangible but irrelevant historical sources at one of its points; with hard-to-access (and perhaps lexicographically not even relevant ) information on the mental lexicon at another point; and “the user”, who in this ideal, unitary form and with homogeneous needs certainly does not exist, and whose requirements concerning a good dictionary are not easily detectable, at its third point. More importantly, it again appears that when all is said and done, shrewd editorial judgement still matters more than “blindly following some rules”.

2.4.7 Pre-Saussurean and Saussurean dictionaries

Béjoint (2000) introduces, albeit implicitly, a distinction between Pre-Saussurean and Saussurean dictionaries, which is an insightful remark about the relation of linguistics and lexicography. His claim is that a pre-Saussurean dictionary, e.g. the OED (and the OED2 is not much different), is one that is centred on the individual word and its existence as a discrete unit, and does not focus on the lexical and linguistic system. Apparently, Saussure’s views left the trade of lexicography unaffected as they “filtered through, little by little, without causing any great revolution”, and his notion that a word is best seen in the “multi-faceted contexts of its paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations” were not acted upon for a long period of time (Béjoint 2000:173). Béjoint complains that this insight is just beginning to be implemented. Of course, this passage and the criticism dates back to Béjoint (1994), when it was more legitimate; it is just during around this time that English lexicography, learner’s dictionaries in particular, started to prove “truly Saussurean”.

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In 1989, Hausmann (1989:342; quoted in Béjoint 2000:174) still had to complain that too many dictionaries “make do with definitions, and neglect verb patterns, collocations, synonyms, and antonyms, not to mention morphosemantic paradigms”. Dictionaries, then, were still far from the Saus- surean ideal.

2.4.7.1 Országh (1967) sees Saussure’s langue “crowded out of dictionaries” More than twenty years before Hausmann, Országh complains (1967) about the same shortcoming. He claims that the broadening of the quantitative scope [of (monolingual) dictionaries] “has not always gone hand in hand with a corresponding all-round deepening of linguistic information. The more frequent and common words of the language have in most English dictionaries not always and in every respect received that many-sided treatment that is due to them in view of their importance [...]. The truly vital components of a language are its frequent common words and their variable associations in sentences. Yet the association-patterns of words, the “social life of words”, the langue of de Saussure has for a long time been almost crowded out of dictionaries by matters of relatively less importance and seems only now to be gradually coming into its own in a few modern English lexicographic works. There is still a great danger that even in the largest monolingual explanatory English dictionaries one may lose sight of the wood for the trees [...]. A new type of an English dictionary is needed, because our conception of the semantic role of words has undergone certain changes in the course of the last few decades. We now like to think of words not as independent entities, but rather as coordinated elements of larger structures, as linked constituents of utterances. (Országh 1967:485) Országh provides a list of the principal deficiencies of modern English monolingual dictionaries which are responsible for the “hortus siccus of words” that they provide instead of the “linguistic diorama showing the natural habitat of words in depth”. A new type of English dictionary, which “need not aim at comprehensiveness in vocabulary”, should include, among other things: phraseology, i.e.: (i) the smallest group of “idiomatic locutions, or immutable phrases” (such as cut corners ); (ii) the very large group of “standing combinations”, mostly open compounds, “prefabricated constructional elements” (such as command performance ); (iii) “word associations through frequency” (e.g. in the entry for (the ‘apparatus’ kind of machine , the adjectives complicated , obsolete ; knitting , sewing ; verbs of which machine is the subject, such as be out of order , function , go ; verbs of which machine is the frequent object, e.g. adjust , install ); (iii) the emotive connotations of the words and their combinations (Országh 1967:486–493) To be sure, the issue of whether infrequent words are indeed “matters of relatively less importance” even in learners’ dictionaries is no easy question. It is often argued that it is just those rare words that users look up most. Országh’s “plea”, outlining some solutions to the shortcomings of existing dictionaries, was a veritable charting of the future for the learner’s dictionary, which was to be rich in phraseology, word combinations, and collocations. It thus captured a moment when dictionaries were beginning to be “truly Saussurean” or (if that would not entirely come before Sinclair’s Co- build project – cf. Sinclair 1990; Sinclair 1991; Sinclair 1998; Sinclair 2004; Moon 2007), then at least the need was felt for them to be brought in line with Saussurean linguistics. One cannot help feeling that this may be the last moment of such, potential rather than actual, synergy between linguistics and lexicography.

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2.4.7.2 Ground for optimism concerning the linguistics/lexicography liaison? The currents from generative linguistics, which has aimed at the potentialities of language rather in the field of the lexicon as well, influenced lexicography even less than structuralism: Hanks (1990) goes as far as to claim that “the Chomskyan revolution... passed by pretty well unnoticed, at least as far as lexicography in English is concerned” (Hanks 1990:31; quoted in Béjoint 2000:175) As linguistics grew more and more distant from observed language, it was bound (to be both able and willing) to offer less and less help to lexicography. A revitalized interest in semantics – prototypes, categorization, polysemy research etc. – may generate a revitalized interest in lexicography, but not necessarily. At the time of Béjoint (2000) – or back in 1994, the time of the first edition – it seemed that modern semantics had not had any impact on practical dictionary-making yet. It is not at all clear in the light of this (and of many of the claims made above on their relationship) how, after all this, Béjoint reaches the conclusion that “lexicography and linguistics are now inex- tricably mixed”, and that “no modern lexicographer can afford to ignore what linguistics has to offer” (Béjoint 2000:177). Béjoint quotes Geeraerts, who points out that for lexicography, “the principles of language are merely one among a number of parameters that determine the shape dictionaries take” (Geeraerts 1989:287). Béjoint quotes McCawley, who reminds us that the “relationship of linguistic theory to lexicography [...] must be highly indirect if the lexicographer and the pedagogue are to accomplish anything” (McCawley 1986:165); this explicitly sanctions any more direct liaison between the two. Hudson offers a radical, and indeed unflattering, explanation: “The basic problem is that any of us linguists is also a citizen, with the same experi- ences as any other typical citizen. We all have dictionaries on our shelves [...]. These dictionaries are of course the traditional commercial ones, which have various structural characteristics. One is that they distinguish between ‘the dictionary’ and ‘the grammar’, the latter being either printed in summary as an appendix, or left out altogether. I think it is at least partly because of this institutionalised distinction that so many theoretical linguists are convinced that human language has a similar organisa- tion: it consists of a set of rules plus a lexicon. [...] What I am suggesting, then, is that folk linguistics contains various ideas about the lexicon, alias dictionary, which are at least in part founded on the traditional practice of lexicographers. Any linguist brought up in a culture where these folk ideas are prevalent is likely to be infected by them in early life and must beware of building them, without critical examination, into their professional thinking . And forward- looking lexicographers must be even more careful not to mistake ideas which originated in traditional lexicography for carefully considered and researched tenets of scientific linguistics. I applaud any attempt by a lexicographer to learn from linguistics [...] in the hope of being able to move towards radically new and better kinds of dictionary; but it would be tragic if the effect of this contact with linguistics was just to tie lexicographers even more firmly to their own tradition”. (Hudson 1988:287; italics are mine) Béjoint does not exclude the possibility that Hudson’s explanation above is valid: he suggests that if Hudson is right, then “the lexicographers who turn to linguistics for help may actually be given ideas that in fact originated in their own lexicographical traditions” (Béjoint 2000:178).

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Although many scholars – Hudson among them – have for some time subscribed to some form of the view that language is not so neatly organized into lexicon and grammar, it is unconvincing that the traditional rigid compartmentalization should be put down to this naïve world view of ‘folk linguistics’ that Hudson suggests. Identifying the root of a scientific evil by claiming that some scientific approach has gone wrong because its practitioners did not have enough critical “professional thinking” to get rid of such naïve “folk ideas” that have simply grown on them is not just a plain insult but hardly a probable explanation anyway.

2.5 Lexicon into dictionary

2.5.1 Checklist for dictionary design: Hudson’s “types of lexical fact”

Hudson’s “The Linguistic Foundations for Lexical Research and Dictionary-Design” (1988) 16 offers a “check-list of types of lexical fact” in its Appendix, which aims to “cover all the information which could be considered for inclusion in an all-inclusive lexicon”. “Any attempt to model psychological reality must take account of this broad range of knowledge-types; but so must any lexicographer whose purpose is to make accessible all the kinds of knowledge which a typical native speaker has (and which is needed if typical native speech is to be simulated either by a non-native or by a machine). […] The structure of the list is not meant to have much significance – I have argued elsewhere that some of the divisions which I exploit here, such as that between syntax and morphology are inherently vague and should not be made to carry much weight.” Hudson (1988:310) A lot more is surely known about psychological reality today, but not as much as to invalidate Hud- son’s claims. It appears that in Hudson’s original conception, the lexicographer’s aims include the making accessible of the native speaker’s knowledge. This can only mean inclusion in a monolingual native speaker dictionary. The typical native speaker’s knowledge may be targeted in the broad category of “portrait dictionaries” (Béjoint 1994:107), but certainly not in “instrument dictionaries”; and both monolingual learner’s and bilingual dictionaries belong to the latter type. It is not clear from this otherwise highly serviceable checklist, nor quite from the article itself, what Hudson means by “making accessible all the kinds of knowledge”: whether this refers to the inclusion of pieces of this knowledge as headword, of some as information within entries, possibly in the front matter, or possibly in some less explicit form, such as the grammatical groundwork of a dictionary, which is hardly visible to the user but undoubtedly transpires through most of its policy decisions. Hudson himself, who refers to the paper “What linguists might contribute to dictionary-making if they could get their act together” by McCawley (1986), argues that linguists in some of the better- known schools haven’t yet “got their act together” on a number of questions which are of crucial concern to dictionary making. Hudson says that “most lexicographers are already aware of these achievements of linguistics”, so he has little to say about them, and that “[i]n case a check-list of lexical knowledge is of interest”, he has included one as an appendix to the paper”. He adds, how-

16 The paper was based on one prepared for a workshop ‘On automating the lexicon’ in 1986, nearly a quarter of a century ago now.

85 Chapter Two ever, that “it is much more important to warn lexicographers against taking too seriously some very general claims of linguists that touch on their work” (Hudson 1988:287). I could not agree more that most of Hudson’s remarks still hold water; the better part of the present study argues just along those lines. As far as content is concerned, in a few places, Hudson’s explanatory remarks to easily identifiable concepts as well as his more idiosyncratic notions have been omitted. This has been marked by omission signs. I have altered the format of the “checklist”. In the table, Hudson’s categories are listed on the left; their lexicographic treatment and notes have added on the right. Section 4 of Hudson’s list, “Semantics”, contained quite a few items where it was not quite clear to me what he was referring to. Also, since this list mostly concerned information only implicitly featured in dictionaries, I have omitted it altogether (shading marks its original place). In those (indeed few) cases where unambiguous /+/ or /–/ answers can be given, only these are provided. Wherever a longer comment is needed, numbers are provided and the comments follow below the table. Hudson does not claim universality (although he uses a non-English example at one point). The table presented here, however, only concerns English dictionaries, but of various types; these are referred to in the Notes.

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2.5.2. Hudson (1988) tabulated

Hudson’s label Treated in Notes the dictionary*?

1. Phonology underlying segment structure; or several such structures + segmental analysis: transcrip- if allomorphs are stored rather than computed tion; “storage vs. computation” indifferent prosodic patterns of word (to the extent that there are no + stress: transcription; irresp. of rules for computing these) – i.e. mainly word-stress or whether there are “rules for tone computing these” 2. Morphology structure in terms of morphemes […] – No information in any form at all about many different kinds of word formation irregular morphological structures linked to particular + for variable word classes: N, V, morpho-syntactic features (i.e. irregular inflections) Adj, (Adverb) partial similarities to other words – 1 (in the case of derived words or compounds) cliticizing properties (i.e. whether or not the word con- – 2 cerned may be used as a clitic or as host of a clitic) 3. Syntax general word-class (e.g. ‘verb’) + see next box sub-class (e.g. ‘auxiliary’) +/– 3 The class vs. subclass distinction emerges with nouns and verbs obligatory morpho-syntactic features (e.g. beware ) + ideally/mostly valency: deviant position of dependent + ideally/mostly (e.g. someone etc) deviant position of head (e.g. enough ) + ideally/mostly class of dependent (e.g. object of discuss is a N) +/– class of head (e.g. head of very is an ad-word) – 4 morpho-syntactic features of dependent + 5 ideally/mostly (e.g. objective of folgen is dative) morpho-syntactic features of head (?)** lexical identity of dependent +/– 6 (e.g. high-degree-modifier of drunk is blind ) lexical identity of head (e.g. [ ] … neutral +/– ideally/mostly prepositional head of foot is on ) semantic identity of dependent + 7 implied by example/translation (e.g. dependent of herd refers to a set of cows) semantic identity of head – 8 implied by example/translation (e.g. head of each refers to a distributed event) semantic identity of dependent if optional and absent – argument structure information (e.g. He shaved = ‘He shaved himself’) is usually not featured 4. Semantics — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

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5. Context restrictions relating to immediate social structure + usually given by labels (e.g. power/solidarity markers) restrictions relating to style (e.g. ‘formal’, ‘slang’) + usually given by labels restrictions relating to larger social structure + usually given by labels (e.g. speaker classification) restrictions relating to discourse structure + given by (label) / exam- (e.g. topic-change markers) ple / translation 6. Spelling normal orthography + usual medium; variants also marked standard abbreviations or ideographs + have headword status inflectional irregularities in spelling +/– specially provided 7. Etymology and language ? 9 the language to which the word belongs (in a bilingual dictionary) the language from which it is ‘borrowed’ the word on which it is ‘based’ the date when it was ‘borrowed’ 8. Usage frequency and familiarity +/– 10 age of acquisition +/– 11 particular occasions on which the word was used – 12 clichés containing the word +/– 13 taboos + if given, by labels (better placed under 5. Context)

* Unless otherwise indicated, English general dictionaries are meant. *The parenthetical (?) sign is Hudson’s own, with no explanation offered.

1 I do not quite see what Hudson refers to here; certainly nothing like this is done explicitly. The diverse morphemes themselves, when included as headwords at all, receive diverse treatment. 2 “Cliticization” is not part of the everyday linguistic vocabulary (consisting mainly of standard names of PoS’s). Phenomena of cliticization will be under the heading “contraction”; con- tracted forms are obviously entered, but the possibility of contraction is not marked in the relevant entries. 3 I do not think native speakers have explicit ideas about the classes, let alone the class vs. subclass distinction. The classes may have some intuitive basis, but certainly not more than that; implicitly, of course, native speakers know “all” about the finest subclasses as well. Also, I doubt that any dictionary makes these subclasses explicit anywhere. 4 I find this too abstract/technical to claim that some information like this is in the native grammar on a par with the rest of these items. Implicitly, of course, unlike the learner, the native speaker knows that very does not combine with a non-ad-word (e.g. with a verb, with which it does in Hungarian, a potential source of error, cf. nagyon esik ‘rain hard’, lit. ‘very rain’). 5 Interestingly, Hudson never moves outside English throughout the list, just on this point of Ger- man Case.

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6 A little of this will necessarily be included in all good native speaker dictionaries; some, in collocational dictionaries; this information will be aimed at in its entirety in the Meaning ↔Text model. 7 This, of course, is not given explicitly in bilingual dictionaries: the supplying of the Hungarian csorda equivalent for herd does not generate this knowledge (as indeed the dependent of herd may not only refer to cows but sheep as well, while that of csorda may only refer to cows). 8 It is difficult to guess what degree of explicitness Hudson has in mind, but I suspect that a – sign is in order. Also, there will be very different kinds of head with very disparate kinds of semantic specifications. 9 I do not quite see what Hudson may refer to, especially since none of this is part of the native speaker’s knowledge. 10 Frequency information (of headwords, not senses) is often included (and is discussed in several places in the present study). I do not know what is meant by “familiarity”: if it is a statistical notion, it is not separable from frequency; if it is a “style” label, it has a better place in 5. Con- text above. 11 This may be, but rarely is in dictionaries, suggested by labels such as “child’s usage”, “caretaker language” or “motherese”. 12 A cultural dictionary, for example, may make a point of illustrating much of its lexicon with a lot of such detail. 13 Clichés may be included in most dictionaries, as may idioms and all sorts of what are referred to as “listemes” in 2.6 below.

2.6 Lexicon into dictionary: listing in the lexicon vs. the dictionary

2.6.1 Listedness and listemes

2.6.1.1 “E-lexicon” vs. “I-lexicon” Dictionaries (that is, E-lexicons, to use a term based on one of Chomsky’s notions that may have fallen out of favour with himself 17 , but certainly very helpful for my purposes) are not meant to be models of anything, unlike grammars of every hue: descriptive, generative, contrastive or pedagogical. Most of them are certainly not designed to model the lexicon. Since in general, “[a] dictionary is not a theoretical construct, [...] a list of words, each word being provided with a description serving primarily practical purposes” (Kiefer 1990), monolingual native-speaker dictionaries and bilingual ones are certainly not models of the lexicon, and specialized ones even less so. One series of dictionaries, best referred to using the name of the project under whose umbrella they have been compiled, the “Meaning ↔Text model of language”, may be an exception 18 . But neither does the “Meaning ↔Text” model look to explicitly model the workings of the mental lexicon; rather, it differs from standard E-dictionaries in terms of quantity, quality, and granularity of its data.

17 Cf. Andor (2004). 18 Apresyan et al. (1969); Mel’ čuk (1984); Mel’čuk & Žolkovskij (1984); Mel’čuk & Žolkovskij (1988); Mackenzie & Mel’ čuk (1988); Mel’ čuk (1988); Mel’ čuk (1998); Apresjan (2001).

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The dissimilarities between the mental dictionary and print dictionaries, as is well-known, are supposed to be of both organization and content (Aitchison 1994:10). While the mental lexicon, or “I- lexicon” is in constant flux, dictionaries are by definition conservative due to technical reasons, even with the most advanced technology. Speakers’ lexicons are not static, and not unstructured: the structure of a lexicon far exceeds that of any dictionary; it is often conceptualized as a network of sorts, of items displaying phonological, semantic, morphological (and other) similarities. While the lexicon is far richer in information than the dictionary, even general dictionaries often contain encyclopaedic – both linguistic and non-linguistic – information that, in turn, is not part of linguistic competence. Etymology is a case in point. Ironically, the main reasons why average English- speaking users consult their dictionaries are to check spellings, and check “hard words”; if that is so, they deem themselves less competent in spelling, and difficult lexical matters; these are certainly not at the core of their competence ). As Crystal (1987) puts it: “Dictionaries are traditionally meant to solve our lexical problems – check on spelling, or a meaning, or (if you’re a Scrabbler) to establish whether a word exists at all. It is a close encounter of the briefest kind: you open the book, find the word, check the point, and close the book” Crystal (1987:vii). Crystal’s remarks focus on native speaker dictionaries, and since bilingual ones have always served more purposes , they are always longer encounters than that. The notion of “the dictionary” has been enormously expanded since by the completely different world of learner’s dictionaries. The lexicon, unlike most dictionaries, has some (arguably approximate, and never up-to-the-minute) frequency information, which, however, is not encyclopaedic in the sense that the speaker appears to use it in linguistic production, and, being part of linguistic competence, can be made explicit – e.g. experimentally. The other lexicon, the entire lexical stock, or “word stock” of a speech community is referred to in the present study as the vocabulary. Bauer (2004) uses “lexicon” in a rather broad sense when he writes that the lexicon is either in the heads of speakers or “shared by speakers of a single language variety” (Bauer 2004:66). It is the “social construct”, i.e., the vocabulary that is being meant when the claim is made that “a dictionary will never provide a full coverage of the lexicon due to practical limitations of size and requirements of user-friendliness and because the lexicon is expanding and changing daily” (Booij, 2007:18; italics mine) Since these public word stocks of languages are even more complex phenomena than the individual mental lexicons of their speakers, it must be obvious that contra Booij it is not just the practical kind of limitation that stops dictionaries from covering them in their entirety. The dictionary, then, is not meant to model either the lexicon or the vocabulary, but may be seen as a device that documents, represents, or portraits the latter. An ever more widely held notion must be noted here: that speakers also have an “encyclopaedia”, in addition to the I-dictionary, at their disposal; Keith (2001:99), for example, contends that this encyclopaedia contains the mental lexicon. If our world knowledge is seen as containing linguistic knowledge, this is far from implausible. Although it is customary to classify E-dictionaries in terms of more or less encyclopaedic, they characteristically do not represent this encyclopaedic knowledge. Besides, a lot – probably most – of the world knowledge that makes human existence possible is never documented in either encyclopaedias or dictionaries. The relationship between this I-encyclopaedia and E-encyclopaedias is presumably similar to, and undoubtedly not less challenging than, that between I-lexicons and E-lexicons.

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There is largely agreement on both the lexicon and the dictionary being metaphorically conceptu- alizable as some kind of list ; there is not even broad concord about the content or the shape of this. This chapter, which looks at aspects of listedness, takes a rough inventory of the entities stored in the lexicon and the print dictionary.

Three caveats are in order here. One is that there is much controversy concerning listedness, and related problems of storage and retrieval, if one surveys the more relevant psycholinguistic literature. Since the present study has nothing to contribute to that area (and nothing to say about the structure of mental lexicon entries, their links, the exact nature of information contained in them, including the question of whether the word’s phonetic shape is represented separately from the syntactic and semantic information), it is to be expected that even the broadest claims made will be highly tentative .

The second is that the present chapter, and presumably the notion of listeme itself, is only relevant in some linear morphological model . Fortunately, Hungarian and English are predominantly like that.

The third, that a neat, and not necessarily justified, separation of linguistic levels will have to be assumed at the outset to make cataloguing possible.

The lexicon is supposed to be a repository of whatever the speaker stores here and retrieves from here; it will be stressed, then, that any arbitrary sound–meaning pairings unpredictable for any reason are listemes. “Arbitrary”, in this approach is effectively synonymous with “unpredictable”; “arbitrary” is usually applied with reference to words and not to other lexical items, but since the term implies that there is no link between form and meaning, it should be valid at any lexical level, from compounds to all multiword units. When any expression above the morpheme level is unpredictable either semantically or formally, it may be considered an idiom.

2.6.1.2 Origins of the term “listing” The concept of “listing”, if not the term itself, is widely believed to have been introduced in Aro- noff (1976:45), where it is claimed that linguistics owes the notion to Zimmer, who was “the first person to suggest that productive and unproductive classes could be distinguished by claiming that only members of the latter were listed in the lexicon”. The original source, then, is Zimmer (1964). Under the notion of listedness, if a word had idiosyncratic properties, it was supposed to be listed in the lexicon. Listedness here, then, only concerned words , and only a subset of words. Whatever was idiosyncratic was necessarily a listeme; whatever was regular was not. Aronoff’s example were the -ness words, which “must not be listed” unless they were irregular. He did not use “listeme” or “listedness”; the former was first used in Di Sciullo & Williams (1987). The wording “ must not be lexically listed” may seem to only make sense in dictionaries but not in the lexicon, for which “need not be listed” seems appropriate. The form “ must not” does, however, make sense if (i) it is shorthand for “must not be listed in the model of the lexicon”, or (ii) it really bans the listing of anything redundant in the memory for reasons of economy. Today it appears that there is a lot of memorization in the case of regulars as well (Altmann 1998; Martin, Newsome & Vu 2002; Plag 2006; Windisch Brown 2008).

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2.6.1.3 On the mental lexicon Altmann (1998:1ff) 19 warns that “the history of science is littered with examples that do not work. Often, they are simply inappropriate, simply wrong, or simply confusing. But even when inappropriate, they can prove useful. For instance, it is not unnatural to think of our knowledge about the words in our language as residing in some sort of dictionary. The [...] OED, all twenty volumes of it, is as good an example as any – its purpose is to provide, for each entry, a spelling, a pronunciation, one or more definitions, general knowledge about the word itself, and perhaps a quotation or two. Getting to this information is relatively efficient. [...] on CD-ROM [...] you do not even need to scan down the page [...] just type in the word and, and up pops everything you ever wanted to know about it. But [...] the analogy between accessing a written dictionary and accessing the mental lexicon is at best fragile . [But] it provides a useful starting point from which to proceed, using a vocabulary that is easily understood to describe a process (accessing the mental lexicon) that is easily misunderstood. [...] At least a conventional dictionary can be imagined, and is therefore a useful place from which to start our exploration of the mental equivalent. Most importantly of all, the questions one can ask of a dictionary such as the OED, and the questions one can ask of the mental lexicon, are remarkably similar. The answers, can be surprisingly different.” The fact that [the mental lexicon and the OED] are different does not mean that they are necessarily used any differently – for instance, the OED in book form could hardly be more different from the OED on CD-ROM, and yet there are aspects of their use which are common to both of them.” While searching the paper dictionary, we do not burden our minds with the “neighbours” of words, that is, when “accessing the dictionary [..] we will encounter, during the search, other words that share certain features with the word we are ultimately interested in finding, whether they share their spelling, pronunciation, rhyme, shape, length, or frequency. (Altmann 1998:4; italics mine) In the mental lexicon, however, we do access, or activate (the meanings of) the neighbouring words that we encounter. It is far from obvious how all this may happen, but Altmann claims that “it is unclear how things could possibly happen any other way”. (Altmann 1998:4). Explaining why “activate” information is better as a term than “access” information, Altmann reminds us that all the information in the mental lexicon is stored within the neural structures of the brain. “[N]othing is accessed; it is activated. And although we might just as well continue to refer to lexical entries, [...] the mental lexicon is in fact a collection of highly complex neural circuits”. (Altmann 1998:6). Altmann argues that not just words but morphemes also have their own lexical representation. “the relationship between ‘walking’ and ‘talking’, and between ‘entrapment’ and ‘enhancement’ can be explained in terms of the words sharing morphemes that each contribute to the meaning in a way that is specific to that morpheme.” (Altmann 1998:18)

19 The page numbers for Altmann (1998) that are given here refer to Ch 6: only this chapter is available.

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Words such as apartment and department , however, are not morphologically complex in the same way that words like enhancement and entrapment are, because enhancement and entrapment are related to enhance and entrap respectively, but apartment and department are not related to apart and depart , respectively. On hearing the initial sounds of enhance , the mind activates the entry for enhance (i.e. the entry corresponding to the stem, which includes the activation of its meaning). Towards the end of the sound sequence it will anticipate a number of possibilities that will include the subsequent morpheme -ment . If the subsequent acoustic input matches this morpheme, its activation increases. If it does not, then the mismatch decreases the activation. For words like apartment , after hearing the sequence ‘apart’, two lexical entries are activated: one corresponding to apart , and one corresponding to the still unfolding but unrelated apartment . Crucially, the -ment in apartment is not interpreted as a distinct morpheme (Altmann 1998:18–19). It could well be that all this linguistic activity really belongs with the happy hunting ground of psychology and not linguistics ; and theoretical constructs such as “lexical entry” may well be jettisoned. Lexicography, however, is going to continue needing some – more traditional – foundation.

Altmann (2001) is a review that takes a broad look at how psycholinguistics has developed from the turn of the 20th century through to the turn of the 21st. Of its observations only those concerning “storage and retrieval” and within it, the representation of morphologically complex words, will be focussed on. Altmann’s references, some of which have been left out and marked by [...], are not included in the References at the end. How are morphologically complex words, composed of a root and one or more affixes, represented in the mental lexicon? “[It has been ] argued that the root word is located (through a process of ‘affix strip- ping’), and then a list of variations on the root word is then searched through [...]. [E]xtensive evidence [has been provided] to suggest that polymorphemic words are represented in terms of their constituent morphemes [...]. However, the evidence also suggests that morphologically complex words which are semantically opaque are represented as if they were monomorphemic (the meaning of ‘casualty’, e.g., is not related to ‘causal’, hence the opaqueness). Thus some morphologically complex words are represented in their decomposed form (as distinct and independent morphemes), while others are not.” Altmann (2001:140) What determines whether a word is represented in decomposed or whole-word form? “[S]emantic transparency, productivity (whether other inflected forms can also be derived), frequency and language [...] In respect of the access of these forms, for phonologically transparent forms, such as ‘reviewer’, the system will first activate, on the basis of ‘review’, the corresponding stem. It will then activate some abstract representation corresponding to the subsequent suffix ‘er’, and the combination of these two events will cause the activation of the corresponding meaning. For phonologically opaque forms, such as ‘vanity’ (from ‘vain’), the phonetically different forms of the same stem would map directly onto (and cause the activation of) that abstract representation of the stem (making the strong prediction, hitherto untested, that the sequence /van/ should prime not only ‘lorry’, but also ‘conceit’). ... “Theories concerning the acquisition, representation and processing of inflectional affixes (e.g. ‘review’ + affix ‘ed’ = past tense ‘reviewed’) have been particularly controversial.” Altmann (2001:140–141)

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2.6.1.4 Must or may be listed? Most of the psycholinguistic literature seems to suggest that the definition that “whatever is irregular is listed, whatever is regular is not; it is computed on the spot” only holds in one direction. If a form is irregular, or idiosyncratic, it will indeed be stored in the memory, but many – the more frequent – regular forms are also stored, since their retrieval can be faster, and their storage more “cost-effective” than generating them online. It is an often neglected aspect of this storage that without such storage of regular forms the general pattern could not emerge in the first place, as pointed up in Taylor (2003:643). Booij (2007) even claims that “a correct model [of morphological knowledge] has to allow for the storage of regular inflectional forms” (Booij 2007:244). Dictionar- ies, to be sure, need not be concerned with whether regular forms are or are not listed in the mental lexicon – dictionaries do not, as a rule, list them. The treatment of irregular forms, however, reflects their mental listedness. Since anywhere above the level of morphemes only complex units are found (although whether this complexity is provided by the morphology or the syntax depends on the language in question), in the study of listedness the basic dichotomy is “constructed ↔ unconstructed”. Simplexes are necessarily listemes, while complex units may be – but usually are not. The ratio of listed to unlisted forms will also depend on morphological type. An extreme example that illuminates this is that for what is termed a “full listing” of 20,000 nominal and 10,000 verbal roots of the lexicon of Turkish, two hundred billion inflectional forms would have to be stored (according to Hankamer 1989, cited in Katamba 2005:242). An English learner of Turkish will obviously not want to search for most of these inflected forms in a Turkish–English dictionary, but suppletive forms do have to be listed when their shape is so different from the rest of the paradigm that finding them otherwise would be impossible.

2.6.2 Listedness in the lexicon: the traditional rank scale

Traditionally, one of the divisions that may be postulated for linguistics is as follows: phonology/phonetics; morphology; syntax. It is far from obvious a priori that this division is theoretically justified; it may well be, for example, that the rules for the combination of morphemes are the same as the rules of combinations for words. If so, no real distinction between morphology and syntax is justified. It is also conceivable that some such division may be justified, but not this one: e.g. part of “today’s” morphology is “really” part of phonology, but not all of it. The segmentation of speech signals may be done at various layers and with various levels of “graininess”: of these, lexicography represents all the traditional layers but focuses on the middle ones. Because of this, it is the traditional picture that is conveniently assumed for the purposes of the present study. Listedness, in the definition above, applies to the entire scale of meaningful linguistic entities, in a sense much broader than originally used by Aronoff (1976). On the traditional “grammatical rank scale” of morphemes, words, phrases and clauses (Halliday 1985/1994), listed must be whichever of these are stored in and retrieved from the speaker’s memory rather than generated ab novo . It is obvious that in this rank scale all four items do contain listemes. As a rough approximation, it is probably true that morphemes are necessarily listemes; some, perhaps most, words must be; many phrases and a small part of clauses are listemes. This treatment, as has been suggested above, obviously presupposes the separation of these ranks for expository purposes. These four ranks, along with certain peripheral items which will be emerging as the discussion enfolds, will be explored from the point of view of listedness. In the remainder of this chapter, an inventory of these items on the grammatical rank scale will be offered. The picture is the least controversial within the category of morphemes; the most controversy is expected within the (not always easily separable) categories of words and phrases, and within the

94 Chapter Two broad category of phraseological, or multiword, expressions. Since there is listedness both below and at the level of words as well as above the word level, the question must be addressed of what kinds of morphemes, words, phrases and clauses are characterized most by listing. The overly simplified picture – ignoring, among other things, (i) the twilight zone around words, (ii) the fact that there exist linguistic elements other than those on the grammatical rank scale, i.e., belonging within the grammatical system, (iii) the fact that not everything that may be listed must be – is as follows in tabulated form: listeme? morphemes all words most phrases many sentences fewer

2.6.3 Below the level of words

Morphemes, as unpredictable minimal form–meaning units, are all listemes by definition. This feature of morphemes is independent of the traditional “bound vs. free” and “derivational vs. inflectional” distinction. Whether meaning components of morphemes exist, i.e. whether morphemes are or are not atoms semantically , is not relevant for us. If these ostensible meaning components do not correspond to formal ones, then for the present analysis they have virtually no existence. Componential analysis may (have) be(en) relevant for semantics, but is surely irrelevant for lexicography. Morphemes that have no conventional meaning just function, i.e. are not form–meaning units, will be lexicographically almost non-existent, at least for everyday dictionaries of a more modest coverage. Thus, while giant portrait dictionaries such as RHUD and MWUD do enter (if without any label) the interfix -o- , average native speaker dictionaries typically do not list such formatives:

• RHUD (1999) -o- the typical ending of the first element of compounds of Greek origin (as -i- is, in compounds of Latin origin), used regularly in forming new compounds with elements of Greek origin and often used in English as a connective irrespective of etymology: Franco-Italian ; geography; seriocomic; speedometer . Cf. -i- . [ME (< OF) < L < Gk]

• MWUD (2000) -o- Etymology: ME, from OFr, from L, from Gk, thematic vowel of many nouns and adjectives in combination used as a connective vowel originally to join two elements of Greek origin and now also to join two elements of Latin or other origin and being either identical with < chrysoprase > or analogous to an original Greek stem vowel or simply inserted < jazzophile > < dramatico- musical > compare -I-

2.6.3.1 Morpheme boundary types Morphemes are not a unitary group in multiple ways; under one classification, English affixes have been claimed to belong to two (phonologically distinct) types from the relevant point of view 20 : affixes with a (a) # (cross hatch) boundary: e.g. un# , re# and #s – as in un#natural, re#use, nation#s (b) + (plus sign) boundary: e.g. in+ , re+ and + al – as in in+numerable, re+duce, nation+al

20 The original notion behind this classification of morphemes – never embraced by the majority of researchers, and modified heavily and repeatedly since – is based on Kiparsky (1982), Halle & Mohanan (1985) and Mohanan (1986).

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Affixes of the “#” type are supposed to typically attach to free roots ( #natural , # use , nation #), while “+” affixes may attach to bound roots as well ( +numerable , + duce , nation +). Roots of the “#” type and affixes of the “#” type are probably both listemes. The productivity of some “#” type derivational affixes (and concomitantly the transparency of the words produced from them) may be as high as that of inflections. The listedness of bound roots of the “+” type and of “+” type bound affixes, by contrast, cannot be summarily given, but can probably be characterized by a cline. At one extreme of the listedness continuum of “+” bound roots, under this assumption, are found those that have an easily recognizable free variant , and which thus have a more transparent meaning (e.g. nation +). At the other extreme are elements of the +duce , + ceive type, which do not even owe their morpheme status to their meaning (if indeed they are morphemes), but to their morphological behaviour, i.e. allomor- phic variability. The “+” type bound affixes are probably not listed. In this sense, they do not have as independent a (psycho)linguistic existence as the listed ones.

2.6.3.2 The dictionary need only list derived, not inflected forms?

2.6.3.2.1 Hungarian nagyot and sokat : straddling inflection and derivation

Forms such as the H. nagyot ‘hard; intensively’ (as e.g. in swallow hard ) and sokat ‘a lot; a lot of times’, which are considered as marginal exceptions, can be looked upon as lexicalized accusative forms of the adjectives nagy ‘large’ and sok ‘lot’, respectively. (The H. adverb nagyon ‘very’ is itself a locative-suffixed form of nagy ‘big’) This obviously results in listing. Because, however, this process involves category change, listing is also inevitable, since this is a derivational not an inflectional process. The entries of nagyot and sok below are from MASz (2000); nagyot has its own entry. The entries are slightly edited: nagyot – nagyot esik fall RH heavily , have a bad fall nagyot lép take RH a long step nagyot üt strike RH heavily nagyot halad make RH good/great progress The analogous sokat , unfortunately, has not been accorded headword status in MASz (2000): the relevant meaning of sokat is buried deep within the sok entry (which would be quite a huge one without this) with the consequence that is hardly discernible at all. The relevant expression has been underlined; the KIFEJEZÉSEKBEN [‘in expressions’] section has been removed. sok 1. [megszámlálható:] many, a lot of, a large number of, numerous, a host of sok száz several hundred, hundreds of smth sok ember many people, lots of people, a large number of people elég sok quite a lot sokban különbözik differ in many respects/ways sok tekintetben in many respects/ways 2. [nem megszámlálható:] much, a lot of, plenty of, a great deal of sok tej much / a lot of milk sok ideje van have a lot of time nincs sok ideje not have a lot of time, haven’t got a lot of time, be pushed/pressed for time elég sok quite a lot sok id őt vesz igénybe it takes smb a long time, it’s very time-consuming sok pénze van have a lot of money, have heaps/wads/tons of money sok fáradságba kerül take RH smb a lot of trouble/effort sokat a lot, a great deal sokat ér be precious/valu- able tíz fonttal ma nem mész sokra ten pounds goes nowhere now sokat ígér ő promising sokat képzel magáról be full of oneself túl sokat enged meg magának go RH to liberties, have the audacity to do smth sokba kerül cost RH a lot sokban hozzájárul contribute a great deal to smth sokkal jobb be a lot better […] While inflections are supposed (i) to be highly productive, applying to all (eligible) roots of a word class; (ii) to be semantically transparent; (iii) not to change word class, derivation is not necessarily productive, does not necessarily produce semantically transparent expressions, and may change

96 Chapter Two word class 21 . The simple view is a commonly held one that dictionaries do enter, as headwords, derived forms (i.e. different lexemes) but not inflected forms.

This simplistic claim is clearly disproved by many bilingual, including E →H dictionaries. Most irregular English forms – past forms, plurals and comparatives – are of course (likely to be) given, as these have their rightful place in monolingual works, too. The likes of went , men and better will not be absent in them; these entries, however, will just refer further to the canonical forms.

The H →E part of any larger dictionary, if it is to prove useful to the non-Hungarian user 22 , may actually contain a daunting number of such irregular Hungarian forms. However, because irregularity is more typical, in addition to the paradigms being much more varied, than in English, the consistent registering of all unpredictable forms would be near impossible: the forms mész ‘go 2SG ’, menj ‘go SG IMPER .’ and many similar ones, even the infinitive menni itself, are unguessable from megy ‘go 3SG ’, the canonical lemma form. The non-Hungarian user, then, is expected to have just the right amount of grammatical knowledge to know the (less wayward) verbal, nominal and adjectival paradigms. The forms that are usually entered are the irregular/suppletive ones (the distinction between which is but a matter of degree, this proving to be a domain where clines rather than crisp either–or relations hold), even if some of these are not more difficult to guess than the regularly inflected ones. The form több ‘more’ (comparative of sok ‘many/much’) does indeed differ from sok in each segment, but the form ment ‘went 3sg’, e.g. is not easier to guess from the canonical megy ‘go 3SG ’ than szebb (comparative of szép ‘beautiful’) is guessable from the canonical szép – and the latter is not even irregular, let alone suppletive. (There is, incidentally, also a canonical form ment ‘save 3SG ’; this means that if all such unguessable forms as this one actually were to be included in the H →E dictionary, then for the string ment two homonymous headwords would be needed – whether in one entry or two; of these, one would just refer to canonical megy .

Focusing now on English: a similar but actually existing, and not too frequent, case is when some form can be assigned to two homophonous word classes (assuming a PoS-first and senses-second arrangement). Taking the letter sequences broke and worn as examples, there will be one adjectival (e.g. flat/stony broke ) and one irregular verb form for broke , with the latter just referring on to the infinitive break , while with worn , there is one adjectival (‘adversely affected by long use’) and one verbal entry (the “3rd form”), the latter just referring the user on to wear . This double nature of adjectival vs. verbal participle forms, as well as this referring item, is typical in bilingual dictionaries.

Nouns and adjectives are the best illustrations of this phenomenon. With verbs, the situation is different: they have irregular past forms whose separate inclusion is generally unwarranted. There is usually little about the past tense abode or wrote that cannot be said in the abide and write entries. Participle forms, however, behave differently: being on the border of inflection and derivation, past participles such as written may have their separate entries; in such cases the pattern is similar to the homophonous broke headwords, with one referring and one self-contained written . Even idioms containing the past and past participle forms of these will be naturally entered in the canonical “plain form” entry.

21 The inflection vs. derivation distinction itself, as is often suggested, may well be trivial, or uninteresting and without predictive power, for theoretical morphology. It is, however, a relatively stable linguistic notion that is hard to sweep under the carpet in lexicology. 22 The practice, however, seems to be that they do not wish to cater to non-Hungarian, i.e. mostly English users; they are unidirectional in this sense.

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2.6.3.2.2 Adjectival and nominal illustrations: better, best, teeth

Three (adjectival and nominal) entries are given below to illustrate; the AMSz (2000) entries have been slightly edited. (i) In the case of adjectival better it would probably make no sense to list all of the following expressions in the entry good . better 1. jobb better and better egyre jobb 2. nagyobb(ik) the better part of smth a nagyobbik része vminek 3. jobban van, kevésbé beteg she is better this morning ma dél- el őtt már jobban van

KIFEJEZÉSEKBEN: better luck next time! legközelebb több sikert! / sebaj, legközelebb jobban megy majd! for better or (for) worse jóban-rosszban, történjék akármi get the better of smb legy őz, felülkerekedik vkin better the devil you know a bizonyos rossz is jobb a bizony- talanságnál Here, even if the clearing or loosening up of the better entry were the purpose of relocating the better phrases to the entry of good , moving them would not only significantly clutter up the good entry (sizeable anyway); the relative placement of these better phrases and the good expressions within the good entry would also be problematic. The better expressions simply have nothing to do with the good expressions already in the entry; there is no good expression that each of them might be attached to; listing them at the end of the entry practically means listing them separately . There is hardly room for the better expressions here:

good, better, best MNÉV 1. jó a good father jó apa […] 2. kellemes, jó have a good time jól mulat, jól érzi magát […] 3. kedves, jó, szíves it was very good of him nagyon kedves volt tőle 4. ért vmihez, jó vmiben be good at maths jó matekból […] 5. hasznos, jó, egészséges, célszer ű milk is good for you a tej egészséges […] 6. érvényes good for a month […] 7. sikeres make (it) good boldogul, sikerre viszi, befut 8. helyes, jó, erkölcsös […] 9. mennyi- ség-kifejezésekben a good deal of trouble sok / jó nagy baj […]

KIFEJEZÉSEKBEN : very good, sir! hogyne/igenis, uram! no good hasznavehetetlen no good talking about it kár a szót vesztegetni rá good for you! gratulálok! […] good on/for him! jó neki! make good jóvátesz, orvosol, pótol as good as szinte, jóformán she as good as re- fused gyakorlatilag nemet mondott as good as new majdnem új, mint újkorában so far so good eddig/idáig rendben is van/volna all in good time mindent/majd a maga idejében as good as gold olyan, mint egy angyal be as good as one’s word ura a szavának, szavatartó good and {MNÉV } teljesen, tisztára {MNÉV } I’ll come when I’m good and ready majd jövök, ha teljesen kész vagyok good and mad tiszta bolond (ii) The entries of the four different word classes of the graphic sequence best throw light on other problems as well. Let us see one by one what the possible alternatives might be to such a self-contained set of four best entries. If the nominal best were moved from this supposedly inflected-form entry to its “sister” entry, i.e. the supposedly canonical form, which is the nominal entry good in this case, then – whichever arrangement within that entry were chosen – it would make it seem that good and best are forms of the same noun . If the adjectival best were moved to its “sister” entry, that of the adjectival good , then the problems caused by moving better (discussed above) would only be multiplied: the entry would thus accommodate all of the good/better/best expressions. If the adverb best were moved to its “sister” entry, that of well (a complicated one without this move), then better would also have to be moved (above only the adjectival better was targeted.) More importantly, if all of these – nominal, adjectival and adverbial – best expressions were moved and their present entries eliminated, then the only PoS to remain under the form best would be the verbal one, having no “sister entry” to which to be moved. The dictionary would then willy-nilly claim that the only (noteworthy) best form is a verb, possibly with referring arrows sending the user on to the other three entries.

best FNÉV a legjobb [tudás/eredmény/teljesítmény] KIFEJEZÉSEKBEN : do/try one’s best megtesz/megpróbál minden t őle telhet őt to the best of one’s knowledge/ability legjobb tudása-képessége szerint look one’s best a legel őnyösebb színében mutatkozik […]

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best MNÉV 1. legjobb all the best minden jót! 2. legnagyobb the best part of smth a nagyobbik része/fele vminek, vminek a java KIFEJEZÉSEKBEN : it’s all for the best jól van ez így

best HAT .SZÓ 1. legjobban as best one can amennyire vkit ől telik 2. [összetételekben] legin- kább best-loved legjobban szeretett best-hated a legjobban gy űlölt KIFEJEZÉSEKBEN : at best legfeljebb, a legjobb esetben (is) had best [tanács kifejezése] legjobban tenné-teszi, ha {MONDAT } you had best go at once legjobb/legokosabb volna azonnal menned

best IGE legy őz, felülkerekedik vkin

(iii) In the case of teeth , there may be less reason to retain some of the expressions in the teeth entry. Encountering the plural expression, the learner/user may well check under teeth and be referred to the entry tooth . The problem here is that there are some MWEs containing the singular tooth as well; this time, size is no problem, but the relative placement of these tooth phrases and the plural teeth expressions would still be one: teeth 1. fogak tooth cut one’s teeth fogzik, jön a foga 2. hatalom, mozgástér we want to give the police more teeth több hatalmat akarunk a rend őrségnek

KIFEJEZÉSEKBEN : get/sink one’s teeth into smth lendülettel/lelkesen / teljes erejéb ől bele- kezd/belefog / beleveti magát vmibe

tooth TBSZ teeth 1. fog […] I’m going to the dentist to have a tooth out megyek a fogor- voshoz kihúzatni egy fogamat cut a tooth jön egy foga […] 2. fog [fés űn/f űrészen/fogaskeré- ken]

KIFEJEZÉSEKBEN : fight tooth and nail foggal-körömmel harcol have a sweet tooth édesszájú an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth szemet szemért, fogat fogért

A similar but by far not marginal case is the (apparent) English plurals such as scales , news , goods , which (may not be derived from anything but) clearly are not regular, predictable inflected (plural) forms. A problem with such a rule of thumb as the “include as headwords lexemes, not word forms” referred to above is that views in this regard seem to be hugely varied. (Users, of course, are unaware of the bases of these views and are thus ignorant of the motives of such decisions.) The underlying question, as in many cases, can be seen as reducible to a simple one of “meaning vs. form”: how much difference of sense and/or possibly distribution must two forms that are only inflectionally different display for these two forms to be regarded as different lexemes? It is not at all clear whether the word salts will fare better if it is buried (even with the appropriate typographical highlighting) as just a word form within the salt entry, or whether it deserves an entry of its own. When such an entry is rather long, as seen above in the good–better–best set of examples, then “buried” will unavoidably mean hard-to-find. Is either the meaning or the grammar of plural salts sufficiently different from that of the singular salt ? These individual expressions may be judged to be different semantically, but quite similar in terms of syntax, or the other way round, whichever the case may be; both views may be argued for. The problem has often been discussed in the literature with all its ramifications: Acquaviva (2008) is a book-length treatment of the relevant phenomenon, which he has termed “lexical plural nouns”. The discussion in the sections below is based on this work. It may be a policy to have plural forms like these entered separately from their singular counterparts whenever there is a “meaning shift” between them, i.e. the plural meaning is not predictable from the singular. As always with such decisions, it is questionable, however, whether users realize this kind of subtle distinction that is the basis of decisions here, i.e., whether they notice and appreciate this policy.

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A noun can be plural lexically in a variety of ways: the most obvious example (and the least revealing one) is the fixed-plural-value noun e.g. scissors . There are lexically idiosyncratic plural forms, like pence from penny . Plurals that must be learned as whole word forms, like suppletive stems, also involve knowledge about certain words and not just about grammatical morphemes (affixed or otherwise). But the empirical domain of lexical plurality is much wider. It includes plural doublets and all instances of competing plural alternants, insofar as the choice between them is not automatically determined by grammar but involves choosing between distinct senses. For those who use mice for animals and mouses for pointers, the choice between the two plurals is no more grammatically determined than that between cat and dog . Competing plural alternants often differ in form and grammar beside meaning, but even when pluralization does not involve morphologically contrasting alternants, it may affect lexical semantics to such an extent that the question whether we are dealing with one noun or two becomes unanswerable. It is not so clear that the plural that appears in she’s got the brains in the family is an inflectional form of the same word that appears in the singular as brain . After all, if brain refers to an organ, she’s got the brains does not mean that she has many cerebral organs. A plural, likewise, like waters in the river and its waters does not refer to a set of waters in the same way as books refers to a set of books. Does that make it a lexical entry distinct from the singular water ? Are pence (units of value) and pennies (coins) distinct lexical items? It depends on what is meant by lexical item, and that too is heavily theory-dependent. It seems a worthwhile thought experiment to imagine a situation where all editors of all English monolingual and bilingual dictionaries have a thorough knowledge of Acquaviva (2008). Would they be able to get past this stage and manage to skim just the kind/amount of information that their particular dictionary needs? The answer is a definite no . The book, similarly to most such volumes as might be thought to provide guidance for lexicographic use, offers no such knowledge of a directly utilizable kind. In the absence of such guidance, it might be consoling to think that at least some practical solution will be found, but that is not that easy either. It would not be practical, and would not, in the final analysis, do a good service to users, if words of the salts (and brains ? and waters ?) type were included twice, once in the singular entry and once on their own. In paper dictionaries, this duplica- tion would be a waste of space that is an unforgivable disservice to users. In lexicographic contexts where space is no problem, this problem of waste would not be there: a double inclusion would simply be an open admission of a semantic–lexicological ignorance. Decisions concerning inclusion of such expressions under the singular, as inflected forms, or under a plural headword of their own, must consequently be ad hoc and remain so. User studies cannot be hoped to provide the answers: they would just show that not only are there widely different users but also that these lexical items themselves come in too many different subclasses for any tendencies to be clearly visible. From theory’s point of view, this may be admission of failure; looked at from utility, ad hoc inclusion is the only viable option. On an even more pessimistic note: almost nothing coming from theoretical quarters concerning the inflection–derivation line of demarcation (provided that there is indeed some such) helps the dictionary treatment of items such as have been explored above by providing foolproof tests for lexicography.

2.6.3.2.3 Semantics vs. lexicography

Lexical semantics only gives tentative and/or relativistic and/or ad hoc answers: after all, the job of a science is not supposed to be the clearing up of problems once and for all but to handle new ones that will emerge from the half-solved old. If that is so, lexicography can never hope to get answers to its basically descriptive problems, nor think that getting them would be advantageous. It may

100 Chapter Two cherry-pick from the (rapidly changing) solutions and theories on offer from time to time, but because whatever input will have to be heavily modified by its own methodological considerations, the treatment of the lexicon that may be hoped to emerge from this large body of input will never be “scientific”. Kay (2000) argues that his paper has been written “from the point of view of a semanticist who is also a working lexicographer, and one who has suffered frustration over the years from a lack of connexion between the two activities. These two areas of human endeavour have a natural affinity, yet the degree of cross-fertilisation between them has been depressingly slight. To semanticists, lexicography often appears largely and lamentably untheorised, uneasily poised between the academic and commercial worlds. To lexicographers, on the other hand, semantics may seem a remote, abstract and even frivolous discipline, with little to contribute in the way of practical solutions. Dictionaries often merit little more than a passing glance in handbooks on semantics, while semantic theory is rarely mentioned in dictionary prefaces.” (Kay (2000:53) To this may well be added that most of these observations need not necessarily be phrased in such woeful terms. Apparently, those researchers, both on the applied and the theoretical side of the divide, who speak of fruitful linkages between lexicography and semantics (thus also implying theoretical linguistics in general: for if there is a branch of it that qualifies, then it is semantics) only practice wishful thinking. In the face of such obvious lack of connection or affinity, it is not deplor- able but very much predictable that there be no “cross-fertilisation”. Lexicography, as has been demonstrated, is indeed untheorised , but it is not at all clear that this is lamentable. Semantics is indeed an abstract discipline, and judging by the products of lexicography that may be informed by its findings, it is abstract enough to disallow most of its results to be directly utilized. And while dictionaries may “merit little more than a passing glance”, they do get a look – maybe not to the extent warranted by their undoubtedly growing significance – in treatments of semantics, it is hard to see why and how anything like semantic theory should be mentioned in dictionary prefaces, unconsulted in their present form without being burdened with semantics. As Kay points out, these attitudes (of and to semantics and lexicography) have historical reasons: she contends that the creation of dictionaries is “an ancient craft” that predates work in semantics by long centuries, but “a relative newcomer to the pantheon of academic disciplines”, and the methodology for creating them has developed independently of any direct influences from linguistics (Kay 2000:53). One wonders, of course, whether possessing a methodology makes some endeavour into an “academic discipline” Meyer (2009) may not be too severe when he claims that “while lexicographers may have developed a methodology for creating dictionaries, their ultimate goal is to sell dictionaries , and their methodologies have drawn little upon modern theories of lexical semantics” (Meyer (2009:158); italics mine). As the present study hopefully shows, lexicography has its own not-at-all-academic, reader-oriented concerns, responsibilities that bear on user-friendliness , to use a trite expression; consequently, it has considerations unknown to semanticists.

2.6.4 Fine tuning the word level

Having looked, by and large, at the morpheme level, the level of words will be explored in some detail in 2.6.4–2.6.5. At the word level, the situation is more straightforward on the one hand, but on the other, the picture is complicated by the fact that a more delicate analysis distinguishes three types of wordhood, and affixes also come in two subtypes. This, and the fact that simply put, compounds may be argued to be both at, and just above, the level of words lexicographically, the

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“around the level of words” may be an appropriate heading for this short section. The argumentation of Atkins & Rundell (2008) when they claim that “Many dictionaries give specific treatment to compounds and phrasal verbs, but it is not usual for dictionaries to distinguish many subclasses of phrases. This is because the boundaries are so fluid that it has proved impossible to establish watertight criteria for lexicographers to apply in dealing with multiword items.” Atkins & Rundell (2008:166–167) may be taken to tacitly lump together compounds and multiword expressions. If this fine-tuning of the “word” category, which will be sketched out in 2.6.4.1 below, were not the case, the pattern would be as neat as this: SIMPLEXES These are monomorphemic, so by definition all listemes: units with unpredictable meanings. COMPLEX WORDS : (1) derived; (2) inflected; (3) compounded (1) Most of these are listemes, unless their meaning is compositional. (2) – Regular inflected words need not be listemes. – Irregular inflected words are necessarily listemes 23 . (3) The majority of compounds are probably listemes. In a finer analysis, however, words come in several, syntactically definable subtypes. It will be shown that many items at word level may be more adequately termed vocables rather than words.

2.6.4.1 Independent words, dependent words and semiwords in Hungarian Based on an analysis (Kenesei 2000, 2001, 2006, 2007 and 2008) that seems to suit English 24 as well, three kinds of word-like element will be distinguished for Hungarian. — Independent words: minimum free forms; occur as utterances; uninterruptible, internally stable, positionally mo- bile in the Bloomfieldian sense 25 . — Dependent words: do not occur as utterances; bound forms which, however, allow independent words to occur between them and the lexical item to which they are bound: the “word” a in a cat allows, e.g. adjectives to occur between itself and cat , to which a is bound; include articles, conjunctions, postpositions; particles; clitics.

Lexicographically, dependent words receive exactly the same treatment as independent words. Us- ers would probably be in for a surprise if, by some kind of notational separation of the two types, they were claimed to be different. Nothing in school grammars suggests this separation either. — Semiwords: initial and final constituents of compounds that can only occur as such;

23 Suppletive forms also belong here. Since they are not different from the rest of irregular forms in that they require listing, it does make sense to talk about suppletivism in etymological but not lexicological terms. 24 Marchand (1969) already distinguishes items “midway between full words and suffixes”, such as - like and – worthy ; some of these only occur as second members of compounds “though their word character is still clearly recognizable” (Marchand 1969:356). 25 A word, then, is a free form which does not consist entirely of […] lesser free forms; […] a word is a minimum free form ” (Bloomfield 1933: 178; italics in the original).

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can undergo both forward and backward coordination reduction; (the ellipted element here is represented by a Ø): forward coordination reduction: monitor-féle vagy Ø- szer ű ‘monitor-resembling or Ø-like’ backward coordination reduction: tévé -Ø vagy monitorszer ű ‘tv-Ø or monitor-like’.

Below the word level: — Affixes: these do not tolerate either type of coordination reduction: forward coordination reduction: *feleség-gel vagy Ø -hez ‘wife-with or Ø-to’ backward coordination reduction: *feleség -Ø és anyá-hoz ‘wife and mother-to’

—To these four elements are added the “passive stems” 26 , which are above the affixes but not necessarily below the semiwords. Some of them are themselves semiwords, and some of the semiwords are supposed to be “passive stems”. Since, most importantly, a “passive stem” is bound , it is perhaps best to use “bound base” for this element. Bound bases, then, are semiwords or less-then- semiword items that are not affixes but can take affixes themselves. As stated in Kenesei (2000, 2006) and elsewhere, bound bases (in his framework, similarly to affixes) have no syntactic category. This may be why they cannot be right-hand members of compounds (Kenesei 2000:92; 2006:87). In that, but only in that, sense they are outside of the grammar . This ostensive status of extragrammaticality will have further important consequences for the present study. Because these bound bases belong to what is usually referred to as stem-based morphology , while the majority of Hungarian morphological operations are word-based , Kenesei (2000:92; 2006:87), e.g. argues that passive bases do not fit into the (rest of the) hierarchy, thus they may constitute a fifth category but not on a par with the first four. 27

2.6.4.2 Listedness of dependent words, semiwords and bound bases From the point of view of listedness there is nothing to suggest that the different types of word are different. Independent words, dependent words, semiwords on one hand, and bound stems and affixes on the other, are listemes to the same degree. This grouping in the form outlined above is not reflected in dictionaries either, similarly to many such more fine-grained approaches. For lexicographic purposes, whether English or Hungarian, autonomous words and dependent words are not different. Semiwords differ from the two other word types in terms of dictionary-worthiness , but not by being labelled as “semiword” or anything that could set them apart from the majority of “standard” words. Even if all the lexical items similar to English -proof and - friendly as well as Hungarian -biztos ‘-proof’ and -barát ‘-friendly’ were listed as headwords in their respective dictionaries, as many of them surely are in the most reliable ones, there would be no label for them 28 . The much too broad “combining form”, though available, is not universally used, and would cover not just those but all expressions that have been felt to be of a more-than-affixal but less-than-word character.

26 These may simply be referred to as “roots”, and are known by different Hungarian names – “passive stem”, “fictive stem”, “basic stem”, “phantom stem” (or “root” instead of “stem” in each case). 27 Fehér (2007, 2008) criticizes Kenesei’s system of word (sub)types from a more general viewpoint, which is not relevant here. 28 Chapter Three discusses the lexical items -proof , -friendly , -biztos and -barát in some detail.

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2.6.4.3 Independent words, semiwords, and bound bases lexicographically

2.6.4.3.1 Left-hand members

A sample is given below of the items resulting from a search on hyphenated headwords of type XXX- (i.e. where the elements listed are left-hand members of compounds) from MASZ (2000). As left-hand members of compounds, these are potential semiwords, i.e. at least semiwords, but can also be possible independent words as part of compounds.

List No2 agyag- gyógy- magán- össz- társ- ajak- gyomor- makro- össze- táska- al- hiper- mega- panel- techno- ál- hold- méh- papír- tele- alap- homlok- mell- petro- tera- arc- hő- mellék- pletyka- terem- árnyék- id ő- mikro- plusz- terep- atom- kar- mini- pót- többlet- barkács- kényszer- mirigy- próba- tölgyfa- bio- kiber- motor- prosztata- tömeg- e- konzerv- mű- radio- torna- elektro- köb- nano- segéd- tucat- ellen- kölcsön- nap- sejt- turbó- euro- köz- nem- selyem- turista- fa- közép- nő- sí- ultra- férfi- kripto- nosztalgia- sport- utó- fog- kultúr- nyíl- stílus- varázs- foto- kvázi- öko- száj- vas- fő- látszat- olaj- szaru- végbél- giga- lumpen- ön- szem- vendég- gyapjú- luxus- orr- szív- vese- gyerek- mag- ős- szuper- video-

The list comprises different kinds of lexical item:

• Independent words One of the reasons for including the Hungarian independent words as hyphenated forms in the H→E dictionary is that often what corresponds to the E. adjective is not an adjective but a hyphenated form. These items account for the majority of the list. Such examples include the hyphenated form agyag- for the English earthen ; ajak- translating the adjective labial (where both agyag- and ajak- happen to be independent words that may be ad hoc compounded). Some further examples, still from the beginning of the alphabet: arc- (= facial, face ); árnyék- (= shadow ); atom- (= atomic, nuclear ). (Wherever there are homographic items minimally differing in the presence of the hyphen, the hyphenated form comes first alphabetically so that its placement is more conspicuous: arc- ‘facial’ will be followed by arc ‘face’.) When these items occur outside compounds, they have their standard PoS labels. • Semiwords Another kind of hyphenated forms are the semiwords, i.e. elements that are not more than semiwords: examples include the al- (= vice-, under-, sub-, deputy ), ál- (= false, fake, counterfeit, bogus, sham, pseudo- ), and alap- (= basic, fundamental ) forms.

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As compound constituents, these forms can only occur as left-hand members, and thus cannot undergo both forward and backward, only backward, coordination reduction (i.e. deletion of the earlier conjunct): in al- és f őcímek ‘subtitles and main titles’. They clearly must be classified as semiwords rather than bound bases because unlike bound bases, these elements cannot take affixes. The English equivalents of these Hungarian forms may themselves be independent words vs. combining forms: cf. vice-, under-, sub vs. deputy .

• “Latinate” combining forms Hungarian also has the exact equivalents of what are standardly referred to as English combining or hyphenated forms, i.e. elements of Latin and Greek origin that only occur in compounds (as left or right members thereof). These also belong to the semiword category, even if they have never been labelled thus (which shows a certain exclusion from the home-grown Hungarian vocabulary). Examples (for which no gloss is needed) include: bio-, elektro-, euro-, foto-, giga-. The item e- (= e- as e.g. in e-commerce ) also belongs here. These items, being restricted to the status of left-hand member of compounds, do not have syntactic categories and thus do not have PoS labels.

• Bound bases A minority of the lexical items in the list are what have been termed bound bases : barkács- (= do- it-yourself, DIY ); gyógy- (= curative, medicinal, therapeutic ); varázs- (= magic, magical ). That these can be affixed is an indication that they are bound bases. As seen above, some of the bound bases occur as semiwords; Kenesei’s examples, of which gyógy- also features in the list above, include fesz- , gyógy- , tám- and tév- (Kenesei 2000:91).

2.6.4.3.2 Right-hand members

The next list is a sampling of the results from a search on hyphenated headwords of the type -XXX (i.e. the elements in the list are right-hand members of compounds) from the same source as above, MASZ (2000). The list contains many of what were traditionally considered as derivational affixes ( -beli, -féle, -né, -szer ű etc) but are actually semiwords. Since these are right-hand members of compounds, they are PoS-classifiable. The following classes have been distinguished: A(djective); A(dverb); Num(eral); N(oun). Within the Adjective category, the largest number is accounted for by the compounds of the following types:

Num-N- Ú – e.g. -ágú → -branched, -forked, -pointed, -pronged as e.g. in ötágú villa five-pronged fork A-N- Ú – e.g. -nyomású → -pressure as e.g. in nagy nyomású high-pressure Num-N- Os – e.g. -soros → -line 12 soros 12-line as e.g. in 12-soros 12-line

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The types being determined by the semantics of the N, some items belong to more than one category, although not typically. The element -bet űs, e.g. may be NumN- Os (e.g. kétbet űs → two-letter ) as well as AN- Os (e.g. zöldbet űs → green-lettered ).

List No3 PoS -kalóriás A -né N -ágú A -karátos A -nélküli A -ágyas A -kedély ű A -nként Adv -ajkú A -ként Adv -nyomású A -árbocos A -képpen Adv -patájú A -barát A -kerek ű A -perces A -beli A -kez ű A -pontos A -bet űs A -kilós A -rendez ő N* -bites A -kori A -részes A -biztos A -kötetes A -rét Adv -centiméteres A -központú A -rét ű A -centis A -külsej ű A -soros A -centrikus A -lábú A -sorsú A -egynéhány Num -lakó A -stÓl Adv -ellenes A -lángú A -stUl Adv -eres A -lapos A -szájú A -esz ű A -lelk ű A -számjegy ű A -éves A -lépcs ős A -szavas A -félben Adv -lóer ős A -szem ű A -felé Adv -lövet ű A -szOri A -féle A -megatonnás A -szerte Adv -féleképpen A -mell ű A -szer ű A -fel ől Adv -menetes A -szintes A -figyelés N -mentes A -szív ű A -fogásos A -méret ű A -szOr Adv -fokú A -mérföldes A -találatos A -fontos A -méteres A -tan N -hetes A -milliméteres A -tojásos A -illatú A -mintájú A -tornyú A -iskolás A -modorú A -ujjas A -ismeretlenes A -nagyságú A -üléses A -iziglen Adv -napos A -valahány Num -jegy ű A -nauta N -wattos A

*= organizer e.g. iratrendez ő

2.6.5 “Lexical” items of doubtful status

The traditional “grammatical rank scale” was resorted to in 2.6.2 to facilitate an exploration of those lexical units (many of them probably listemes) that are also featured lexicographically, i.e. which tend to appear as headwords in dictionaries. In the framework set up above, all morphemes must be listemes; most words are listemes, but more importantly, the category of words has been refined on the basis of Kenesei (2000, 2006) and similar sources; phrases that are listed are fewer, and sentences that are listemes number even less.

In the classification used here, there is, strictly speaking, only place for independent words among the morpho-syntactic categories, i.e. only autonomous words have a PoS status 29 . Dependent words subcategorize according to the (lexical or phrasal) class they are dependent on, i.e. bound to, but

29 This is one of the targets of Fehér’s (2007, 2008) justifiable criticism.

106 Chapter Two have no category themselves. Affixes and semiwords do have some PoS information (since they project the category of the complex word of which they are a part), but have no categorial status of their own either (both being below word level in this sense).

More importantly for the argumentation in the followings sections, however, excluded from the lexical types with PoS labels are two kinds lexical expression: (i) what are labelled “interjections” and lack a usable definition, and (ii) what are referred to as “sentence words” 30 in traditional Hun- garian descriptions, for which there does not seem to be a workable English term, and which also have a semi-legal existence without a proper definition. The (iii) class of lexical items called “(inarticulate) 31 onomatopoeic words” partly overlap with both. The overlap may be so significant that rather than positing three separate classes, we may think in terms of just one superclass containing all three types. The special status of these word types is also recognized in e.g. Biber & al. (2000, 2002), where the term “insert” is used for a class that is peripheral to grammar and contains “stand-alone” words unable to enter into syntactic relations with other structures, or “loosely attached to a clause or non- clausal structure” (Biber & al. 2000 passim ; Biber & al. 2002:449; Quaglio & Biber 2006:704). Although interjections, sentence words and inarticulate onomatopoeics (and perhaps similar expressions) cannot be PoS-classified, they are words syntactically as well: their use in syntax is not less strictly governed by rules than that of any other category. This is why, in the framework of Biber & al. (2002), the broad category of “inserts” is used, apparently encompassing the three items (i)–(iii). Diagramming the three types of lexical item – (“inarticulate”) onomatopoeic word, sentence word, and interjection – is straightforward because due to a lack of proper definitions; the diagram is thus both informal and tentative. The categories are so volatile that nothing more definitive may be said than what the circles suggest: that there will be a common ground between any pair of the three, and there will be an area shared by all. The semantic clue of onomatopoeics probably makes them easiest to distinguish from the other two. The category of “inserts”, as we have seen, is probably best thought of as covering the overall area of the three terms.

onomatop.

sentence word interj.

In view of the above complexities of the PoS situation, it may be best for the purposes of lexicology (if not for lexicography, which does not need it) to distinguish two types of word: those perfectly integrated within the grammar, the grammar-internal ones, which have clear (though obviously theory-dependent) morpho-syntactic categories on the one hand, and the extragrammatical , “inarticul- ated” elements, which are non-PoS-classifiable, and thus lie outside of grammar , or of clausal structure, on the other. A term for the latter will also be used here: vocable will be used for an item of the lexicon, thus listeme in the obvious sense of an unpredictable form–meaning/function unit, which has no PoS status in frameworks which, for whatever reason, exclude (i), (ii) and (iii) above,

30 The Hungarian term mondatszó ‘sentence word’ suggests, appropriately, that these expressions are “simultaneously words [...] and utterances” (Ameka 2006:746). This metaphorical usage, although it somewhat blurs the sentence– utterance distinction, is useful since it refers to this duality in the name. The German term “Satzwort” seems to cover the same domain. 31 As opposed to words of onomatopoeic nature that do have word status, i.e. PoS labels, see 2.6.5.2.

107 Chapter Two insisting (quite understandably from their syntax-based vantage point) that for something to be a word, it needs to have a syntactic category. Lexicography (and lexicology), of course, recognizing not merely the existence but the importance (both statistically and pragmatically) of these vocables, must make efforts to represent these as fully as possible. It is also important that grammars should chart this area, where the pragmatic aspect of language seems to be decisive and the standard categories of syntax less dominant. It goes without saying that it is important to register these vocables in dictionaries. While these kinds of lexical elements receive ample grammatical treatment in grammatical descriptions such as Biber & al. (2000, 2006), which will also be further explored below, the lexicographic job of covering this section of the lexicon is excellently handled, e.g. by the Collins-Cobuild line/tradition.

2.6.5.1 Onomatopoeic “words”

2.6.5.1.1 “Inarticulate” onomatopoeic words

It is customary to mention the non-arbitrariness of onomatopoeic words, pointing out in the same breath that they are, however, language-dependent. This is a contradiction, which provides a good example of expressions being motivated but arbitrary; all onomatopoeic expressions are arbitrary, i.e. unpredictable, and thus listemes. These, however, are outside of the grammar, as it were: “inarticulate” onomatopoeic words, or IOWs.

2.6.5.1.2 PoS-classifiable onomatopoeics

There is a class of words which has never satisfactorily been set apart from inarticulate onomatopoeic words that can actually be PoS-classified: they are derived or compounded from IOWs. In Hungarian, overt verbal or nominal affixes attach to inarticulate onomatopoeics, cf. fúj-ol ‘to phooey’, jaj-gat ‘to moan, wail’, vau-z-ik ‘to bow-wow’ (derivations); jajszó ‘a cry of pain’ (compound). While participation in derivation and compounding processes places “inarticulate” onomatopoeic words or IOW in the class of bound bases of the fesz- ‘taut-’, röp- ‘fly-’, and patt- ‘crack-’ 32 type (Kenesei 2006:99), articulate onomatopoeics, by contrast, have full dependent word status (and their speciality of meaning – some degree of sound symbolism – plays no role whatever in their syntax). It is not always obvious, neither synchronically relevant whether a verb such as recseg ‘crack, creak’ is (i) derived from the “inarticulate onomatopoeic”, or (ii) the other way round, or (iii) the two were formed together, and the affix is just a pseudo-one. Bárczi & al. (1967) suggests that this latter, (iii) is the most typical case. As far as listedness in the dictionary is concerned, generally bound bases (of the fesz- ‘taut-’, röp- ‘fly-’, and patt- ‘crack-’, i.e. the non-onomatopoeic kind) need not be, and never are, entered in dictionaries, since they never occur in text. By contrast, and significantly, onomatopoeics of both of the above types need to be documented: jaj-gat ‘to moan, wail’ and jajszó ‘a cry of pain’ will be as natural lexicographically as feszül ‘become taut’ and feszít ‘make taut’, or röpül ‘fly’, röptet ‘fly smth’, all from bound bases. Besides zero-forms and abstract entities of different types, this is another huge domain where the mental lexicon and print dictionaries significantly differ: bound bases of both types are supposed to be stored in the lexicon, while of these, non-onomatopoeic bound bases are not in the dictionary.

32 The hyphen in the glosses shows the bound nature of the Hungarian “equivalent”; English has no bound forms here.

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The rather amorphous realm of ouch, splash, phew, tut-tut, gosh, yuk and their likes in any language, possibly outside of grammar but surely not outside language has an obvious and legitimate place in dictionaries. Sadly though, if one considers the EHCD (1998) and HECD (1998), the only H↔E dictionaries whose size would make possible their detailed and systematic treatment, they do not seem to be given their due either in quantity or quality terms.

2.6.5.2 Interjections Expressions of various sorts traditionally labelled as interjections are among what have been termed vocables . Not strictly parts of the grammar, thus technically not words, they are yet listemes, and are included in dictionaries. Which of their subtypes are listed, however, is a point on which dictionaries diverge. Items such as H. hess → shoo , juj → ouch , na → come on , sicc → shoo! / scat! typically do get entered in bilingual dictionaries, if the size allows. The problem is that there is just a narrow strip of translatability between “interjections” in H. and E., as presumably in any pair of languages. Items of the inarticulate onomatopoeic kind, which are often classified as interjections as well, such as nyau → miaow are only sporadically listed in dictionaries. Their articulate, PoS-classifiable counterparts are not interjections but verbs or nouns; these include verbal nyávog → miaow , nyihog → neigh , csipog → tweet , and are very much dictionary-worthy.

If one examines the items labelled “interjection” in a typical learner’s dictionary, which, incidentally, is very good at representing this area of the English language 33 , a great number of such items is found. It is not suggested that the assignment of an item to this or that PoS in MED 2007, or any other learner’s dictionary for that matter, reveals their genuine grammatical nature. The word farewell e.g., is presented as a noun, an interjection, and an adjective MED – this latter e.g. in farewell dinner/party/speech , where the noun farewell is used as a modifier – which clearly shows a confusion between category and function. Such a dictionary, in electronic form, is still indispensable with all its obvious faults if a comprehensive list is needed of words of any PoS. The picture of interjections in MED (2007) is greatly varied, not just from one, but from many intersecting points of view.

First, phrases are also featured (and these are heterogeneous themselves: e.g. action stations! / good afternoon! / hey presto! / son of a bitch! ); some of these have been italicized in the list below. Thus the “interjection” class is not a PoS classifying or subclassifying words , rather, it seems a pragmatic-lexical device of any syntactic composition; if this is (if not the definition of, but) the approach to, “interjections”, then they are surely not a word class. It remains to be seen whether they can at all be placed in a natural class other than one defined by some vague communicative– pragmatic notions. Second, many items in the list have a straightforward PoS outside of these contexts: nouns, verbs, etc. The word timber , used on its own, is supposed to be an interjection warning people that “a tree that you have cut is going to fall”, or used humorously “when any large object falls over” (MED 2007). The word brother on its own, another interjection, is claimed to be “used for showing that you are surprised or annoyed”, e.g. Oh brother, what a mess ! (MED 2007). A part of these are simply imperative forms of verbs, i.e. they belong to the verb category no doubt, and the only feature that aligns them with “interjections” is that they are often used on their own as utterances; some of these have been marked with boldface. This feature is what supposedly makes them “sentence words” or “inserts”.

33 The Collins–COBUILD series excels at providing this information, but the searches in MED were far superior.

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It needs to be emphasized that this dual PoS of interjections (the ones that are clearly of word level syntactically) is different from the case of conversion, since here the one of the two (or more) ostensive word classes is grammatical, while the other – the interjections, which are just vocables – is “extragrammatical”. It is not the case that the noun man is converted into an interjection in the same way in which it is changed into a verb meaning ‘provide with a crew’. Third, some of the phrasal units seem to have gone through phonological reduction, and as a result they may indeed have become words , to the possible extent of unanalyzability by native speakers. A part of these are such that this reduction or fossilization is not recent: strewth ! A subtype of these are represented by the obscured swearwords, many of which are of deliberately euphemistic origin, e.g. gee whiz ! and drat! (cf. 2.6.5.5). Fourth, the list contains what are straightforward onomatopoeics of the vocable type: atishoo , oink and (the phonotactically irregular) vroom are such vocables. Fifth, there are the foreign phrases, oyez , au revoir , gesundheit , plus ça change and touché – mostly French, and a few German expressions – which are as heterogeneous from a formal viewpoint as their native counterparts, including phrasal units as well. They are less integrated than the vocables within not just the grammar but also within the lexicon of English. Sixth, the list includes a few items that are not just phonotactically wayward, but phonologically anomalous to the extent of containing un-English phonemes, or no vowel: examples include hm / psst / phwoah 34 / sh (The item hm has two, equally, if not identically anomalous pronunciations, in MED (2007): / m/ and / hm /.) Some items, by contrast, have spellings that suggest such phonological anomaly, but are perfectly regular: g'day is an example (it just suggests an abrupt pronunciation with a reduced first syllable).

List No4 MED (2007): 231 interjections

1 aah 26 bollocks 51 diddums 76 goody 2 aargh 27 boo 52 d’oh 77 gosh 3 abracadabra 28 bother 53 done 78 gotcha 4 achcha 29 boy 54 drat 79 gracious 5 achoo 30 bravo 55 duh 80 ha 6 adieu 31 brother 56 eek 81 hallelujah 7 adios 32 brrr 57 eh 82 hallo 8 afternoon 33 bye 58 encore 83 halt 9 ah 34 cheerio 59 er 84 heck 10 aha 35 cheers 60 erm 85 heel 11 ahem 36 Christ 61 eureka 86 hell 12 ahoy 37 chup 62 evening 87 hello 13 alas 38 ciao 63 farewell 88 help 14 aloha 39 congrats 64 fiddlesticks 89 here 15 amen 40 cooee 65 fuck 90 hey 16 atishoo 41 cor 66 gangway 91 hi 17 aw 42 crikey 67 gawd 92 hiya 18 aye 43 cripes 68 g’day 93 hmm 19 bah 44 crumbs 69 gee 94 ho 20 bang 45 cut 70 gesundheit 95 hooray 21 begone 46 dammit 71 God 96 hosanna 22 behold 47 damn 72 goddammit 97 howdy 23 bingo 48 damnation 73 golly 98 howzat 24 bless 49 dang 74 goodbye 99 howzit 25 blimey 50 darn 75 goodness 100 huh

34 A way of writing a sound that someone makes when they see a sexually attractive person (MED 2007).

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101 humph 134 pooh 167 tut 200 chop-chop 102 hurray 135 presto 168 ugh 201 code red 103 jeez 136 prithee 169 um 202 gee whiz 104 Jesus 137 pshaw 170 viva 203 good afternoon 105 later 138 psst 171 voilà 204 good day 106 lo 139 really 172 vroom 205 good evening 107 man 140 respect 173 welcome 206 good morning 108 mm 141 right 174 well 207 good night 109 morning 142 righto 175 wham 208 ha ha 110 my 143 roger 176 what 209 hey presto 111 nah 144 say 177 whee 210 ho ho 112 namaste 145 sayonara 178 whew 211 ho-hum 113 nay 146 scat 179 whoa 212 mea culpa 114 nuts 147 sh 180 whoopee 213 okey-dokey 115 O 148 shabash 181 whoops 214 plus ça change 116 och 149 Shalom 182 wotcha 215 puh-leeze 117 oh 150 shh 183 wow 216 shock horror 118 oho 151 shit 184 yahoo 217 son of a bitch 119 oi 152 shoo 185 yikes 218 ta-ta 120 oink 153 shoot 186 yippee 219 tee hee 121 OK 154 shucks 187 yo 220 thank you 122 ooh 155 shush 188 yuck 221 tsk tsk 123 oops 156 snap 189 yum 222 tut-tut 124 ouch 157 ssh 190 zindabad 223 uh huh 125 ow 158 steady 191 zzz 224 uh-oh 126 oyez 159 strewth 192 action stations 225 uh-uh 127 pah 160 surprise 193 all right 226 upsy-daisy 128 pardon 161 ta 194 au revoir 227 wakey-wakey 129 phew 162 thanks 195 big deal 228 wham-bam 130 phooey 163 there 196 bon voyage 229 yadda, yadda, yadda 131 phwoah 164 timber 197 boo-hoo 230 yah-boo 132 please 165 touché 198 bow-wow 231 yoo hoo 133 poof 166 tough 199 bye-bye

Interjections will also be explored in 2.6.5.4. In 2.6.5.5.1, another list, of the items labelled “exclamations” in CALD (2008), the majority of which feature in the above list of interjections as well, will be given for comparison.

2.6.5.3 Sentence words Paradoxically, the traditional “sentence words” of Hungarian descriptions do pass the independent wordhood test of being able to form an utterance (see 2.6.4.1 above), but they have been denied word status since they do not have syntactic links within clauses, and thus have no syntactic category. Not only do onomatopoeics get no mention either as categories related or unrelated to these other two, the exact boundaries among sentence words and interjections are not discussed in Kene- sei either. In Kenesei (2000) there is but a single mention of sentence words (Kenesei 2000:91), which thus also leaves this question open. Traditional Hungarian classifications have a broad category for “sentence words”; this contains (i) interjections ( ó → oh , brrr → brrr ) (ii) interactional sentence words (helló! → hiya ! pá! → ta-ta ! amen → amen , hm → hm , nos → well , persze! → sure ! pszt → psst ) (iii) “modifiers” 35 ( talán → perhaps , valószín űleg → probably ) (iv) onomatopoeic sentence words ( bu → boo , bumm → bang )

35 These probably come closest to sentence adverbs, or disjuncts. They may altogether be missing from the list.

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Significantly, the examples offered in such descriptions do not, as a rule, include phrase-level, only word-level expressions. Whatever the term “sentence word” covers, they must be stored in the mental lexicon, even though not marked for a standard syntactic category. Lexicographically they also should be given their due.

2.6.5.4 Expletives: not the four-letter kind

2.6.5.4.1 Expletives: words?

Discussing issues of inclusion and exclusion of lexical material in dictionaries, Hanks (2006:122) claims that expletives ought to be classed as words: “Are the English expletives er , um , oh , unh-huh , phwoah , etc., words? Should they be in a dictionary? (The same question applies to expletives in any language.) They occur as types in careful transcriptions of spoken English. To that extent, they may be regarded as words, and indeed, nowadays they often make an appearance in dictionaries.” Hanks simply does not define the term “expletive”. It is also odd that the appearance of a type of item in dictionaries should be taken as proof of that item being a word (in just maybe one, phonological, sense: after all, Hanks refers to “transcriptions of spoken English”). The term “expletive” has its own entry in the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Brown 2006), where Hanks (2006) appears, but it discusses expletives in the “dummy” or “pleonasm” sense, and describes the status of “expletive” as a term that covers a “wide range of disparate phenomena”; it is thus irrelevant to Hank’s claim. “Interjection” does have a substantial and relevant entry (see below and cf. Ameka 2006) but expectably, that notion has its own problems.

2.6.5.5 Interjections: definitions and classification Under the definition of Ameka (2006), interjections are “words that conventionally constitute utterances by themselves and express a speaker’s current mental state or reaction toward an element in the linguistic or extra-linguistic context”.

Interjections are supposed to be definable using (A) formal, (B) semantic and (C) pragmatic criteria.

(A) An interjection is a lexical form that – conventionally constitutes a non-elliptical utterance by itself – does not enter into construction with other word classes – does not take inflectional or derivational affixes, and is monomorphemic.

This definition is claimed to characterize the core members of the class, i.e. (i) words that express emotions: yuk! / ugh! / phew! (ii) words/expressions for greetings, leave-taking, thanking, apologizing etc: hello / thank you (iii) swearwords: shit! (iv) attention-getting signals: pst / hey (v) some particles and response words: yes / no (vi) words directed at animals: whoa! (vii) onomatopoeic words and what are termed “iconic depictives”

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(B) From a semantic point of view, a prototypical interjection is a conventionalized linguistic sign that expresses a speaker’s current mental state, attitude, or reaction towards a situation. This excludes onomatopoeic words, which are descriptive rather than expressive.

(C) In pragmatics terms, interjections are context-bound linguistic signs, tied to specific situations and index elements in the extra-linguistic context. It is clear from the above that in the same treatment, interjections are supposed to be words, lexical forms, and expressions, i.e. different syntactic objects, only belonging together pragmatically.

2.6.5.5.1 Exclamations as a PoS label in CALD (2008)

In section 2.6.5.2 a list of the 231 lexical items classified as interjections in MED (2007) was given (List 4). Before the lexical item goddam and its lexicographic treatment in CALD (2008) is explored in detail, a brief look is taken of the items termed exclamations, actually used as a part of speech label, in the same dictionary.

List No5 CALD (2008): “exclamations” Most of the example sentences have been removed, but otherwise just minor changes have been made; the definitions have been retained where they may be relevant. Some of the example sentences have been kept in order to illustrate that some of these ostensibly “sentence words”, which are supposedly not integrated within the clause structure but appear as an utterance, are actually not like that : it would be hard to establish the grammatical status of the combination of the noun and ahoy in the expressions below, but the ahoy element certainly does not occur on its own: ahoy excl. 2. used, especially on a boat, when you see something, usually something which is in the distance Land ahoy! Ship ahoy! “Exclamation” has been shortened to “excl”; other PoS labels also abbreviated. Although that is not the point now, the list also shows light on many inconsistencies or outright errors in PoS labelling, or mistakes of the matching of definitions with examples. The entry for adieu , e.g. contains an example that is clearly not the exclamation but the noun adieu: adieu excl. literary or old use goodbye She bade (= said to) him adieu and left

1 a 17 April fool excl. UK ( US April fools! ) 2 ah excl. 18 Arse! excl. UK offensive 3 abracadabra excl. 19 atishoo excl. (also achoo ) UK 4 achoo excl. 20 bah excl. old use 5 adieu excl. literary or old use 21 balderdash n. [ U ], excl. old-fash. 6 adios excl. mainly US infml. 22 bang excl. 7 ah excl. (also aah ) 23 begone excl. old use or literary 8 aha excl. 24 bingo excl. infml. 9 ahem excl. mainly humorous 25 blast excl. 10 ahoy excl. 26 blimey excl. UK old-fash. infml. 11 ahoy excl. 27 boo excl. 12 alleluia excl., n. [C] 28 boohoo excl. 13 all right (also alright ) excl. GREETING 29 bosh excl. , n. [ U ] old-fash. 14 all right (also alright ) excl. APPROVAL 30 bother excl. 15 alright adj., adv., excl. 31 botheration excl. UK old-fash. 16 amen excl. formal 32 boy excl. ( also oh boy ) mainly US infml.

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33 bravo excl. 91 hello excl., n. (UK also hallo , also hullo ) 34 brill adj. , excl. 92 hello excl., n. (UK also hallo , also hullo ) 35 bugger excl. UK offensive 93 hello excl., n. (UK also hallo , also hullo ) 36 bullshit excl. , n. [ U ] offensive 94 hello excl., n. (UK also hallo , also hullo ) 37 bye-bye excl. ( also bye ) 95 hell's bells excl. (UK also hell's teeth ) old- 38 champion adj. , excl. mainly Northern infml. fash. infml. 39 check excl. US 96 help excl. 40 cheerio excl. UK old-fash. 97 hey excl. infml. 41 Cheers! excl. 98 hey presto excl. (US presto ) infml. 42 Cheers! excl. 99 hi excl. infml. 43 Cheers! excl. 100 hip excl. 44 ciao excl. infml. 101 hiya excl. infml. 45 congrats excl. , plural n. infml. 102 hm , hmm excl. 46 cool adj. , excl. infml. 103 honestly adv. , excl. 47 cor excl. UK slang 104 hooray excl. , n. 48 crikey excl. UK old-fash. infml. 105 hooroo excl. 49 cripes excl. UK old-fash. infml. 106 hosanna excl. 50 crumbs excl. UK old-fash. infml. 107 howdy excl. US infml. 51 damn excl. (also damn it , also dammit ) infml. 108 huh excl. 52 darn excl. infml. 109 huh excl. 53 dash excl. UK old-fash. infml. 110 huh excl. 54 dear excl. (also old-fash. dearie ) infml. 111 hullo excl. , n. [ C ] plural hullos UK 55 diddums ! excl. UK humorous 112 humph excl. often humorous 56 doggone excl. , adj. [before n.] US infml. 113 hurray excl. ( also hooray , also hurrah ) 57 d'oh , d'uh excl. infml. 114 hush excl. 58 eek excl. infml. mainly humorous 115 ick excl. US infml. 59 eh excl. (US usually huh ) infml. 116 indeed excl. 60 Encore! excl. 117 jeez excl. US slang 61 er excl. 118 Jesus (Christ) excl. (also Christ ) infml. 62 eureka excl. often humorous 119 Knickers! excl. UK slang humorous 63 farewell excl. old-fash. or formal 120 later excl. (also laters ) infml. 64 fiddlesticks excl. (US also fiddle-faddle ) old- 121 lo excl. old use fash. 122 look excl. Look here old-fash. 65 flip excl. UK old-fash. infml. 123 magic excl. UK old-fash. infml. 66 fuck excl. offensive 124 man excl. infml. 67 Gangway ! excl. 125 mayday n. [ S ] , excl. 68 g'day excl. Australian infml. 126 my excl. old-fash. 69 geddit? excl. UK infml. 127 excl. plural O's or Os old use or literary 70 gee excl. mainly US infml. 128 oh excl. 71 gesundheit excl. mainly US 129 oh excl. 72 goddamn mainly US very infml. , US also God 130 oh excl. damn , goddamned , goddam golly excl. old- 131 OK , okay excl. AGREEING fash. infml. 132 OK , okay excl. UNDERSTAND 73 goodbye excl. 133 OK , okay excl. ACTION 74 goodness excl. 134 OK , okay excl. PAUSE 75 good night , goodnight excl. 135 okey-doke excl. (also okey-dokey ) 76 goodo excl. [after verb] , adj. , adv. 136 ooh excl. 77 goody excl. (old-fash. goody gumdrops ) 137 oops excl. (also whoops ) infml. infml. or child's word 138 oops-a-daisy excl. (also ups-a-daisy ) infml. 78 gosh excl. infml. slightly old-fash. 139 ouch excl. 79 gotcha excl. slang 140 ouch excl. 80 gracious excl. old-fash. 141 ow excl. 81 ha , hah excl. mainly humorous 142 pardon excl. 82 hah excl. 143 pardon excl. 83 ha-ha, ha ha excl. 144 pfft excl. 84 hallelujah , alleluia excl., n. [C] 145 Phew! excl. (also Whew! ) infml. mainly humor- 85 hallelujah, alleluia excl., n. [C] ous 86 Heavens (above)! excl. (also Good Heavens! ) 146 phooey excl. infml. humorous old-fash. 147 piddle excl. infml. 87 heck excl., n. infml. 148 please excl. 88 heel excl. 149 please excl. 89 hell excl., n. [U] 150 please excl. 90 hello excl., n. (UK also hallo , also hullo ) 151 please excl.

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152 poof excl. 177 sorry excl. APOLOGY 153 pooh excl. infml. 178 sorry excl. POLITE NEGATIVE 154 pow excl. infml. 179 sorry excl. POLITE NEGATIVE 155 psst excl. 180 sorted adj. [after verb] , excl. UK infml. 156 quick excl. 181 ssh excl. 157 rather excl. mainly UK old-fash. 182 strewth excl. Australian infml., UK old-fash. 158 really excl. 183 sugar excl. 159 rhubarb excl. 184 ta excl. UK infml. 160 right excl. infml. AGREEMENT 185 ten-four excl. (also 10-4 ) mainly US 161 right excl. infml. AGREEMENT 186 thanks excl. 162 right excl. infml. AGREEMENT 187 thank you excl. (infml. thanks ) 163 roger excl. 188 thank you excl. (infml. thanks ) 164 salaam n. [C], excl. 189 thank you excl. (infml. thanks ) 165 say excl. 190 thank you excl. (infml. thanks ) 166 scat excl. infml. 191 there excl. 167 sh , also shh , ssh excl. (also shush ) 192 timber excl. 168 shalom excl. 193 ting-a-ling excl. (mainly US ding-a-ling ) 169 shame excl. 194 top adjective , excl. UK infml. 170 shit excl. offensive 195 touché excl. 171 shoo excl. 196 tsk excl. (also tsk tsk ) old-fash. 172 shucks excl. US infml. 197 tush excl. old use 173 shush excl. infml. 198 tut excl. (also tut tut ) 174 snap excl. 199 ugh excl. 175 snap excl. 176 sod excl. (also Sod it! ) UK offensive

2.6.5.5.2 Goddam in CALD

One example of a lexicographic treatment of an interjection, provided by goddam in CALD (2008), also illustrates that “interjections”, whatever is covered by the term, may have PoS-classifiable homophones, and that the separation of the two may not be straightforward.

CALD3 (2008): goddamn also God damn, goddamned, goddam exclamation, adjective, adverb used to add emphasis to what is being said Goddamn (it), how much longer will it take? Don't drive so goddamn fast! See also damn The entry, with the three PoS labels given indiscriminately at the beginning, is no help. The parenthetical notation of first example, goddam (it) , confuses two cases: without the it , it may be one phonological word that is polymorphemic, in which case it doubtless qualifies as an interjection. With the it included, it must be a three-word sequence of subject, verb and object, with the verb in the formulaic subjunctive. CALD (2008), as pointed out above, does not actually use “interjection”, but “exclamation” as a PoS label. Although not a standard PoS label, “exclamation”, very usefully in a dictionary, singles out the semantic-pragmatic aspect of interjections and uses their “exclamatory” prosodic feature (which they may not actually have) rather than “interjection”. It would be even more important to find a better term instead of the Hungarian “indulatszó”, which literally means ‘passion/emotion word’. The item damn , to which the entry goddamn refers the reader, is richer and easier to label because it can be broken down into several word classes, most of which obviously not interjection-like: exclamation, adverb, (polysemous) verb, adjective, and noun. The register information and some detail has been cut; somebody etc. has been replaced with smb etc. damn exclamation (also damn it , also dammit ) an expression of anger Damn, I've spilt coffee down my blouse! See also goddamn

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damn adverb 1. used, especially when you are annoyed, to mean ‘very’ [...] knew damn well [...] he can damn well do it You were damn lucky [...] 2. damn all UK informal nothing I know damn all about computers.

(It must be noted that for can damn well do it , the definition ‘very’ is hopelessly inadequate.) damn verb BLAME 1. to blame or strongly criticize smth or smb The inquiry [...] damns the company for its lack of safety precautions.

damn verb PUNISH 2. [...] to force smb to stay in hell and be punished forever [...] she would be damned for her sins

damn verb 3. damn you/them/it , etc. used to express anger with smb or smth You got the last ticket - damn you, I wanted that!

damn adjective (also damned ) used to express anger with smb or smth Damn fool !

damn noun not give/care a damn used as a way of saying you do not care about smth, especially the annoying things that smb else is doing or saying He can think what he likes about me – I don't give a damn!

2.6.5.6 Inserts According to the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber & al. 2000), inserts are supposed to be a class of words : stand-alone words characterized by their inability to enter into syntactic relations with other structures. Inserts tend to attach prosodically to a larger structure, and so may be counted as part of that structure. They comprise a class of words that is supposed to be peripheral both in the grammar and in the lexicon of the language. What this means for the syntax is clear, but why they should be secondary in the lexicon is not obvious. It may be questioned, Biber & al. (2000) argue, whether some inserts – interjections ( ugh, ooh ), response forms ( uh huh, mhm ), and hesitators ( mm, uh ) – are words at all. “Vocable”, which happens to be used just once, as if incidentally, in Biber & al. (2000) with no theoretical significance and repeated nowhere again, has been put to good use in the present study. Vocables, as has been argued, are lexical items whose form–function pairings are undoubtedly stored, i.e. which are listemes but do not pass the syntactic test which would make them eligible to be assigned to a word class. Many (but not all) of the inserts Biber & al. (2000) are “vocables”. It should be noted that for Biber & al. (2000) inserts are a words class; from their lexical-based point of view, they are not worried by the syntax-based difference between PoS-classifiable words and these “vocables”. It is not enough to recognize the insert category, Biber & al. (2000) claim, because it is itself best represented as three (or more) concentric circles with central and progressively less central, i.e. more peripheral, members. The more central members: (1) have the ability to appear on their own (not as part of a larger structure) (2) have the ability to appear prosodically attached to a larger structure and (3) are not homonyms of words in other word classes (4) have no denotative meaning; their use is defined rather by their pragmatic function.

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If one considers the fact that inserts, as long as they behave pragmatically and lexically as unana- lyzable formulae, are supposed to be able to consist of more than one word (e.g. thank you, excuse me , and expletive good God ), and the fact that inserts shade into one another and one and the same insert can be very versatile ( Oh , the commonest interjection, is also a discourse marker and response form; okay is a discourse marker, response elicitor, and response form), then it is obvious that inserts are as elusive a category as sentence word and/or interjection, to which their relation is far from clear. Turning now to the lexicography of inserts (sentence words, or interjections): however useful it may be to give all the items in the table below (based on Biber & al. 2000) as elaborate a lexicographic treatment as possible, in both monolingual or bilingual works, three factors will always hinder this cataloguing: (i) in many cases there exists no standard/conventionalized orthography for these expressions; (ii) in the case of bilingual lexicography, lack of standard orthography invariably affects both languages, and the task of matching two basically non-existing representation systems is a daunting one indeed: this is most acute in the case of response forms (iii) in the majority of cases prosodic information would have to be provided, and to this end, a simple but effective notation and the receptiveness on part of the dictionary user are both absent .

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List No6 Inserts in Biber (2000)

Inserts Function- Examples with comments based subtype (Notes to superscripts: inside table) Oh = surprise , unexpectedness, emotive arousal; combines with other inserts Oh yeah / Oh yes / Oh no / Oh aye / Oh well / Oh God / Oh I see / Oh right

Interjections Ah / wow / ooh Cor / aha oops / whoops ugh / ow / ouch / aargh / urgh Ha ! / ha ha ha ha yippee / whoopee / wowee / yuck Hi / Hello / Good morning/afternoon/evening/night / Morning hiya / wotcha / hey / howdy Greetings how (are) you doing and Good day farewells Bye / see you / Bye bye / Good-bye / See you (later) take care Good night ta ta / tara / cheers / cheerio Discourse well / right / now markers I mean / you know / you see / see / look / mind you / now then Attention sig- hey / yo / say / hey you / oi nals Response huh? / eh? / alright? / okay? / right? / see? elicitors yes / no variants: yeah / yep / nope / unh unh – Hung.: “ö- őő ” or “e-e” – no real spelling okay [response to directive]

–POSITIVE : uh huh pron. / ´h´/, rising intonation – Hung. ühü(m), öhö(m), aha, ehe ühüm and aha conventionalized variants: mhm pron. /mhm/, rising intonation Response mm / hmm forms –NEGATIVE : huh uh /m /m/, falling intonation – Hungarian ö- őő or e-e – no spelling convention unh unh /n /n/ or / N/N/ – ö- őő or e-e really / I see

TO DIRECTIVES sure , certainly, okie-dokie, okie-doke huh? – Hungarian hm? eh? – hm? he? what? both response forms & response elicitors sorry? / (I) beg your pardon? / excuse me? this is uh pretty heavy stuff / er er , ninety pound, I think Hesitators nasalized variants: um, I’ll come over / my erm hairdresser brought those erm kiddies’ chairs – Hung. ööö

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Inserts or formulae conventional speech acts: thanking, apologizing, requesting, congratulating; often elicit a minimizer such as no problem / you’re welcome / yes please Thank you / thank you very much / thanks / thanks a lot / ta / cheers you’re welcome / no problem Polite speech (A. Sorry, …) – B. That’s okay act formulae pardon me pardon? excuse me? sorry? (I) beg your pardon? pardon me? congratulations Excuse me! [ also attention signal]

Combining with grammatical constructions such as PPs and complement clauses: thank you for having us thank you very very very much sorry to keep bothering you Taboo expressions, swearwords, semi-taboo expressions in exclamations MWEs with variable syntactic structures excluded; purely formulaic MWEs included: my God / bloody hell

Combining with interjections: Oh hell Non-exclamatory taboo expressions excluded (these can/do combine): e.g. bloody Expletives 1. Taboo, uncensored bullshit; balls! bugger! God; my God; Christ! Jesus; Jesus Christ! Hell; Damn! Shit! Goddamit! Bloody hell! Oh Shit! Fuck! 2. Moderated, or self-censored blimey! crumbs! crikey! dang (it)! Golly! Gosh! (Gosh) darn (it)! Heck! My gosh; Geez; Gees! Gee! Good heavens! Heavens! Good grief! (Good) Lord! Oh heck! My goodness! Goodness (me)!

It may be interesting that formulae, which also occur in lists of synonymous or quasi-synonymous terms for phrasal expressions of different idiomaticity, should also figure in this list, which draw items from the border area of genuine words vs. not-quite-words, i.e. words vs. non-PoS-classifiable lexical items termed “vocables” in the present study. There is, apparently, a set of one-word (less- than-phrasal) expressions at the level of words that contains the non-PoS-classifiable vocables . These vocables are either independent utterances, or show no or very little integration within the clauses which they appear in. Moreover, their functions are greatly varied, as shown e.g. in the table above. Because these functions are served partly by larger-than-word expressions, which would be considered as phrases or even clauses were it not the case that they are made up of vocables and thus fossilized, in this way there seems to be a twilight zone “just above” the word level on the traditional rank scale, which comprises e.g. formulae. These include Oh I see! / Good morning! / See you / mind you / hey you! / excuse me? / you’re welcome / bloody hell – the examples come from the various function-based subtypes of inserts above. The transition from words through vocable/nonwords to multiword units is smoother than often is thought. This overview of interjections, sentence words, inserts, and formulae in 2.6.5 and 2.6.6 throws light on the fact that for dictionary making , insisting that (i) a grammatical rank scale-based classification of what is (not) listed in the lexicon and in the dictionary is as unjustified as insisting that (ii) lexical expressions need to be PoS-classifiable in order to be words. The expressions that will be (a) words with PoS labels for the syntax on the one hand, (b) listemes for the mental lexicon, and (c) dictionary-worthy lexical items are drastically different.

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The data suggests that there is an abundance of expressions that are not lexicographically inferior just because they cannot be neatly assigned to word classes. For this realization, it is irrelevant whose fault this may be – the syntacticians, the lexicologists, or someone else’s, or simply language is just too complex at this juncture. There is such a wealth of expressions just above the word level on the traditional grammatical rank scale, and within their level, these expressions are so varied semantically, syntactically, lexically and functionally/pragmatically that a rank scale-based description pales before this variety.

2.6.5.7 Lexically bound words The bound nature of morphemes means, in its simplest formulation, that such morphemes only occur together with others. Affixes are bound; most lexical roots are free; independent words are by definition free. Dependent words e.g. in the sense of Kenesei (2000) are bound syntactically and phonologically, do not have lexical meanings, and do not occur as utterances. What are termed lexically bound words in this study are different: together with vocables, interjections, sentence words, inserts, inarticulate onomatopoeics, and bound bases, they inhabit the flexible zone between the secure position of words and phrases on a grammatical rank scale. Bound words in another, lexical, sense are words that invariably occur together with other words in multiword expressions. Just as bound lexical morphemes (e.g. of the “cranberry” type) have neither meaning nor grammatical function but still distinguish words, such lexically bound words function similarly. Whereas bound lexical morphemes show the inadequacy of a traditional definition of the morpheme under which morphemes need to have meaning, lexically bound words exhibit a trait even more anomalous: that not all words have meaning. This is certainly so in the eyes of the lay dictionary user, who is usually ignorant of, and thus not worried about cranberry morphemes but cannot fail to notice the odd meaningless word: whenever a dictionary cannot provide a one-word equivalent for such a word, it is a very noticeable phenomenon. There exist numerous such words, and they are amply registered lexicographically. Although dictionaries do not as a rule use a special label, terminology or device to mark them, they do indicate this feature of theirs variously, but effectively in the following way: “Word W, appears (only) in phrase P”. Whether dictionaries PoS-label bound words is largely a matter of chance. In CED&T (1992), lieu , e.g. is marked as a noun with a paraphrasable meaning: lieu ‘stead; place’ (esp. in the phrases in lieu , in lieu of ) In CALD (2008), lieu is also marked as a noun; a search on lieu returns two items, lieu n and in lieu (of) , but here, lieu is entered as a noun without a meaning given, and in lieu (of) with the meaning ‘instead (of)’.

Kuiper & al. (2003) mention that bound words exist in a number of what they term phrasal lexical items (presumably the same category as multiword expressions). Examples include take umbrage ; take cognisance of; have an inkling ; with bated breath; with might and main . The interesting flip side of this argument, of course, is that if an expression contains a (lexically) bound word, it must be an idiom of sorts. If, under the standard definition, idiomaticity implies that the meaning of the whole is not reducible to those of the parts (plus the rules for their combination), this situation clearly holds when the parts have no meaning .

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Idioms that owe their existence to lexically bound words, to be sure, are the minority. They, however, count among the “colourful”, conspicuous ones exactly because of the rare or unique, stylistically marked words that they contain.

Lexically bound words have also been called “phraseologically bound”, and may indeed be called “fossil words”: obsolete words which remains in currency because they are contained within an idiom that is still in currency. An idiom here is seen as some kind of protective structure that pre- serves the form side of some form–meaning duality, although it must be noted that there are lexically bound words that never have had meaning in the first place, e.g. because they are corruptions of well-known existing words. It is Trawi ński & al. (2008) who call these bound items “cranberry words”, based on Aronoff (1976). This use, however, may be misleading: for a long time, the term “cranberry word” has been used for items that contain a cranberry morpheme, not for words that are the analogues of those kind of morpheme. In that sense, cranberry is a cranberry word. If the analogy is to be kept consistent, lexically bound words ought to be termed “cran- words”, since they are the fossilized, meaningless parts of the complex. If, however, “cranberry word” is still to be used for lexically, or phraseologically, bound words, then “cranberry expression” is a convenient one for a multiword expression that contains (at least) one. The “cranberry word” examples of Trawi ński & al. (2008) include ulterior motives ; to and fro ; sleight of hand ; scantily clad ; nook and cranny ; days of yore ; sticks in one’s craw ; in fine fettle ; kith and kin ; spick and span ; at loggerheads ; in the offing ; short shrift ; happy as a sandboy ; play footsie with someone; make headway ; the whole caboodle; wend one’s way . Trawi ński & al. (2008) admit that e.g. the verb bate ‘ abate’ does exist; indeed, often the alleged lexically bound words are not absolutely non-existent. CED&T (1992) e.g. defines e.g. shrift as follows: shrift Archaic. ‘the act or an instance of shriving or being shriven’. See also short shrift .

The phenomenon of lexically bound words is a typical gradience: whether to a person a word is bound, i.e. used outside of some multiword expression, is a matter of education. Just as the person may know or not know, and adequately use in all circumstances, the idiom itself, they may or may not have come across the lexically “bound” word contained therein. There seem to be (almost) 100% bound and less bound words, and this fact is reflected in the cautious handling of these expressions in dictionaries: instead of the “Word W, appears only in phrase P”, which suggests a fully bound word, other wordings are encountered: CED&T (1992), e.g., sometimes has the qualification “esp. in the phrase”: cranny ‘ narrow opening, as in a wall or rock face; chink; crevice’ (esp. in the phrase every nook and cranny with the wording “esp.” clearly showing that cranny is less than 100% bound. Ayto (2006) argues that idioms may contain fossilized words that “have no independent existence” (e.g. pig in a poke ). He also recognizes that cranberry expression is often used for the idioms that contain such words, the cranberry words . Ayto does not further classify these words, but a dual separation is useful indeed. Cranberry morphemes really come in two varieties, the cranberry type and the gooseberry type. Just as the morphemic “cranberry fossils” are either (a) completely non- existent outside the given complex word (as the cran - of cranberry ), or (b) exist outside the complex word only in some irrelevant meaning (as the goose- of gooseberry ), these word-level fossils in idioms may either (a) be entirely non-existent outside a given pattern, or (b) not exist outside the idiom in one particular , obsolete but etymologically traceable, sense. While, e.g., fro in to and fro , the sleight of the phrase sleight of hand , or the yore of days of yore exemplify the former, abso-

121 Chapter Two lute cranberry word type. The poke in pig in a poke or root in the phrase root for illustrate the latter cranberry.

As far as lexicography is concerned, it is expected that dictionaries will also provide conflicting data on this account. In 2.6.5.7.1, two works will be compared for some lexically bound word items. • The expressions are in alphabetical order of the ostensible lexically bound words in them. • The expression “esp. in (the) phrase” has been shortened to “esp. in”. • Style labels have been cut.

If, based on the wordings in the two dictionaries, a boundness index were to be assigned to the lexically bound words, showing the obviously gradational character of the phenomenon, the task would not be a simple one. Often the alleged (lexically) bound word has other meanings in which it is freely used outside the ostensible cranberry expression, making the form–meaning unit unique, but not the form itself: headway and main are cases in point. Sometimes the MWE is not even recognized as a cranberry expression in the dictionary, which does not enter it at all. It also happens that the “bound” word is not deemed so unique as to explain the MWE in the entry for that word ; rather, the dictionary has just a referring article to some other word of the ostensible cranberry expression: e.g. from craw , COED (2004) refers the reader to the entry stick ; similarly, from the fro entry to the entry to and fro . The multiword item may simply not be listed in the dictionary: with might and main and happy as a sandboy , e.g., are not entered in COED (2004). It even happens that it is not clear which of the components of the cranberry expression is the lexically bound word: the cranny part of nook and cranny is a “normal” word according to COED (2004), which lists every nook and cranny as a phrase under nook and labels it a phrase. By contrast, CEDT (1992), which uses “esp. in every nook and cranny ”, suggests that cranny is the bound word and nook a “normal” one. Thus this multiword expression figures twice below, shaded in both cases.

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2.6.5.8 Some lexically bounds words in CEDT and COED

The table takes a look at the treatment of a few bound words in CEDT (1992) and COED (2004).

List No7

Item CEDT (1992) COED (2004) with bated 1. bate another word for abate 2. with bated breath bated breath holding one’s breath in (in with bated breath ) in great suspense. suspense or fear the whole caboodle a lot, bunch, or group (esp. in caboodle caboodle the whole caboodle , the whole kit (in the whole caboodle or the whole kit and caboodle ) informal the whole and caboodle ) number or quantity of people or things in question. scantily clad clad a past participle of clothe clad 1 archaic or literary past participle of clothe . 1 clothed. 2 provided with cladding. take 1. knowledge; acknowledgement take cognizance or cognisance cognisance cognizance of to take notice of; ac- 1 formal knowledge or awareness. […] 2 […] PHRASES knowledge, esp. officially 2. the take cognizance of formal attend to; take range or scope of knowledge or per- account of. ception nook and cranny narrow opening, as in a wall or cranny cranny rock face; chink; crevice (esp. in a small, narrow space or opening every nook and cranny sticks in one’s craw 1. a less common word for crop craw craw (sense 6) 2. the stomach of an animal dated the crop of a bird or insect. PHRASES 3. stick in one’s craw or throat stick in one’s craw see stick 2. Informal. to be difficult, or against one’s conscience, for one to accept, utter, or believe in fine fettle fettle […] 4. state of health, spirits, etc. fettle (esp. in fine fettle ) condition: the horse remains in fine fettle . play footsie footsie flirtation involving the touching footsie together of feet, knees, etc. (esp. in (usually in play footsie ) the action of touching someone’s feet lightly with one’s play footsie ) own feet as a playful expression of ro- mantic interest. to and fro fro back or from. See to and fro fro see to and fro . make headway headway 1. motion in a forward direc- headway tion: the vessel made no headway 2. 1 forward movement or progress. 2 the average interval between trains or progress or rate of progress: he buses on a regular service. made no headway with the problem 3. another name for headroom 4. the distance or time between consecutive trains, buses, etc., on the same route have an inkling a slight intimation or suggestion; inkling inkling suspicion a slight suspicion; a hint. kith and kin kith one’s friends and acquaintances kith (esp. in kith and kin ) (in kith and kin ) one’s relations.

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Item CEDT (1992) COED (2004) at loggerheads loggerhead loggerhead 6. at loggerheads . engaged in dispute 1 (also loggerhead turtle ) a large-headed red- dish-brown turtle of warm seas. […] or confrontation 2 archaic a foolish person. PHRASES at loggerheads in violent dispute or disagreement. with might and main main 8. great strength or force (now chiefly ——— in (with) might and main ) nook and nook a corner or narrow recess, as in a nook cranny room; a secluded or sheltered a corner or recess, especially one offering seclu- sion or security. place; retreat PHRASES every nook and cranny every part of something. in the offing offing 1. the part of the sea that can be offing seen from the shore 2. in the off- the more distant part of the sea in view. PHRASES ing . likely to occur soon in the offing likely to happen or appear soon. happy as a sandboy n. sandboy happy (or jolly ) as a sandboy very ——— happy; high-spirited sleight of hand sleight Archaic 1. skill; dexterity. See sleight also sleight of hand 2. a trick or (in sleight of hand ) manual dexterity, typically in performing conjuring tricks. skilful decep- stratagem 3. cunning; trickery tion. spick and span spick-and-span or spic-and-span 1. spick and span (also spic and span ) extremely neat and clean 2. new neat, clean, and well looked after. and fresh short shrift shrift Archaic. the act or an instance of shrift shriving or being shriven. See also archaic confession, especially to a priest. absolution by a priest. See also short short shrift shrift . ulterior ulterior 1. lying beneath or beyond ulterior motives what is revealed, evident, or sup- 1 other than what is obvious or admitted: she had some ulterior motive in coming. posed: ulterior motives 2. suc- 2 beyond what is immediate or present. ceeding, subsequent, or later 3. lying beyond a certain line or point take umbrage umbrage 1. displeasure or resentment; umbrage offence (in the phrase give or take 1 offence or annoyance. 2 archaic shade or shadow, especially as cast by umbrage ) 2. the foliage of trees, trees. considered as providing shade 3. Rare. shadow or shade 4. Archaic. a shadow or semblance wend one’s wend to direct (one’s course or way); wend way travel (wend one’s way ) go slowly or by an indirect route. days of yore yore n. 1. time long past (now only in yore the phrase of yore ) adv. 2. (in phrase of yore ) literary of former times or long ago. Obsolete. in the past; long ago

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2.7 Above the level of words

2.7.1Compounds for the linguist and the user

One of the clearest clashes between the linguist’s and the layperson-as-dictionary-user’s way of looking at linguistic expressions is with compounds. While compound words are words in the system of language (albeit ones that are not easily demarcated either from non-compounds, on the one hand, or from phrases, on the other), compounds will always be naturally seen as multiword items , especially in writing, the happy hunting ground of dictionaries. Whatever the linguistic status of a sequence “with a space, or especially more spaces, in the middle”, the user, whose encounters with language are focussed on the written medium, will be quick to establish that they are looking at an “expression”, a “phraseologism”, or an “idiom” of sorts when they see one. Since the status of multiword expressions within what are generally considered as “phraseologisms”, i.e. their relation to the expressions catalogued in 2.9, is not at all unproblematic, one that notoriously lacks a consensual view in the linguists’ community, it is to be expected that a huge portion of linguistic expressions that contain more than one (written) word, and are listemes (for the lexicon) will be in an indeterminate twilight zone lexicographically. Sections 2.7 and 2.8 explore this ill-defined zone. Compounds themselves will be discussed in all of those places where they are seen as overlapping with (other) multiword units. One central claim in the present study is that the majority of compounds are listemes. The claim held by many (cf. Katamba 2005; Booij 2007) that they need not be listed since their meanings are compositional is hard to accept. Booij claims that the “productivity of compounding in many languages is largely due to its semantic transparency and versatility” (Booij 2007:75). While versatility is hard to define and neither is it clear why it should contribute to productivity , the transparency claim must be mistaken: Booij states that “the general semantic pattern of a compound of the form XY is that it denotes a Y that has something to do with X or vice versa, depending on the language” (Booij 2007:75). This may be true, but this does not mean transparency . It may suggest motivatedness in a trivial sense, but not predictability . Just by knowing the meaning of the components of the compounds G. Hausfrau , Du. huis-vrouw , H. házinéni and H. háziasszony (#1: ‘house’ #2: ‘woman’), there is no guessing which is/are the one(s) that mean(s) ‘landlady’ and which means ‘housewife’.

2.7.2 Synthetic compounds

It is only synthetic compounds, a subset of compounds at large, that have predictable meanings indeed, and display a productivity that otherwise marks the syntax. The operation of their formation is so productive that any verb V and its argument A plus an Affix can be the input to such compounds as Arg–V–Aff, where Aff may be, e.g. -ing and -er in English (the actual binary structure is irrelevant now). The outputs range from (a) the established through (b) the potential but unusual along to (c) the bizarre. The most bizarre compounds are exactly of the same (un)acceptability and not less grammatical than their related VP with the same verb and argument structure. The expression ?feed the windows is not a worse syntactic object than ?window-feeding is a morphological one: the usual syntactic creativity, only restricted by semantic anomalies, seems to be involved.

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There is no need for the listing of synthetic compounds in the mental lexicon: their majority are thus probably not listemes. A part of them, the more frequent ones, may well be stored, if storage is more cost-effective than real-time generation. The infinite number of potential synthetic compounds, which are generated in a way only characteristic of the maximum productivity of syntax, are per definitionem unlisted.

2.7.3 Lexicon vs. lexis

“Lexis” and “lexicon” both refer to the storage in the mental lexicon of lexical units, i.e. listemes, that are retrieved and combined into meaningful language. They may be used interchangeably, and sometimes are, as in much lexicographic writing. Corpus linguistics – with perhaps a sweeping generalization – is of the view that the old dichotomy between grammar and the lexicon/vocabulary does not exist, and often opts for lexis rather than lexicon because, as opposed to the lexicon, it focuses on probabilistic, not possible language usage. The concept of lexis is thus supposed to contrast with mainstream (generative) theoretical accounts of language; grammar is seen as the product of accumulated lexis, rather than an entity that generates it. Research along these lines claims that it has found grammar to be actually avoided as far as possible, and much of language consists of prefabricated pieces of some form or other (Moon 2007). As a foretaste of sections 2.8 and 2.9, List No8 sketches out the simple but workable overview of the various types of lexical item in Atkins & Rundell (2008:164). These lexical items are not claimed to be either idiomatic or dictionary-worthy, although there may seem to be a link between idiomaticity and dictionary-worthiness. Atkins & Rundell (2008:169–170) argue that because non-idiomatic compounds, e.g. table leg , are (i) spontaneously produced and found in their thousands in corpus data, and (ii) semantically transparent, they pose few problems to lexicographer or dictionary user. As the present study argues throughout, however, idiomaticity is not best defined in terms of transparency, but rather in terms of predictability, and for the purposes of bilingual lexicography predictability is the prime concept. The kind of predictability that comes even before predictability of meaning is predictability of existence (or existence of some similar form). Carstairs–McCarthy 2002:126 is explicit about this double aspect of predictability: “Unpredictability of existence does not entail unpredictability of meaning.” Thus there is no guarantee, e.g. that even a (clearly transparent ) compound like table leg will also be a compound in some other language (that language may not use compounds at all), let alone a compound with the same metaphor and of the same form as the English one. The case of the Hungarian compound nyílegyenes ‘straight as an arrow’ will illustrate this. English has a simile, while Hungarian a compound for this concept (literally: “arrow-straight”). It is never predictable whether notions like this are going to be expressed at all , and whether they are expressed by the two typical devices of (i) similes or (ii) compounds (iii) or possibly in some other way. Any linguistic expression in either of a pair of languages, especially when looked at from the learner’s point of view, is thus idiomatic .

2.7.4 Types of lexical items in Atkins & Rundell (2008)

The examples in Atkins & Rundell 2008:169–170 (given below except for the simple words) are not originally included, but come from Chapter 6:

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List No8 Types of lexical item 36 SIMPLE WORDS ABBREVIATIONS PARTIAL WORDS MULTIWORD EXPRESSIONS

–lexical alphabetisms: bound affixes: fixed & semi-fixed phrases 37

–grammatical BBC im- as in –transparent collocations: to risk one’s life (function words; impossible –fixed phrases: knives, forks and spoons; closed category kith and kin items): -ment as in Some function as compounds. attainment –similes: white as snow 5 types: Prep, –catchphrases: Conj, Pron, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em Aux, Det –proverbs: too many cooks (spoil the broth) –quotations: to be or not to be; an eye for an eye acronyms: productive other phrasal idioms 39 : affixes 38 : NATO ex- as in ex-wife Includes all idiomatic phrases except the -gate as in other four types in this column. Zippergate throw in the sponge / towel to get too big for one’s boots etc etc contractions: combining forms: compounds:

don’t one-legged, idiomatic 40 & non-idiomatic vinyl-covered, –PoS mainly: N, A & V flat-leafed (within V: commonest = phrasal V)

in spite of = compound P –types: –figurative: lame duck, civil servant –semi-figurative: high school, blind drunk –functional: can opener, police dog phrasal verbs: consists of V + one or more particle(s) Particle may function as Adverb ( away, out ) or Prep ( with , to ), or both ( in , through ). Meaning may be literal and figurative (= metaphorical): run out support verb (= light / delexical / empty verb) constructions: make a complaint, take a decision, have a rest, give a lecture, do a dance

36 Atkins & Rundell (2008:166) mention that of the four principal classes, only MWE‘s pose problems of identification. 37 Without specifically mentioning “bundles” or “chunks”, Atkins & Rundell (2008:166) emphasize that many groups of words, such as she put it in the or immediately below the , co-occur frequently in corpus text but are of no real interest to lexicography”, adding that “Some theorists call such fragments collocations […]”. 38 Atkins & Rundell (2008:165) include this footnote: “Some dictionaries call these combining forms, but we give this term a more specific definition”. 39 In the absence of hard and fast criteria, Atkins & Rundell (2008:166) admit that it is almost impossible to be consistent here. The phrase must pass the “meaning is more than the sum of the parts” test, and then it may have one or more defining properties (no idiom has them all). 40 Atkins & Rundell (2008:170) warn that there are no watertight criteria for identifying idiomatic compounds in corpus data. Then, most confusingly, they say that idiomatic compounds they will call simply compounds .

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No claim is made here, or elsewhere in the book, that a list of the types of lexical item covers the whole lexicon of English, or that a similar one may cover that of another language. Of the four principal classes – simple words, abbreviations, partial words, and multiword expressions – only the members of the first are all traditionally classified into parts of speech (which classification, of course, is a lexicographical problem in its own right). The only type in the multiword column whose members, being word-level items, are PoS-classifiable, are compounds . Of these, however, only A and N compounds are a straightforward matter: compound prepositions are claimed not to exist by many authors. Support verb “constructions” are not verbs as PoS, but VPs. Phrasal verbs, while (i) they have an uncontested place from both the pedagogical and lexicographic point of view, (ii) receive widely differing analyses syntactically, and (iii) are classified differently in the lexicological literature. Two extreme approaches in the latter are Atkins & Rundell (2008), who, as seen above, explicitly classify them with compounds – which they are sometimes claimed not to be syntactically: to be compounds, they would have to be left-headed, which is sometimes claimed to be impossible in English. At the other end, Booij (2007) claims them to be lexical units but not words since they lack lexical integrity: “another way of putting this is to say that look up is a listeme but not a lexeme of English” Booij (2007:23).

A dictionary, then, may contain several types of lexical item whose “word vs. nonword” status remains forever unclear, and irrelevant, for the general user. The “simplex word vs. compound” borderline is no more clearly defined than the “word vs. phrase” divide.

2.8 Lexical unit

It has been traditional in lexicography to refer to the units catalogued in dictionaries as “lexical items”, or “lexical units”, terms which are supposed to include any unit of the lexicon, not just words, but which sometimes restricted to larger-than-word units. As summarized, e.g., in Kiefer (1990), “a lexical item need not be a word of the language: it can be a stem morpheme, a phonologically not fully specified sequence of segments or even an abstract entity with no direct relationship with the actually occurring elements of the language”. Of these, most stem morphemes are not, and certainly no phonologically underspecified elements and abstract entities are, entered in dictionaries. This is one of the rarely mentioned differences between the mental dictionary and the lexicographical product. Whether an abstract lexical entity may be a listeme that is stored and retrieved seems a highly controversial issue that the present study obviously cannot endeavour to solve, but it may be in order to point the fact out. Essentially, however, “lexical item” may cover the whole ground both below and above the word.

Since, crucially, the expressions “lexical item” or “lexical unit” were introduced so that they could also cover multiword expressions in the first place, “multiword (lexical) unit/item”, or an unquali- fied “multiword unit/item”, more than precisely delimits its object in the phraseological realm: a lexical unit consisting of more than one word-level item.

In contrast to this, the term “lexical unit” is used more restrictively e.g. in Atkins & Rundell (2008), where it explicitly means “word sense”: they speak of a “...a methodology for dividing words (or ‘lemmas’) into senses (or ‘lexical units’)” (2008:20). They write about “finding the senses, or lexi-

128 Chapter Two cal units, of the headword [...] and [...] identifying what is worth recording for each of these lexical units (2008:114). Lexical units here are thus associations of form and meaning: ball 1 ‘spherical body’ and ball 2 ‘social function for dancing’ are two (of the many) lexical units (with the same form / bç˘l/). Similarly, Atkins & Rundell (2008) explicitly warn “that the paradigmatic relationships [..] in this chapter are all between lexical units (LUs), that is to say, word meanings and not words themselves” (2008:144). They define LUs thus: “a headword in one of its senses is a lexical unit (or LU), and [...] we use the term to denote one sense (either during the analysis process or within a dictionary entry)” (2008:175). Discussing word-centred vs. collocation-centred vocabulary teaching, for example, Almela & Sánchez (2007) claim that “recent advances in corpus linguistics mark a departure from the word- centred approach”, because “vocabulary teaching should be inspired by a revised notion of what constitutes a lexical unit. [...] The concept of an extended lexical item, or ELI, has implications both for the structure of the lexicon and for the scope of the phrasicon ”. To put these insights more succinctly, they basically claim that the lexicon is mostly a phrasicon .

2.8.1 “Phrasicon” and phraseology

The term “phrasicon”, signifying the whole inventory of idioms and phrases of a language, does not seem to be universally used, but it does appear in Gläser 2001 (Rosemarie Gläser’s contribution in Cowie 2001), one of the most influential volumes on the subject. It is this term, “extended lexical unit”, used in e.g. Poß & van der Wouden (2004) for what the majority of scholars now seem to label “multiword expression”. Writing about what they term extended lexical units Poß & van der Wouden (2004) claim that “recent developments in linguistic theory [...] question the traditional picture of the language system consisting of an interesting grammar vis à vis a boring lexicon. Large parts of everyday spoken language are arguably constructed out of “extended lexical units” (ELUs), which we will use as a pre-theoretical term to refer to all linguistic building blocks larger than words, be they compositional or not, that must be assumed to be stored in the lexicon (sometimes also known as “construction”), because they have idiosyncratic properties as regards their phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, style level, etc. Note that lexical storage of these ELUs does not preclude the possibility that they possess various degrees of grammatical structure and/or grammatical freedom.” Poß & van der Wouden (2004:187); italics mine

This significant and densely worded statement will have to be separated into two: (i) more broadly, about the significance of longer-than-word lexical units for syntax, and the changes that their recognition may imply for linguistics, involving a fundamental theme of linguistics: the architecture of grammar, and the division of labour between the lexicon and the grammar; (ii) more narrowly, the nature of these longer-than-word, “extended” lexical units: their compositionality, storage, and idiosyncrasies at different linguistic levels; also, their relation to other longer-than-word expressions, e.g. “constructions”. Whatever one’s view on the overall linguistic significance of these extended, or multiword, lexical units may be, and whether one agrees that these units disprove the tenet of an “interesting grammar vis à vis a boring lexicon”, the second part of the statement can hardly be denied: the literature on the phrasal lexicon, which has always suffered from an embarrassment of riches and a lack of definitions due to the elusive character of its object, contains a host of “pre-theoretical”, mostly undefined or rather untidily defined, and obviously cross-cutting terms such as: “multiword expression”,

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“lexical phrase”, “polyword”, and “phraseme”. Under the headings of these terms researchers have invariably placed widely differing linguistic patterns, and this has resulted in a multitude of different terms signifying a multitude and partly overlapping phenomena that are impossible to unravel. This unconstrained invention of names and new classification is not the fault of the numerous analysts who either use the existing formidable multitude or, dissatisfied, add their own but – contra optimistic voices from lexicographic quarters – it is of no use for dictionary-making.

2.8.1.1 Fixed expressions, phrases, idioms

2.8.1.1.1 Moon (1998) on problems of terminology

Moon (1998:2) characterizes this situation as follows: “Terminology in this field has always been problematic […]. There is no generally agreed common vocabulary. Different terms are sometimes used to describe identical or very similar kinds of unit; at the same time, a single term may be used to denote very different phenomena” Moon (1998) uses “fixed expression” as a general term to cover several kinds of “phrasal lexeme, phraseological unit, or multi-word lexical item, that is, holistic units of two or more words” (thus treated synonymously). Fixed expressions for Moon (1998) include (among other things) frozen collocations, grammatically ill-formed collocations, proverbs, routine formulae, sayings, and similes .

“Fixed expression” also covers idioms . Moon also sets out a more detailed typology, and finds “fixed expression”, like “idiom”, unsatisfactory, since many are not actually fixed. She states that she “will retain it for simplicity’s sake”, and refer to fixed expressions (including idioms) as FEI s. The really difficult question of whether a string is a unit, i.e., a FEI, is decided by taking three factors into account: (i) institutionalization, (ii) lexico-grammatical fixedness, and (iii) non-compositionality. These “form the criteria by which the holism of a string may be assessed.” (Moon 1998:6).

Institutionalization, in turn is supposed to be “the process by which a string or formulation becomes recognized and accepted as a lexical item of the language. […] In corpus terms, institutionalization is quantitative, and assessed by the frequency with which the string recurs. […] However, […] most FEIs occur infrequently.” (Moon 1998:7) FEIs cover only some of the phraseological units in English: Moon claims that she is “deliberately avoiding four particular kinds of item”: compound nouns, adjectives, and verbs […]; phrasal verbs […]; foreign phrases […]; and multi-word inflectional forms of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs such as had been lying and more careful(ly) ”, explaining this by claiming that “the interest in compound words seems […] to rest largely in morphology, and multi-word inflectional forms are simply part of the grammar of English”. She is excluding phrasal verbs and foreign phrases because limits need to be set; phrasal verbs are easily separable on lexico-grammatical grounds, but otherwise show a similar range of idiomaticity types to FEI s. “Idiom” itself is fraught with problems, first of all because it is used in a narrower and a broader sense: “Narrower uses restrict idiom to a […] kind of unit: one that is fixed and semantically

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opaque or metaphorical, or, traditionally, ‘not the sum of its parts’ […]. Such units are sometimes called pure idioms […]. In broader uses, idiom is a general term for many kinds of multiword item, whether semantically opaque or not.” Moon reminds us that Anglo-American dictionaries typically call idioms what she has termed FEIs, making no further typological classification. Idiom is also used for “non-compositional polymorphemic words” such as blackbird . (This basically equals idiomatic compounds). In Hockett’s view even single morphemes are idioms, since “their meanings cannot be deducible” (Hockett 1958: 171ff, quoted in Moon 1998:4). “In some discussions of speech act theory”, the term idiom refers to a conventionalized formula with an illocutionary function (for example, can you pass the salt? ), but that formulae such as this are rarely recognized as idioms in lexicology. Moon states that while she uses FEI as a general term, there are others in use, in addition to broader uses of idiom . Phraseological unit is used in some Slavonic and German linguistic traditions as a superordinate term for multi-word lexical items. Phraseme is sometimes used as a superordinate term outside Anglo-American traditions. Even more confusingly, there are other uses for both of these terms. Phraseological unit and phraseme can be identified with phrasal lexeme in (Lyons 1977: 23; quoted in Moon 1998:5).

2.8.1.1.2 Granger (2005) on phraseology

The different approaches to multiword units and phraseology in general are aptly summarized by Granger (2005:165). Phraseology is supposed to deal with “the study of word combinations rather than single words. These multi-word units […] are classified into a range of subtypes in accordance with their degree of semantic non-compositionality, syntactic fixedness, lexical restrictions and institutionalization. As phraseology has strong links but fuzzy borders with several other fields of linguistics, however, notably morphology, syntax, semantics and discourse, linguists vary in their opinion as to which subsets of these MWUs should be included in the field of phraseology. Compounds and grammatical collocations are cases in point.” And because phraseology has fuzzy borders, opinions also widely vary as to which of these ought to be included in dictionaries. Opinion is even more widely divided on how they should be included, if at all, but that is a matter of lexicographic policy rather than lexicological wisdom. Crucially, “institutionalization”, an expression that sometimes appears in lists of the axes along which multiword units may be placed, is rarely defined. (Moon 1998, quoted 2.8.1.1.1, which is an exception, defines it in basically statistical terms, considering it as one of three factors that make units holistic , i.e. fixed expressions .) ...Although there is still some considerable discrepancy between linguists as regards the terminology and typology of word combinations [...], there is general agreement that phraseology constitutes a continuum along which word combinations are situated, with the most opaque and fixed ones at one end and the most transparent and variable ones at the other. ...One of the main preoccupations of linguists [...] has been to find linguistic criteria to distinguish one type of phraseological unit from another (e.g. collocations vs. idioms or full idioms vs. semi-idioms) and especially to distinguish the most variable and transparent multi-word units from free combinations, which [...] are [...] considered as falling outside the realm of phraseology.”

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One is tempted to say that if the expression is really “free”, then it has no place in the dictionary. If, however, the border between the grammar and the lexicon is fuzzy – as certainly seems to be the case from a lexicological angle – then even this much is uncertain. Granger also argues that by establishing non-compositionality and fixedness as the criteria for word combinations, the focus shifted to (or, contra Granger, stayed with) multiword units such as proverbs, idioms and phrasal verbs, while the less central, more variable combinations usually get much less attention. This is reflected in the omnipresence of books on idioms and phrasal verbs on the market; lip service to what the present study refers to as the “colourful” type of idioms (such as be green with envy , appropriately using a colour metaphor) has been around for far too long. More importantly, Granger reminds us that a more recent approach to phraseology, the statistical or frequency-based approach (as opposed to a top-down one which identifies phraseological units on the basis of linguistic criteria uses a bottom-up corpus-driven approach to identify lexical co-occurrences. This in- ductive approach generates a wide range of word combinations, which do not all fit predefined linguistic categories [...]. It has opened up a ‘huge area of syntagmatic prospection’ (Sinclair 2004: 19) encompassing sequences [...] which are ‘syntactically and semantically compositional, but occur with markedly high frequency’ [...]. Such units [...] have recently revealed themselves to be pervasive in language, while many of the most restricted units have proved to be highly infrequent. Here, “free” is allowed to creep back into the dictionary, as it were, simply provided it is frequent enough. Word combinations, then, are equated with multiword units, which are classifiable into subtypes by four criteria. MWUs have fuzzy borders, and no clear definitions: a compound, e.g. may or may not be considered one. MWUs constitute a continuum with an opaque/fixed extreme and a transparent/variable extreme. Analysts try to find criteria both for separating out types of MWU, and for the demarcation of the MWU vs. “free combination” border. The new approach to MWUs may not base itself on linguistic criteria: MWUs may not be grammatical, i.e. linguistically natural, units. Indeed, the notion MWU is open to every and any interpretation . All this makes it more than unlikely that there ever emerges an all-embracing definition for MWUs, since not only have these been found to have even fuzzier boundaries than most linguistic objects, but also less clear ones than before; and in the absence of at least an initial working definition, their sphere can be widened arbitrarily. Some of the units that have “recently revealed themselves” are clearly not units of grammar at all, only units in the statistical sense: the “bundles” of Biber & al. 2000 and the “clusters” of Carter & McCarthy (2006) are cases in point. Pawley & Syder (1983) argue that “fluent and idiomatic control of a language rests to a considerable extent on knowledge of a body of ‘sentence stems’ which are institutionalized or lexicalized”. These are units “of clause length or longer whose grammatical form and lexical content is wholly or largely fixed [...]. Although lexicalized in this sense, most such units are not true idioms but rather are regular form-meaning pairings. The stock of lexicalized sentence stems known to the ordinary mature speaker of English amounts to hundreds of thousands . In addition there are many semi-lexicalized sequences, for just as there is a continuum between fully productive rules of sentence formation and rules of low productivity, so there is a cline between fully lexicalized formations on the one hand and nonce forms on the other.” Pawley & Syder (1983:191; italics mine)

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In the light of such (frequently made) realizations, it is odd that when questions concerning the “word stock” of a language are asked, authors (although warning about the problems of definition and methodology involved) fail to point out: words are not what count. This multiply erroneous lay notion of the “word stock” is in this way partly perpetuated by dictionaries. Another fact worthy of note is that according to Pawley & Syder (1983) too, lexicalization of sentence stems is not an either–or but gradational phenomenon.

2.8.1.2 “Phrase” vs. “idiom”: not distinguished in CALD (2008) Notwithstanding the volumes of literature on phraseology, the everyday notion of the lexicon is such that it contains “words and expressions”, or “words and phrases”, where the latter signifies any (memorizable) multiword sequence. CALD (2008), one of the best learner’s dictionaries in electronic form, offers different sorts of useful searches, and even has a system of colour coding for the different types of hit: dark blue = main entries and variants; green= phrasal verbs; light blue = phrases ; red = idioms While all users will (have to) accept this grouping, which is a given in the dictionary, the terms themselves are not explained in the Help. Thus the difference between “phrase” and “idiom” will never be explained; a glance at the list of examples convinces one that there is no such difference . Not only are phrase and idiom, distinguished by labelling but not kept apart consistently, there is also no labelling either for compounds (which is not a unique feature of this dictionary: compounds are not usually marked as such): the boldface items in list (A) below are all compounds (with word the head or the modifier), but neither in their entries nor in this list is there indication of their compound status. The first group of hits are Main entries and variants , not Main entries and compounds . “Variant” thus remains undefined – and indeed undefinable. The above is no criticism of CALD (2008): there simply does not exist a workable taxonomy in the literature on which lexicographic treatments of these and similar examples could be based; the lexical phenomena involved are apparently too complex for that.

List No9 Search on word in CALD (2008):

(A) Main entries and variants word n LANGUAGE UNIT function word n word n TALKING the f-word n word n NEWS a good word n word n PROMISE guide word n word n ORDER word association n word v word perfect adj big word n word processing n complex word n word processor n dirty word n the written word n four-letter word n word class n, at part of speech (n)

(Boldface here signifies what are labelled “variants”)

(B) Phrases not believe a word of it the printed word doubt sb/doubt sb’s word the f-/c- etc. word keep your promise/ word

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Three of the phrases are VPs. The two NPs, the f-word and the printed word could also figure among the “variants”.

(C) Idioms not have a civil word to say about sb have a word in sb’s ear (your) every word in a word be as good as your word man/woman of his/her word won’t hear a word (said) against sb/sth (upon) my word ! Many a true word is spoken in jest. not get a word in edgeways not know the meaning of the word put in a good word for sb be the last word in sth put the word about/around/out/round What’s the magic word ? take sb at their word Mum’s the word . word for word the operative word word gets about/around/round say the word word has it send word (the) word is spread the word your word is your bond take my word for it, at take it from me (the) word is/gets out weigh each word , at weigh your word s not get a word in edgewise, at not get a breathe/say a word word in edgeways by word of mouth take sb’s word for it, at take sb at their from the word go word give your word

In (B) and (C), word is boldface – in the dictionary there is no such highlighting.

2.8.2 Idiomaticity due to singularity of occurrence in some medium

It may be difficult to determine whether an expression such as KEY CUT WHILE YOU WAIT is special owing to its register, field, or medium – because it is really none of these: written language, but more than that, a typical notice. Corpora are written or spoken, and notices are a subtype of the former, but while corpora may very well gather linguistic material from notices as subcorpora, in the dictionary there will be no such standard register as “Notices”. As any learner of a foreign language will tell, notices use a special language, sometimes with unique grammar or vocabulary, possibly both, and these are largely unpredictable from the “normal” language. They may also vary with dialect, but that in itself does not make them special; this feature just adds to unpredictability. Because they are not genuinely written (and mostly not kept in electronic form) it seems hard to devise and collect corpora, e.g. for street signs and all kinds of notices, including official ones. Dis- cussing text types, Stubbs (2002:5) mentions that some whole texts can be very short. Exactly because these are self-contained texts, these are maximal formulas, as it were; it is easy to se that the following equivalences are unguessable from either language: English PRIVATE WET PAINT CLOSED FOR LUNCH NO ENTRY TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED corresponding to Hungarian (IDEGENEKNEK ) TILOS A BEMENET FRISSEN MÁZOLVA EBÉDID Ő – ZÁRVA literally ‘(for strangers) entry is forbidden’ 41 ‘freshly painted’ ‘lunchtime – closed’

41 PRIVÁT is not impossible as a notice in Hungarian. Chapter Two

One can indeed appreciate the idiomaticity reading some of the word-for-word glosses. Getting them wrong and producing intelligible but still un-English expressions is a fine example of what it means to speak “unidiomatic”. The “thank you for…” type seems to be a recent addition to Hungarian notices, owing to which it is now possible to find – or invent – a Hungarian equivalent for notices such as THANK YOU FOR NOT LETTING DOGS LOOSE – e.g. Köszönjük, hogy nem vette le a kutyájáról a pórázt . One ticket office at a Budapest underground station boasts the following English-language notice: AFTER LEAVING YOU CANNOT RECLAIM . It is clear that though removing the false friend, and changing the you cannot part may improve it a lot, there no simple salvaging the entire phrase except by replacing it with an authentic one (that will bear the mark of one of the varieties of English and, to be sure, may look foreign to speakers of other varieties). The fact that notices such as this will differ geographically reminds one of another fact related to geographical variation. Paradoxically, reclaim , a false friend in more European languages than not (cf. Hill 1982), is perhaps better understood in “world English” than would be its idiomatic counterpart complain , which will be usually better known worldwide in the sense ‘grumble’, and perhaps because of this, it will not be readily used in this “official” sense by Europeans less proficient in English. A subtype of this hard-to-translate notice item is when there is no linguistic equivalent of some written notice: WALK or GO and DON ’T WALK or STOP are standard texts on the red and green light, respectively, but because presumably in several cultures this is not verbalized, either some para- phrase or a translation will have to be given: WALK ‘zöld; szabad’ (jelzése) [jelz őlámpán] DON ’T WALK ‘piros; tilos’ (jelzése) [jelz őlámpán] [i.e. ‘on traffic lights’] STOP ‘piros; tilos’ (jelzése) [jelz őlámpán]

Although neither szabad nor tilos is used in traffic lights, which making them pragmatically unsuit- able as equivalents, from a Hungarian → English point of view, the idiomatic translation of Hunga- rian szabadot/tilosat mutatott a lámpa (lit. ‘the lamp showed allowed / not allowed ’) may be just this: the light/sign said walk/don’t walk . An added difficulty may be dialectal variation again: this use of (DON ’T) WALK seems to be Ameri- can rather; but the inclusion of such information is sure to clutter up an entry completely.

2.9 A catalogue of multiword expressions (MWEs)

Not all authors use the MWE label for the same phenomenon, but if there is to be one such label, multiword expression will be used as a catch-all. Taking the inevitable risk of misunderstanding or misrepresenting the original conceptions, dia- grams will be provided of each taxonomy of MWEs, to illustrate what Sag & al. (2002) have called “a pain in the neck for NLP”, which apparently causes a pain in the neck for the whole of the study of the lexicon, if not the whole of the linguistic enterprise. Listed, scrutinized and tabulated in 2.9 are fifteen different, mostly recent, schemes that can be hoped to make a contribution to the cataloguing in dictionaries of expressions larger than the word. (Ayto (2006) and especially Numberg & al. (1994) will be more detailed.) What emerges from this catalogue is that, similarly to many, perhaps most, such inventories, it is too fine-grained for use in lexicography.

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Each framework is summarized in a Venn diagram, which, though inevitably a simplification, is hoped to be true to the spirit of the discussion in question. Also, such unifying simplification is needed if the common features of these widely differing frameworks are to be captured. What brings together these diverse discussions is their claim, mostly explicit, that there is a lot more to the lexicon than words, and that this realization, although naturally and inescapably acted upon in lexicography, is far from common knowledge in linguistics in general. What will clearly transpire from this variety of frameworks, and what must have been plain especially in Moon (1998) above, is that if an editor should need guidelines as to what to include of the larger-than-word expressions, “idiomatic” or otherwise, then there is certainly no single source to turn to, in view of the striking disparity of approaches (which most of them themselves recognize and admit). It is even less likely that they allow for some consensual view to be gleaned.

The following sources have been examined:

2.9.1: Cruse 2000 2.9.9: Kuiper 2006 2.9.2: Biber & al. 2000 2.9.10: Fazly & Stevenson 2007 2.9.3: McCarthy 2006 2.9.11: Goldberg & Casenhiser 2007 2.9.4: Hanks 2006 2.9.12: Abu-Ssaydeh 2005 2.9.5: Dobrovol’skij 2006 2.9.13: Sag & al. 2002 2.9.6: Ayto 2006 2.9.14: Biber & al. 2000 2.9.7: Moon 2006 2.9.15: Numberg & al. 1994 2.9.8: Wray 2002

2.9.1 Cruse (2000) on compositionality

Cruse (2000:67) defines the principle of compositionality as follows: the meaning of a grammatically complex form is a compositional function of the meanings of its grammatical constituents. Since, however, there are expressions not all of whose grammatical constituents contribute an identifiable component of its meaning [= idioms], the principle is reformulated thus: The meaning of a complex expression is a compositional function of the meanings of its semantic constituents, that is, those constituents which exhaustively partition the complex, and whose meanings, when appropriately compounded, yield the full global meaning. (While “grammatical constituent” apparently needed no definition, “semantic constituent” has to be, and is defined by means of the recurrent contrast test.) The type of grammatically complex expression not all of whose grammatical constituents are semantic constituents is an idiom. Although “this term is more usually applied to phrasal units”, by this definition, blackbird is an idiom Cruse (2000:72). Idioms are non-compositional in the sense that their apparent constituents are not real semantic constituents, and the meanings which such constituents have in expressions where they are semantic constituents may not have any relevance to the meaning of the unit. Cruse’s approach lends support to the view, maintained in the present study, that compounds are typically idiomatic.

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2.9.1.1 Opacity and dictionary-worthiness Different degrees of opacity are distinguished in both Cruse (1986) and (2000), and two components to this notion are claimed to exist: (i) the extent to which the constituents of opaque expressions are “full semantic indicators”. E.g. blackbird has two full indicators, and is thus less opaque than ladybird (which has only one partial indicator: the element -bird ); this, in turn is less opaque than red herring (no indicators at all). The opacity scale is thus: red herring > ladybird > blackbird ( > black bird) (ii) The other component is the “discrepancy between the combined contribution of the indicators (whether full or partial ones) on the one hand, and the expression’s overall meaning on the other”. Some irreversible binomials, e.g. fish and chips , are less opaque than, e.g. blackbird , even though both contain only full semantic indicators. (Cruse admits that the objective measuring of such a discrepancy is difficult.) The expression fish and chips is not a completely free and transparent syntactic phrase; it is opaque because not just any kind of fish or any method of cooking or presentation will qualify. By contrast, both the phrases chips and fish and chips with fish and the expression fish with chips are both transparent and free.

The opacity scale then is modified thus: red herring > l adybird > blackbird > fish and chips ( > black bird) As the degree of opacity diminishes, the transitional zone between opacity and transparency is approached: Cruse admits that some irreversible binomials are indeed hard to categorize as one or the other, e.g. salt and vinegar , soap and water . It may be added that not only some irreversible binomials, but many items of intermediate status are difficult to classify “as one or the other”. All opaque sequences are obviously minimal lexical units and therefore, in an ideal dictionary, should be listed. This is independent of whether some of the genuinely free/transparent combinations are listemes in the mental lexicon.

2.9.1.2 Noun binomials lexicographically Cruse (1986: 2000) cannot be right when he claims that practical lexicographers would draw the line of demarcation at a different place from him and argue that fish and chips or bread and butter (while they are undoubtedly slightly opaque in the technical sense) present few problems of interpretation to speakers familiar with the normal constituent meanings of the parts, and are thus not worth listing. What likely happens is that if items like these do not get included, it is not because they do not deserve to be included, in the judgement of editors; rather, it may be (partly) because it is not always easy to spot the potentially semi-opaque character of an expression (as Cruse himself warns in the case of fish and chips ). Cruse must tacitly have native speaker dictionaries in mind here, although this is not easy to verify. It does seem to be the case that native speaker dictionaries do not usually contain such noun binomials as headwords; this will be explored below. • It is not easy to find dictionaries with search possibilities that can be put to use to prove a point like this. However, a wildcard search on “? and ?” in CED&T (1992), a native speaker dictionary, shows that there is not one single headword of the “N and N” form, that is, one that matches the pattern of bread and butter or soap and water . ( Bread and butter , the only apparent example of this type, does get listed, but in the ‘livelihood’, not the ‘slices of bread spread with butter’ sense; it is thus a genuine idiom rather than a simple binomial.)

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• NSOED (1997), another native speaker dictionary, has no compounds with bread as the first member as headwords, and has no bread binomials either. It does contain, within the bread entry, the following binomials: bread and butter; bread and circuses ; bread and milk ; bread and scrape ; bread and water ; bread and wine . These are all somewhat opaque but only in the sense that in all of them there is what Cruse calls “discrepancy between the combined contribution of the indicators and the expression’s overall meaning”.

Although dictionaries may have a section for compounds in the entry of either 42 of the compound members (if the compounds themselves are not made into headwords, like in NSOED 1997), they never have a separate zone for binomials within these sections for compounds. Binomials are thus never recognized lexicographically 43 .

• MED (2002), a learner’s dictionary, allows this kind of search: a smart search on noun headwords containing the word and yields 84 results, of which the relevant ones (with the likes of the expression bring and buy sale having been removed) are listed below:

List No10 arts and crafts five and dime pins and needles assault and battery flesh and blood pros and cons B and S goods and chattels R and D bed and board hammer and sickle R and R bed and breakfast health and safety rank and file block and tackle hide-and-seek rhythm and blues boom and bust hook and eye rock and roll bread and butter hue and cry room and board breaking and entering hundreds and thousands rough and tumble bricks and mortar ins and outs search and rescue bubble and squeak Jekyll and Hyde show and tell cash and carry kith and kin skull and crossbones cat and mouse law and order slap and tickle checks and balances lost and found snakes and ladders comings and goings meet and greet so-and-so country and western mover and shaker supply and demand Customs and Excise noughts and crosses to and fro cut and paste odds and ends toing and froing D and C odds and sods tongue and groove down-and-out painter and decorator track and field dribs and drabs park and ride wear and tear fish and chips pay and display yin and yang

Here, too, the item bread and butter (marked “Uncount Noun”) happens to be listed in the ‘livelihood’ sense, not the ‘slice of bread spread with butter’ sense.

2.9.1.3 Whether (irreversible) binomials are nouns The above list of binomials contains quite dissimilar items. “Binomial noun”, if regarded as a subclass of nouns, is a “word (sub)class”. Some are marked “singular” in MED, presumably meaning that they unpredictably take singular rather than plural concord ( hue and cry ); others are marked “plural”: hundreds and thousands ; kith and kin ; yet others are marked “Uncount”: law and order, lost and found . (Count, Uncount, Singular, and Plural are the four grammar labels in MED that make sense with nouns.)

42 It is simplistically assumed here that compounds have two members. 43 The linguistic sense of binomial is not contained the NSOED (1997) at all.

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There are also abbreviations among the binomials: e.g. B and S ; D and C ; R and D ; and R and R , which MED 2002 – very pragmatically and very much in the face of all descriptive (and other) tradition – regards as word classes . Paradoxically, however, although you can search on abbreviations, these four items – B and S, D and C , R and D , and R and R – are not labelled as abbreviations but as nouns. One may expect there to be also “plural only” and “singular only” nouns; however, pins and needles and yin and yang e.g. are not “plural-only” but “Uncount”. This information is of little use and deceptive at the same time: yin and yang e.g. is used with a plural, not singular verb. Some of the items in the list are nouns in the sense that they have nominal distribution, but do not have obvious noun members. In this they resemble (non-binomial) compounds that are exocentric: cash and carry ; lost and found; so-and-so are cases in point. Arguably, if one criterion is used to the exclusion of the others, then these exocentric nouns are not binomials at all: a noun that is not from two conjoined nouns, i.e., not a “like-category conjoined” item, cannot be a genuine noun binomial. Also, if unpredictability is the determining factor in idiomaticity, then these, being formally unpredictable, will qualify as idioms. Labelling these as NPs rather than nouns may solve the problem syntactically, but it certainly is no way out in lexicographically: all of these items above are listemes, and will have to feature in dictionaries accordingly. There is nothing against listing NPs as headwords if they are listemes. Even a semi-formal examination of items like those above suggests that: (1) the criteria for establishing classes cross-cut one another, adding to a basic arbitrariness of grouping; (2) in a fine- enough analysis, all lexical items that appear to constitute a group can be shown to behave – that is, pattern, distribute, collocate, govern, be governed, or show some other property – differently; (3) (partly as a consequence): there is no real difference between class and subclass. Taking (a small number of, traditional-like) word classes as basis, the set can always be analyzed into smaller groups with still common uniting features, and these in turn (4) (partly as a consequence): into yet smaller ones. Any classification may be adequate for a given purpose, as has just been the case with “binomials”.

This must be understood so radically as to also imply that either “noun” is seen as a subclass of “binomial”, or the other way round – even if the set of nouns is significantly larger than that of the binomials. There are non-nominal (typically: adjectival and verbal) binomials, so the binomial class may be argued to include the class of nouns; on the other hand, only some of the nouns are binomials, so nouns include binomials.

2.9.1.4 “Lumping vs. splitting” of binomials To summarize an important conclusion: the variety of grammatical phenomena even in this very narrow segment of English (into which some insights are constantly supplied by theoretical linguistics) is so great that finding ideal balances between the “theoretically” sensible and the lexicographically justified is impossible. Classification problems for this set of phenomena (as for many similar observations) can be approached with a broadbrush strategy or with more fine-tuned instruments. The former, in which all of these expressions will be seen as belonging to the same broad category, can be nicknamed “lumping” (to use an informal term from sense analysis) ; the latter, which is sensitive to many subtypes, is “splitting”. It is obvious that no a priori answer can be given, once and for all, to the question of which of these two strategies is ideal for lexicography at large. If a minimum amount of “splitting” is done, with all the N and N types of MWEs in the list above “lumped" together, i.e. considered as one type of phenomenon, then this unitary MWE phenomenon can be termed several things: (i) special compound nouns; (ii) special coordinated noun phrases;

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(iii) binomial expressions (most of which are irreversible). Descriptively, this would do (and the qualification “special” is there in both cases to warn us that these are not the standard type of noun compound or coordinate NP). For lexicographic purposes, however, they cannot simply be termed compound nouns because they are quite unlike the standard compound nouns (without a coordinating word) that the dictionary user will be familiar with; that is, they are too special . Compound nouns are never specially indicated as such in dictionaries anyway. “Coordinated noun phrase” is not an option, because – although users may be more or less familiar with both the notions “phrase” and “coordinated”, this label is too special . NP as a “word class” would be too unique a label anyway. Finally, “binomial” is too exotic a term, and not one that most dictionary users suspect has a linguistic sense. If a term did indeed have to be introduced for all of these, as a unified group, then fixed “and” compound would capture what is happening in them. This, however, would be an innovation that no dictionary likes to experiment with unless absolutely necessary – and, as has been often claimed, it is never so. If, by contrast, more “splitting” is done (subcategorizing these items is necessary, since they are far from homogeneous), then subclassification may be based on several features, including (a) countability: whether the noun is C or U (b) concord: whether the noun is used with a singular or plural verb (c) morphology: whether the noun is formally singular or plural (d) exocentricity: whether the resulting N is not made up of two nouns but still functions as one The resulting taxonomy, based on all these, would surely be so complicated as to be quite useless for lexicographic use. In its present state, the MED grammatical apparatus already clearly confuses countability and concord. The expression bread and butter is special in that it would have to be labelled two different linguistic categories, depending on its sense: it is both an idiom [= one’s livelihood] and a binomial [‘slice of bread spread with butter’]. It is far too little emphasized that while single words are typically and expectably polysemous, and the more frequent they are, the more so, the situation with MWEs (in the broadest sense of the term) is different: they are typically monosemous, and frequency does not typically alter this. That bread and butter behaves in this dual fashion is an exceptional example of a MWE having multiple meanings. MWEs come in many varieties, and while some, e.g. the genuine, “colourful” idioms are infrequent ( contra expectations); others are much more frequent; binomials are probably heterogeneous from this point of view. All types of MWEs, however, from binomials to “core/genuine” idioms, are typically monosemous; and with MWEs, higher frequency (of the “other kinds of phraseological item”, cf. Moon 2006) does not contribute to (more) polysemy. Learner’s dictionaries had best include this type of not-so-opaque and not-so-transparent expression (in this case, if only because of the irreversibility problem in the syntax). Even more (and more obviously) so the editor of bilingual works: the Hungarian user e.g. does not suspect that soap and water should (or at least can 44 ) be translated as szappanos víz ‘soapy water’, because they do not suspect any degree of opacity here. Fish and chips , even more “culturally laden”, is even more dictionary-worthy. Szappanos víz , then, cannot simply be translated by putting together the parts of this expression, soapy and water; this is 100% idiomatic behaviour. The above list also convinces one that wherever a foreign-language equivalent of an English binomial is not likewise a binomial, a bilingual dictionary is very well advised to enter it. The expressions bread and butter , soap and water , fish and chips and salt and vinegar have been summed up in the following table:

44 If soap and water is indeed ambiguous (as potentially all such expressions that have a homonymous irreversible binomial and a normal reading, in the former construed as singular, and in the latter construed as plural.).

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Listed in Discrepancy Cultur- Standard Standard Hung. Inclusion May MED w/ between indic- ally Hung. Hung. transla- in H →E Status have relevant ators’ combin- marked transla- transla- tion syn- diction- other mng? ed contribu- (in E →H tion ex- tion pre- tactically ary war- mng? tion & idiom’s relation)? ists? dictable? differ- ranted? overall mng ent? salt and irrev- + – 1 + – + vinegar ersi- fish and ble + +* 4 + – + chips bino- soap and mial + – 2 – + – + + water bread + –** 3 – + – + + and butter *The definition is ‘a meal consisting of fish and long thin pieces of potato, both cooked in very hot oil’. **Listed only with the ‘smth that provides the main income’ sense.

The columns one by one: (1) If a common label must be found for these four items (and most of the ones in the list above), this is perhaps the best that fits their status. (2) All of the four expressions have a non-binomial, standard coordinate NP sense, in which they obviously take plural concord, e.g. salt and vinegar are both inexpensive . (3) MED, the learner’s dictionary selected, only enters the culture-specific fish and chips (and only the genuine idiom bread and butter ‘livelihood’. (4) According to their idiomaticity, both tentatively and subjectively measured as the discrepancy between the combined contribution of the indicators and the overall meaning of the idiom, the four items have been placed on a scale of four, with 4 signifying the largest. (5) Being “culturally marked" is meaningful in an English–Hungarian relation: thus, bread and butter would be culturally marked for speakers whose culture does not have the institution of bread and butter, but it is not a problem for Hungarians. (6)–(8) “Standard” Hungarian translations exist for the third/fourth, but not for the first two items. The English pattern in these four is “N 1 and N 2”. Corresponding to the English “N 1 and N 2” pattern, the standard Hungarian expression has “N 1y N 2” ( szappanos víz ‘soapy water’) or “N 2y N1” ( vajas kenyér ‘buttery bread’). These patterns, however, cannot be always used for “non- standard cases”; as this small sample of four items shows, the Hungarian for fish and chips can indeed use the “N 2y N 1” but not the “N 1y N 2” pattern, while salt and vinegar cannot be translated with either. The fact, then, that the English “N 1 and N2” pattern sometimes corresponds to the Hungarian “N 1y N 2” ( szappanos víz ) and sometimes to “N 2y N 1” ( vajas kenyér ), while sometimes neither pattern translates them, demonstrates that these binomials are fundamentally idiomatic in the most relevant sense for a bilingual dictionary, by virtue of being unpredictable . (9) Consequently, these binomials are no less dictionary-worthy than “genuine”, central idioms. Not one of the above ideas concerning the handling and analysis of these expressions, in terms of binomials or otherwise, either “lumped” or “split”, has any trace whatever in dictionaries. Binomi- als, which are strictly irreversible/frozen, but whose most important idiosyncrasy is not this restriction on syntactic mobility, are highly idiom-like and should be marked as such. They, however, never receive their lexicographic due.

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2.9.1.5 Cruse (2000) on collocation Cruse (2000) distinguishes frozen metaphors, and discusses collocations without including them within idioms. We are not told this explicitly, but collocation must be a type of idiom; and in the final analysis, all of them – from noun compounds through “standard” idioms of the paint the town red type, and his “frozen metaphors” and collocations – all involve gradation. The sheer quantity of treatment may be nothing to go by, but Cruse has little to say about collocation, which is supposed to do with compositionality from the point of view of the speaker: collocations are idioms of encoding from the speaker’s viewpoint. Like the more familiar kind of idioms, they must be individually learned.

Non-compositional expressions

clichés collocations

frozen metaphors

idioms

Cruse (2000) does not use any of “multiword expression”, “multiword”, “phraseological unit” or “phraseme”. His approach is not “phraseological”; based on compositionality, this framework supplies the two major classes of expressions, “complex vs. simplex”, and “compositional vs. noncompositional”. With simplexes, the issue of compositionality does not occur; with non-compositionality, everything is a gradience; there are no rigid boundaries. Quite idiosyncratic is his handling of collocations ( idioms of encoding, as opposed to idioms of decoding, i.e. idioms from the hearer’s viewpoint). It is not clear that this distinction is meaningful, and Cruse himself does not pursue this further. No other framework except Nunberg & al. (1994) makes this distinction. They, however, use it in a way that is different from Cruse’s and also, highly important for the purposes of this study.

2.9.2 Multiword expressions in Biber & al. (2000)

According to Biber & al. (2000:987), a MWEs function as structural or semantic units, the most common types of which are phrasal and prepositional verbs. MWEs are distinguished according to idiomaticity and invariability. At one end are idioms, relatively invariable, and with meanings that cannot be predicted from the meanings of the parts. Collocations, on the other hand, are associations between lexical words, so that the words co-occur more frequently than expected by chance.

Phrasal/prep’l verbs Multiword Exprs

Idioms Collocations

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“Idiomatic phrase” and “idiom” are used interchangeably. Idiomatic phrases (defined as expressions with meanings not entirely derivable from those of their parts) represent many different kinds of structural units, such as wh -Q, NP, PP, VP: • wh-Q – how do you do? / what on earth...? / what’s up? / what in the world...? • NP – a piece of cake • PP – as a matter of fact, for the time being, not on your life, out of order • V PP – bear __ in mind , beat around the bush , fall in love , take __ into account V NP – change one’s mind , miss the boat , keep an eye on __ , kick the bucket

Though they are a separate category, the verbs in V NP combinations with have , make , and take are not termed “light verbs” (or any such, often synonymous label, as e.g. “support verb”) in Biber & al. (2000). This suggests that any VPs containing these verbs are light verb VPs – which is clearly not the case. Importantly, though, the expressions that result from a few especially productive verbs combining with NPs to form idioms are claimed to form a cline of idiomaticity (Biber & al. 2000:1026):

– At one extreme of this cline are have a look, make a killing, take time – In between: relatively idiomatic: have a chance, have a bath, make a deal – At the other end of the scale are the ones that retain the core meaning: make a sandwich; take a snack in your pocket

This idiomaticity scale, then, is not within the category of light verbs but all productive verbs such as have , make and take . Many, as they argue, could be replaced by a single verb ( have dinner – dine; make provision for – provide for; take part – participate ); this, however, is clearly no operational criterion, and one hopes indeed that this is not one of the features that are supposed to make this class intermediate, since replaceability of an XP by a single X, be it a verb phrase or any other phrase, occurs at both ends of the cline, and in between the extremes.

2.9.3 Multiwords in McCarthy (2006)

McCarthy (2006:66) explains that “Lexemes can have more than one word stem, for example, post office […] referred to as ‘multiwords’ […] phrases where the meaning is not compositional, that is, the meaning of the phrase is not simply a sum of the meaning of component words. [...] There are a variety of multiword types including idioms, specific constructions such as phrasal verbs and collocations, i.e., words which occur together by convention” (Sag & al. 2002).

The wording “more than one word stem” suggests compounds; indeed, the first example of multiwords offered is not an idiom, a phrasal verb, or a collocation, but a straightforward compound, post office . Under this definition, a multiword is a noncompositional phrase – the usual defining feature of idioms. On the other hand, multiwords are just said to include idioms, along with phrasal verbs, and collocations. This suggests the following scheme:

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Idioms Multiwords Phrasal Vs Collocations

Compounds

Compounds of the nominal type include verbal (synthetic) compounds, which is quite a productive class with syntax-like regularities. They have an internal argument structure, which, in computer- based approaches (where they are typically termed “compound nominalizations”, cf., for example, Nicholson & Baldwin 2008), has recently been amply explored. Thus, when the head noun is deverbal, the non-head corresponds to the subject, the direct object, or to the prepositional object – i.e. some argument – of the base verb. These may be extremely productive, suggesting that there is no need for their lexicographic inclusion; but a good number of them are so frequent and what is often referred to as “institutionalized” that they need to be included in virtually all general dictionaries.

2.9.4 Multiword expressions in Hanks (2006)

Hanks (2006:121) asserts that “the number of multiword expressions in a language is unimaginably vast”. Then, switching to lexicography right away: “They could not possibly all go into a dictionary, even one that was unconstrained by the physical limitations of printed books 45 . Nevertheless, some [MWEs] receive entries in dictionaries.” Hanks’s typology of MWEs is as follows: MWEs include idioms, whose “meaning is not recoverable from the analysis of the parts”. Other subcategories within MWEs are not mentioned. All that can be derived from this textual information to be tabulated is as follows:

Multiwords Idioms

According to Hanks (2006:121), those MWEs that do find their way into dictionaries are selected not on the basis of frequency , but on semantic grounds: when their meaning is not recoverable from the analysis of the parts. (What type of dictionary is meant is not specified; nor is it made clear which MWE types are meant.) It is difficult to agree with this especially in the light of the need to enter a great many frequent (albeit) transparent/recoverable compounds (e.g. in bilingual dictionaries). Hanks claims that “there is no point in putting a frequent collocation into a dictionary if it is

45 It is odd that the author should have no such worries about simple words . It may be true that the number of MWEs, simply by combination, is orders of magnitude higher, but the “physical limitations of printed books” is surely not restricted to MWEs.

144 Chapter Two perfectly obvious what it means” [...]. ( Collocation is undefined here; it is loosely identical to MWE.) This suggests that only idioms are (though obviously not all of them), and all other MWEs are not, included as entries. This is much too simplistic: observing this “rule” would be problematic in all dictionaries, and obviously so in bilingual ones. Discussing bilingual lexicography, Corréard (2006) e.g. asks the (rhetorical) question, “How should multiword expressions be dealt with? Should they be treated as separate entries, or nested under one of the elements and, if so, which?” Two problems with this wording must be ignored before our main point can be made: (i) that this is only an issue in print dictionaries; and (ii) that entering a MWE “separately” necessarily involves entering it under one of its elements, in alphabetical terms. The real difficulty is that, in bilingual lexicography or elsewhere, there can be no summary solutions to placement decisions or any treatment of MWEs, because by consensus “multiword” seems to be the largest category of the units in question, coming in dozens of varieties, as acknowledged by all researchers. There cannot possibly be a best placement strategy for what are so widely differing expressions. The dictionary user may disfavour solutions based on solid linguistic grounds. The MWE by and large , for example, is both 100% noncompositional and 100% immobile. In addition, it is syntactically anomalous, coordinating as it does different types of category, P and A, which is why it is sometimes classified as anomalous, or “extragrammatical”, The function of the complex is adverbial/adjunctive; its category is problematic. This fixedness is still no guarantee that users will look it up under the first component. They may think it a better guess to first check it under large , which is at least an open-class item. (That users generally have no explicit knowledge of open vs. closed classes does not mean that they cannot have an intuitive grasp of the distinction.)

2.9.5 Idiom dictionaries in Dobrovol’skij (2006)

Dobrovol’skij (2006:514) uses ‘phraseme’ as a hypernym for “all kinds of phrasal lexical items, figurative as well as non-figurative”. He argues that notwithstanding the terminological chaos “there is a consensus about the main features of phrasemes” [which] are conventional multiword units of the lexicon showing various kinds of formal and/or semantic irregularities. Phrasemes are stable by definition: as soon as an expression has become conventionalized, it will be reproduced in discourse as a prefabricated unit of language.” Phrasemes, then, are MWUs of the lexicon, which, like all lexical units, are relatively stable in form and meaning. They are claimed to have long been classified into classes: restricted collocations, phrasal verbs, routine formulas, idioms, proverbs, etc. The central group is that of idioms, which are supposed to share a crucial property: semantic irregularity, i.e. idiomaticity. Crucially, however,

“there is no general consensus about where to draw the line between idioms and other phraseme types. The differences between various linguistic schools concerning the extension of idiom class are [also] due to different terminological traditions in different languages” Dobrovol’skij (2006:514)

Thus, “idiom” is often understood as an umbrella term for all fixed expressions. Dobrovol’skij (2006:515) claims that this use is uncommon in Russian or German, where “idiom” exclusively covers idioms in the narrower sense. Idioms are the most irregular category among phrasemes; since irregularity manifests itself in idiomaticity and stability, these features must be more salient in idioms than in other phrasemes.

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“Idiomaticity is understood as a semantic reinterpretation and/or opacity, while stability is understood as frozenness or lack of combinatorial freedom of a certain expression. Idioms can be thus defined as phrasemes with a high degree of idiomaticity and stability. [...] Idioms must be fixed in their lexical structure (however, this does not exclude a certain variation), and they must be [...] semantically reinterpreted units [...] and/or semantically opaque.” “Current approaches to phraseology also distinguish proverbs and idioms with sentence structure (sentence idioms, or speech formulas), e.g. the coast is clear or the die is cast .” The following important equations, some explicitly, some implicitly given, can be established based on the text: Phraseme = conventional multiword unit = fixed expression = prefabricated unit. The information may be presented in diagram form:

Idioms Phrasemes Proverbs Sentence idioms Phrsl Vs

Restricted coll’s Routine formulae

2.9.6 Idioms in Ayto (2006)

“Multiword expression” (MWE), “multiword unit” (MWU), and “multiword construction” (MWC) all seem to be used synonymously in the literature, and Ayto also uses “multiword construction” as a cover term for all kinds of idioms and related (more or less) fixed expressions. Compounds are MWEs in the sense of being composed of more than one free stem; also, their compositional “fixedness”, or “fixity”, is greater than that of most “phraseological units” (an expression that Ayto also uses). The class of compounds, to be sure, is open at both ends of the spectrum. At one end, compounds are hard to distinguish from free phrases: the phonological criterion, usually touted as the safest, is far from reliable (this is summarized e.g. in Bauer 2007). At the other end of the spectrum, since compounding may be hard to differentiate from derivation (the issue of neo- classicals being just one case in point), compounds may not be easy to tell from non-compound words . Ayto defines idiom as an “institutionalized multiword construction, the meaning of which cannot be fully de- duced from the meaning of its constituent words, and which may be regarded as a self-contained lexical item” (Ayto 2006:518) arguing also that “beneath this broad definition are grouped a large number of different constructions that inhabit intersecting spectra of (i) semantic opacity, (ii) compositional fixity, and (iii) syntactic function.”

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These three axes are discussed below. The examples show that there is indeed a gradience in all three areas. The taxonomy of Ayto (2006) may be presented in the following diagram. Idioms have a “core” as well as peripheral members that overlap with other MWE expressions.

Idioms MW Constr (Expr/Unit) “Idioms proper” Clichés Institutionalized phrs Sayings Freezes Collocations Proverbs Compound Ns Constr’l idioms Allusions Opaque similes

In Ayto’s lists of idioms , broken down by syntactic function and type of derivation, some of the nouns and adjectives are claimed to be produced “by premodification”: salad days , monkey business ; brand new , dirt poor . That these are prototypical examples of nominal and adjectival compounding can again be taken as suggesting that the line between compound and noncompound idioms is a flimsy one indeed.

2.9.6.1 The first of Ayto’s three “intersecting spectra”: semantic opacity At one extreme, each word defies literal understanding: eat crow . Some fixed phrases contain elements used in their literal sense: in get down to brass tacks , the expression get down to is used as it would be in a range of other collocations [...]. Such literal elements may be variable: know the ropes , show someone the ropes (where the ropes could be seen as meaning ‘special methods or procedures’). In some cases, all the main words have literal meanings; it is only their combination that lends a meaning beyond the sum of the parts: bread and butter .

The closer to the opaque end of the spectrum a MWC is, Ayto argues, the more likely it is to be regarded as a fully fledged idiom. Many compound nouns satisfy the criteria of opacity applied above. However, such compounds are generally not regarded as idioms unless the complete lexical item is metaphorized, e.g. dark horse . The referent of green room , e.g. is a type of room, so the term does not qualify as an idiom. It must be mentioned that “metaphorization” or “metaphor” have not been defined even informally.

2.9.6.2 The second “spectrum”: grammatical/compositional fixity Most idioms participate in the inflectional variations of person/tense; however, many are subject to a range of grammatical restrictions, and are capable to a greater or less degree of being altered.

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Transitive verbal idioms may have a vacant slot for a variable: a direct object ( sweep X off their feet , an indirect object ( give X a piece of one’s mind ), or a prepositional object ( clap eyes on X ). “Constructions”, such as what is X doing Y? and V + obj + away such as in dance the night away , are supposed to occupy the most “fluid” end of the spectrum. Here the overall meaning is claimed to be determined more by the syntactic structure than by any semantic properties of the elements; these have been termed “constructional idioms”. Ayto claims that idioms of this sort, midway between completely fixed idioms, which have to be interpreted as indivisible units and ordinary non-idiomatic combinations, which are interpreted according to productive grammatical rules, actually require a new type of grammar. An approach termed ‘construction grammar’ (Kay and Fillmore 1999; Jackendoff 2002: 181) has been proposed, he argues, which “deploys a set of extra, bolt-on rules, beyond the general grammar of the language, to deal with these semi-idioms”. Whether a separate grammar is indeed warranted by the existence of idioms like these is questionable, but these kinds of MWEs are another example of how the linguistic separation of lexicon and grammar is challenged .

2.9.6.3 The third “intersecting spectrum”: syntactic function No other of the authors mentioned in 2.9 but Ayto (2006) classifies MWEs, or idioms, according to their detailed syntactic function. Some ignore this altogether, while most simply note that they occur in all functions. Ayto’s breakdown of idioms by function is useful for classification as well as for the problems that it raises in connection with MWEs in general. • Verbs Idiomatic verb phrases function syntactically as verbs. 46 Their internal structure is commonly V + O, with or without further elements: change hands , stick one’s neck out , clap eyes on . Idio- matic combinations of verb + particle (phrasal verbs) are usually also categorized as idioms: shut up , take in ‘deceive’, back down . Combinations with other adverbials are also frequent: go someone’s way , cut both ways , go west . Other frequent patterns are a verb with the dummy object it: lump it ; and combinations of two or more verbs with a conjunctive: pick and choose .

2.9.6.3.1 Dummy “ it ” idioms

A surprisingly huge collection of idioms containing the “dummy” object pronoun it , optionally accompanied by some other constituent is found in CALD 2008 47 . This object-expletive it can indeed be argued to be a dummy in most of the cases; however, there are again no clear boundaries. (Not only is the “meteorology” type subject it , with its restricted but palpable semantic content 48 , different from the genuinely dummy (pleonastic, non-referring) it ; there also seem to be intermediate cases, with the object it idioms. At one end of the scale, the object it in these idioms can be attributed some notional content. Accordingly, expressions such as (i) spit it out , (ii) grin and bear it and (iii) be coining it , none of which contains the clearly, or 100% dummy it , may well be excluded from the list below: in (i) the it refers (presumably backwards) to some proposition; in (ii) the understood object is “life”, “fate”, or something similar; in (iii), even more restrictively, it is unquestionably money . The it , to be sure, while referential – perhaps deictic – in (i), is not referential in (ii) and (iii) in the sense of being anaphoric or cataphoric; it is just “un-

46 Ayto uses V(erb) as a function symbol (= Predicate). 47 An idiom search for it yields all words containing it ; results have been filtered so that only the object type remains. 48 The expressions it’s 10 miles to London ; it’s raining ; it’s two o’clock ; it’s nice to be here differ in terms of the semantic emptiness of the it .

148 Chapter Two derstood”. The idiom be rolling in it , which is synonymous with be coining it , actually alternates with the phrase rolling in money , providing support for the referentiality of this it . (There happens to be no *be coining money .)

Both the sheer number of the “verb with dummy object it ” idioms and their lexical makeup (they use the most frequent words in addition to the item it ) causes most of them to be absolutely unpredictable, and makes them highly dictionary-worthy. Because, however, they are never entered under the it itself (which, from the system’s point of view, would be a highly logical decision, although one resulting in a hardly manageable it entry), but under the verb (or some other component), their grammatical nature practically goes unnoticed . In this sense it is true that out of sight is out of mind: if it is not in the dictionary, it is more difficult to take notice of.

List No11 Verbs with dummy object idioms in CALD (2008)

beat it make it with smb bring it on mix it bugger it move it button it! you name it [sentential?] be coining it get it in the neck clinch it pack it in do it pile it on end it all push it get it on put it about it get together put it there [sentential] it go for give it a rest it go alone rolling in it it have had rough it it have had (up to here) with shove it it have in you slug it out it have in for smb slum it it have off snuff it it have away (with smb) step on it it hightail stick with it it hit off be stretching it it hold strike it lucky it hoof strike it rich it hotfoot suck it and see it knock off sweat it out it be larging swing for it it lay on a bit thick take it in turns it leave at that take it out of smb Leave it out! [sentential] be tipping it leg it to top it all let sb have it try it on let it lie walk it live it up watch it lord it over smb wing it be losing it give it a whirl lose it whoop it up lump it be with it make it be with it make it up to smb

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2.9.6.3.2 Dummy subject idioms

The number of expletive object idioms just found is surprisingly great because these types seem to be rather underrepresented in treatments of idioms in general, and especially because expletives are supposed to be restricted to subject function and not to occur in object positions. This is noteworthy because while there are so many expletive object idioms , there are few dummy subject idioms . The reason is also obvious: expletive object idioms are VPs with an it object; the number of such expressions is expectably large. A subject-plus-predicate idiom, by contrast – whether this subject is expletive or otherwise – must be clausal . Also, although expletive subject idioms are fewer, it is more difficult to establish whether it is just expletive for a subject it than for an object it : we are also up against a gradience here. Four discreet points have been singled out on this gradience of dummy subject idioms for illustration: (i) expressions such as as it is (‘already; even so’) and as it were have a purely expletive subject; (ii) full clausal structures such as It beats me or It figures (‘I’m not surprised’) clearly have some kind of concrete linguistic or non-linguistic entity which the it refers to anaphorically ; (iii) idioms exemplified with if/when it comes to the crunch have a general kind of “understood” subject easily paraphrasable as ‘the situation’; (iv) idioms of the type it goes without saying are very different: the expletive subject that they have is traditionally termed “anticipatory”, which means that they also have another “logical” or “notional” subject, the (bracketed) that -clause: e.g. it goes without saying [that you'll be paid for the extra hours you work] (the example is from CALD 2008). These are not in effect it idioms: this example is not an it goes without saying idiom but a goes without saying idiom, which has two subjects, a pleonastic (syntactic) and a “logical” (notional) one.

2.9.6.4 Ayto’s classification evaluated • Nouns Nominal idioms are formed by premodification ( salad days , monkey business) ; postmodification (fish out of water , salt of the earth) ; or conjunction of more nouns ( sy’s pride and joy , meat and drink) . • Adjectives Adjectival idioms are formed by premodification: brand new , dirt poor ; postmodification: dyed- in-the-wool , wet behind the ears ; by conjunction: tired and emotional , spick and span . Since most of these adjectival examples, but especially the postmodified ones, illustrate syntactically rigid/fixed phrases, two of them – dyed-in-the-wool and holier-than-thou – would have an equally good, if not better, place among compounds. If they are written in this hyphenated form, and there hardly is another option for this type, then they automatically deserve word status in a (folk/naive) lexicographic sense of the word. Expressions like these are certainly not marked as idioms, if “idiom” is reserved for multiword expressions. • Adverbs Many adverbial idioms are compositionally similar to adjectival idioms: by and large , on and off , once or twice , by the skin of one’s teeth . Other types also occur: all along , ever so , no end . • Others In Ayto (2006), idioms can also function as prepositions ( in view of , by dint of , to the tune of , over and above )49 and what are termed “conjunctives”: not to mention , as long as . Idioms can

49 Huddleston & Pullum (2002, 2005) call “syntactically largely fossilized” P+N+P sequences such as by means of , in effect from and in league with prepositional idioms.

150 Chapter Two also constitute complete utterances or sentences: (Well,) I never . Many are jussive: Never mind , God forbid , or used interjectionally: Big deal! / Not on your life! / So there! Standardized (or cli- chéd) sayings such as Great minds think alike and There’s one born every minute merge into fully-fledged proverbs, e.g. Many hands make light work . “More-or-less buried” literary allusions (e.g. There’s the rub ) are important members of this type. Especially concerning this last, mixed category, a real alphabet soup of structures and functions, but also in general about Ayto’s remarks, four observations are in order: (i) The use of the type “adverb” with its “adverbial idioms” is more than an informal use of “adverb”; it is confusion of category and function. In Ayto’s list of types according to syntactic function , all the types are categorial, not functional. “Adverb” suggests category again. The examples, however, are PPs, not adverb phrases. Rather than lump the prepositional idioms with the “others” group, the system might benefit from the adverbial group being re- named “prepositional”, which would then contain the PPs now in the “adverbs” group. It is a matter of taste whether, after this rearrangement, an “adverbs” group shall remain in place. (ii) The claim that an idiom can be used as an utterance is not restrictive enough, since any noun or verb can be used on its own, as an utterance. It is also impossible to tell these “utterance idioms” apart from the next type, the ones used “interjectionally”. The wording “typically used as an utterance” may be more true to the facts. (iii) The notion “jussive use” is rather vague and also not sufficiently restrictive; for an expression to be used “jussively”, it need not be, or contain, an idiom. (iv) Without a suitable definition of “interjection”, the concept “used interjectionally” is not clear either. Since both idioms and interjections can be, and have indeed been, approached and defined in a confusing variety of ways, “idiom used interjectionally” is at the intersection of two undefinable notions. (The wording “idiom used interjectionally” is non-com- mittal as to whether interjections themselves are a part of speech.)

Points (ii)–(iv) indicate that the closer one gets to idioms of clausal structure, boundaries become ever fuzzier.

2.9.7 Corpus approaches to idiom: Moon (2006)

Moon (2006), discussing “what corpus evidence demonstrates about English idioms, along with other figurative expressions such as proverbs and similes”, defines idiom as an “institutionalized multiword item with a metaphorical meaning”. Under this definition, then, idioms are “figurative”, “institutionalized”, and “metaphorical”. The problem is not just that these terms are not defined themselves; the relative taxonomic positions of “phraseological item” and “multiword item” is also not clarified. One of the points of Moon (1998), to which she refers in 2006, was to show the (at that time presumably surprising 50 ) infrequency of idioms and proverbs and similes, as opposed to the high frequency of “other kinds of phraseological item”, such as take place , in fact and give up . This is why figurativeness , institutionalization , and metaphorization feature thus high in this framework. Moon focuses on the “figurative” and “metaphorical” kinds of idioms, referred to as “colourful” in the present study – because it is felt that other features than figuration and metaphor

50 It is to Moon (1998) that idiom study owes the realization that the infrequency of these “colourful” idioms in conversation is counter-intuitive. These are thought of as colloquial, informal, ‘folksy’. Their seeming prominence in use is misleading, comes from their markedness and salience, which is a result just of their low frequency.

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(such as the presence of unique words, i.e. bound or “cranberry” words) also contribute to their “colour”. Moon (2006:231) also mentions formulae, but where these belong in the scheme of MW items is not specified again.

Multiword items ( = Phraseological items)

Figurative expressions Idioms

Proverbs

Similes

2.9.8 Formulaic language in Wray (2002)

It is not as easy to do justice to the taxonomy of, and approach to, idioms and other related MWEs in Wray (2002) as in the classification of McCarthy (2006), Hanks (2006), Dobrovol’skij (2006), Ayto (2006) or Moon (2006). Wray offers a huge collection of such terms, and her point is just their fuzzy nature. “Words and words strings which appear to be processed without recourse to their lowest level of composition are termed formulaic […]. They are interesting because of their widespread existence is an embarrassment for certain modern theories of linguistics, which have unashamedly pushed them aside and denied their undoubted significance.” Wray (2002:4; italics mine) Wray does not explain how idiomaticity differs from formulaicity. Since under the above definition not just word strings but words too can be formulaic, there seems to be no principled reason at this point for using the term “formulaic” for these sort of expressions, “processed without recourse to their lowest level of composition”. The term “idiom” covers much the same types of expression. Formulaic language, however, is “[...] more than a static corpus of words and phrases which we have to learn in order to be fully linguistically competent. Rather, it is a dynamic response to the demands of language use, and, as such, will manifest differently as those demands vary from moment to moment and speaker to speaker.” Wray (2002:5)

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“Just as we are creatures of habit in other aspects of our behaviour, so apparently are we in the ways we come to use language” (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992:1). Despite Pinker’s (1994:90ff) assertion that using prefabricated chunks of language is a peripheral pursuit that tells us nothing about real language processing, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. [...] in our everyday language, ‘the patterning of words and phrases... manifests far less variability than could be predicted on the basis of grammar and lexicon alone’ (Perkins 1999:55–56) [...]. In the context of ‘collocation’ we find that some words seem to belong together in a phrase, while others, that should be equally good, sound odd. [...] Biber, Conrad and Reppen (1998) report that, in a 2.7 million word corpus of academic prose, large number was more than five times more common than great number [...]” It is not clear why an expression such as large number would be different from great number from the processing point of view – if indeed this is what the quotation suggests. “Whether these preferred strings are actually stored and retrieved as a unit or simply constructed preferentially, it has been widely proposed that they are handled, effectively, like single “big words” (Ellis 1996:111). They are ‘ single choices , even though they might appear to be analysable into segments’ (Sinclair 1991:110). Some are fully fixed in form (e.g. Fancy seeing you here; Nice to see you ) and can bypass the entire grammatical construction process (Bateson 1975:61). Others, termed semi-precon- structed phrases , such as NP i set + TENSE POSS i sights on (V) NP j, require the inser- tion of morphological detail and/or open class items, normally referential ones (giving, for instance, The teacher had set his sight on promotion ; I’ve set my sight on winning that cup ).” Wray (2002:5–7; italics mine) The quotes from Nattinger & DeCarrico, Pinker, Perkins, Biber, Conrad and Reppen, Ellis, Sinclair, and Bateson have been quoted in Wray 2002:5–7. “Single choices” above seems to be a retrieval-based synonym of the storage-based term “listeme”. “Modern theories of linguistics” might of course reply to this line of argumentation that these acci- dences are quite irrelevant to their pursuits. For lexicography, however, they are conspicuous: in a dictionary, lexical items above the level of words, presumably also in the sense of being listemes, i.e. memorized chunks, are numerous. If a dictionary has n thousand words, there is a fair chance that it will contain at least as many “idioms”, in the sense of units with meanings not reducible to, or predictable from, the meanings of the elements. On top of those “idioms”, many thousands of combinations, although compositional, will be memorized as units. This “chunky” nature of language, Wray reminds us, was discovered as early as the mid-19th century by John Hughlings Jackson, the “father of English neurology”. Also, that half century later, Saussure (1916/1966) talked of “synthesizing the elements of [a] syntagm into a new unit... [such that] when a compound concept is expressed by a succession of very common significant units, the mind gives up analysis – it takes a short cut – and applies the concept to the whole cluster of signs, which then becomes a single unit” (p. 177). Wray also reminds us that Jespersen (1924/1976) observed that a ‘language would be a difficult thing to handle if its speakers had the burden imposed on them of remembering every little item separately’ (p. 85). He characterizes formula as follows: [it] may be a whole sentence or a group of words, or it may be one word, or it may be only part of a word, – that is not important, but it must always be something which to the actual speech instinct is a unit which cannot be further analyzed or decomposed in the way a free combination can. (p. 88) It is not easy to see how formula is an interesting object at or below the word level, and what is meant by speech instinct is not less problematic, but above that level formulae seem to be just the listemes .

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Bloomfield (1933) observed that “many forms lie on the border-line between bound forms and words (p. 181). According to Firth (1937/64), “when we speak ... [we] use a whole sentence ... the unit of actual speech is the holophrase (p. 83) [...] Hymes (1962/68) proposed that “a vast portion of verbal behaviour ... consists of recurrent patterns, of linguistic routines ... [including] the full range of utterances that acquire conventional significance for an individual, group or whole culture” (p. 126–127). Bolinger (1976) asserted that “our language does not expect us to build everything starting with lumber, nails and blueprint, but provides us with an incredibly large number of prefabs” (p. 1); and Charles Fillmore (1979) argued that “a very large portion of a person’s ability to get along in a language consists in the mastery of formulaic utterances” (p. 92) Wray (2002:8) adds that “insofar as these descriptions applied beyond the realm of the noncompositional idiom, they became increasingly marginalized as Chomsky’s approach to syntactic structure gained prominence. Only with the new generation of grammatical theories, based on performance rather than competence [...], has the idea of holistically managed chunks of language been slowly reinstated, and its implications recognized. (The quotes from Saussure, Jespersen, Bloomfield, Firth, Hymes, Bolinger and Ch. Fillmore are in Wray 2002:7–8.) All of these observations about the importance of linguistic levels above that of “signs” concern quite disparate phenomena, with some of them hard to assign any immediately relevance to Wray’s line of argument. It is not clear, e.g., how Firth’s insistence on the unit of speech being the “holophrase” has to do with these purported chunks of language. Wray offers a long list terms describing a “larger or smaller part of the set of related phenomena” which she looks at (Wray 2002:9). The most important ones, some of which appear in the present study as well, are as follows (the italics of the ones which are adjectives and not nouns are mine):

chunks – clichés – collocations – complex lexemes – fixed expressions – formulaic language – formulaic speech – formulas/formulae – fossilized forms – frozen metaphors – frozen phrases – holistic – idioms – lexical(ized) phrases – lexicalized sentence stems – listemes – multiword items/units – multiword lexical phenomena – noncompositional – noncomputational – petrifications – phrasemes – preassembled speech – prefabricated routines and patterns – ready-made expressions – ready-made utterances – recurring utterances – routine formulae – schemata – set phrases – stereotyped phrases – stock utterances – unanalyzed chunks of speech – unanalyzed multiword chunks Wray makes two comments of general importance. One, that there is a lot of “conceptual duplica- tion”, where several words are used to describe the same thing [...] while some of the terms shared across different fields do not mean entirely the same thing in all instances. The other, that “a label used by a given commentator may reflect anything from the careless appro- priation of a nontechnical word to denote a specific meaning, to the deliberate selection of a particular technical term along with all its preexisting connotations.” Thus, not just the labels vary, but it is also hard to know what the individual researcher has in mind: this is a huge list, whose members have been categorized in an intimidating variety of ways. Ours is not the task of casting fresh light, or imposing order, on the set. What is suggested by this plethora of terms and the proliferation of approaches to the same phenomenon, that of formulaicity (Wray 2002:9) behind their façade (if indeed there is such a unitary phenomenon) that practical lexicography is in absolutely no position to build on a consensual view of phraseology. This time, a Venn diagram style summary is not favoured by the nature of Wray’s formulae.

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Under various labels, the “chunky” nature of language seems to be so much in the foreground and to have arrived on the scene with such a vengeance, that, as Rundell (1998:318) writes, it spread also throughout the language teaching profession: “The buzzword in the ELT community (repeated almost to the point of tiresomeness) is ‘chunking’: that is, the tendency of writers and speakers to store, retrieve, and process language very largely in chunks (or pre-assembled multiword units of various kinds), rather than by stringing together individual words at the point of articulation.” Rundell (1998:318) is actually of the opinion that in general, the revived concern with phraseology “in all its forms dates back, in the UK, to the late 1970s […] And the work of Sinclair and other early corpus linguists (e.g. Sinclair 1991:110ff) has also been very influential here. But of course its roots go much deeper, and can be traced back not only to the Firthian academic tradition but also to the work done by Palmer and Hornby in the 1930s on collocations and other multiword expressions […].”

2.9.9 Formulaic speech in Kuiper (2006)

Formulaic speech is simply defined as speech that utilizes formulae. Formulae are phrasal lexical items that are indexed for their role in social interaction, or, more narrowly, indexed for specific use in discourse varieties, registers, and genres.

All linguistic performance draws on the lexicon; formulaic speech draws on the phrasal lexicon . As Kuiper argues, I name this ship the... or I now declare you man and wife... are performative formulae, or formulaic performatives: those who know them know the conditions under which they may be appropriately uttered. Some single-word lexical items are also claimed to have such usage properties in Wray (2002): one-word curses, for example, have specific contexts of use ( darn! shit! ). Some linguists include such one-word items within the definition of formulae, but usually formulae are regarded as being phrasal. If “being indexed” for some specific role in social interaction or variety is the defining feature of formulae, then of course one-word expressions also qualify. Given a term like “formulaic performative”, however, it is not at all clear what the relationship between performatives and formulae may be. Formulae exist, Kuiper argues, because performance requires memory and processing resources. Formulae cut down the amount of information a speaker has to keep in memory and to process while performing – easing the burden on the syntax – and does not have to construct them ab novo . Apparently, according to some psycholinguists, memorization may be “cheaper” than processing in certain hard-to-define cases. Kuiper’s phrasal lexical items, or PLIs (which are arguably the same as many other authors’ MWEs) have, in some instances, linguistic properties besides associated conditions of use. They can, for example, be classified as idioms. E.g. the presale formula going once, going twice does not literally mean that the lot is sold one, two or three times. In this way it is like tug at NP’s heart- strings or make heavy weather of NP , which are generally taken to be semantically noncompositional phrasal lexical items. Formulae are a subtype of PLI’s, and the number of PLO’s has been variously estimated: Kuiper reminds us that these figures range from the same order of magnitude as the single-word lexicon (Jackendoff 1995) to an order of magnitude higher (Mel čuk 1995), both quoted in Kuiper 2006:602). This is a very significant observation. One wonders, however, whether these different counts have been based on quite different definitions of the same phenomenon, or the lexicon – ostensibly, language as such – is really as elusive as this; or indeed both. Moreover, Kuiper adds that often those who make such estimates do not indicate whether the numbers are those of PLIs in a

155 Chapter Two language or in the lexicon of an individual speaker . This is an important dimension, one that is oddly missing from much of educated guesswork on this count. The percentage of formulae within this amount is again not normally estimated. One suspects that inadequate definitions would not make this possible. Kuiper warns that the although observation that much of naturally occurring speech is formulaic to a degree is sometimes taken as evidence against the Chomskian position that human linguistic capacity is creative, that does not follow . Human linguistic potential, Kuiper states, is fully as Chom- sky regards it; that this potential is “not fully […] brought into play in some varieties of speech is not counterevidence to this position. It is counterevidence to the position that every utterance humans utter is a novel creation”. Then the question is how much of language is based on recall and how much on novel utterances. This, Kuiper claims, is contextually determined: the two factors that govern formulaic speech – psycholinguistic factors to do with memory and processing, and sociocultural factors such as the degree to which the speech situation is routine – are likely to be the major determinants.

Phrasal Lexical Item = idioms? = MWEs?

Performatives Formulae

2.9.10 Multiword expressions in Fazly & Stevenson (2007)

Multiword Expressions, or MWEs, are claimed to be composed of two or more words that together form a single unit of meaning : frying pan , take a stroll , kick the bucket . Most MWEs behave like any multiword phrase, e.g. their components may be separated, as in She took a relaxing stroll along the beach . Nevertheless, MWEs are distinct from multiword phrases as they involve some degree of semantic idiosyncrasy: the meaning of an MWE diverges from the combined contribution of its constituents. Because of their frequency and peculiar behaviour, MWEs are claimed to pose a great challenge to the creation of natural language processing (NLP) systems. In this scheme of Fazly & Stevenson (2007), “multi-word expression ” is contrasted to “multiword phrase ”: the former, but not the latter, are “semantically idiosyncratic”. This effectively contrasts “expression” with “phrase”, which is hardly desirable. In the present study, at least “free” or “non- idiomatic” is used as a qualification of phrase or expression when it is contrasted with MWE, which is thus defined as semantically idiosyncratic. Semantic idiosyncrasy, Fazly & Stevenson (2007) argue, is a matter of degree. The idiom shoot the breeze is largely idiosyncratic, because its meaning [...] does not have much to do with the meaning of shoot or breeze . MWEs such as give a try […] and make a decision are semantically less idiosyncratic (more predictable). [...] In these, the complement of the verb (here, a noun) determines the primary meaning of the overall expression. This class of expressions is referred to as light verb constructions in the literature (Miyamoto 2000; Butt 2003).

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Clearly, a computational system should distinguish idioms and light verb constructions, both from each other, and from similar-on-the-surface (literal) phrases such as shoot the bird and give a present . Idioms are largely idiosyncratic; a computational lexicographer thus may list idioms such as shoot the breeze in a lexicon along with their idiomatic meanings. In contrast, the meaning of MWEs such as make a decision can be largely predicted, given that they are Light Verb Construc- tions.

[...] Many NLP applications also need to distinguish another group of MWEs that are less idiosyncratic than idioms and LVCs, but more so than literal combinations. Examples include give confidence and make a living . […], where the meaning of the verb is a metaphorical (abstract) extension of its basic physical semantics. The notion of gradience is also transparent in this approach to MWEs.

From literal phrase to idiom: Fazly & Stevenson (2007) in tabulated form Type Example Event structure Institution- Lexico- Compo- alization semantic sitional- fixedness ity Literal shoot the bird event: shoot – – FULL phrase 2 arguments Abstract make a living event: “ earn-money” + ? ? combination 1 argument Light verb give [the event: try + + +/– construction lasagna] a try 2 arguments; lasagna = Patient/Theme Idiomatic [Jack and Jill ] event: chat + + – combination shoot the 1 argument: conjoined J & J breeze

Semantically idiosyncratic expressions are supposed to have the following characteristics: (1) institutionalization, (2) lexico-syntactic fixedness (3) non-compositionality.

(1) Institutionalization is a process through which a combination of words becomes recognized and accepted as a semantic unit involving some degree of semantic idiosyncrasy. (2) Lexico-syntactic fixedness involves some degree of lexical-syntactic restrictiveness, i.e.: – lexical fixedness: the substitution of a semantically similar word for any of constituents does not preserve its original meaning – syntactic fixedness: the expression cannot undergo syntactic variations and retain its original interpretation. (3) Non-compositionality means that the meaning of a word combination deviates from the meaning emerging from a word-by-word interpretation of it.

Multiword Expressions

Idioms

Metaphorical/abstract combinations

Light Verb Constructions

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2.9.11 “Constructions” in Goldberg & Casenhiser (2007)

The term “construction”, used without a qualifying word, and apparently showing overlaps with such terms as “prefabricated constructional element”, “multiword construction”, “institutionalized multiword construction” and “constructional idiom”, has been so variously used in the literature and receives so unhelpful a treatment in this article specifically devoted to this subject that it does not clarify the debates around the term. It is nevertheless worth examining the heading “construction” because it contains multiword expressions not found elsewhere. In Goldberg & Casenhiser (2007:343) the traditional use of the term “corresponds to a conventional pairing of form with (semantic or discourse) function”. They also state that

“linguists vary in their approaches to constructions [but] are willing to apply the term [...] to certain grammatical patterns that have unusual quirks in either their formal properties or their semantic interpretation (or both) that make them ill-suited for universal status. That is, these cases do not follow completely from any general principles and so their patterns can not [ sic ] be predicted; they must be learned piecemeal. [...] it is not the case that these are simple idioms to be learned as individual chunks. They are in fact phrasal patterns with identifiable and definable generalizations.”

“...not only are phrasal grammatical patterns constructions, but grammatical patterns that combine two or more morphemes lexically are also constructions. Still, other theorists emphasize the parallels between morphemes, words, and idioms and larger phrasal patterns by applying the term “construction” to any conventional pairing of form and function, including individual morphemes and root words along with idioms, partially lexically filled and fully general linguistic patterns” (Goldberg & Casenhiser 2007:349)

Further examples, from lexical to phrasal, include book , dog , or (“root words”); un-V (“combinations of morphemes”); going great guns (“idioms, filled”); jog someone’s memory ( “idioms, partially filled”); give her a book (“ditransitive construction”); and the house was hit by lightning (“passive”). This definition attempts a taxonomy of things covered by “construction”, but completely fails to state what is common to these extremely diverse linguistic objects. According to a more inclusive use of “construction”, the authors argue, any linguistic pattern is recognized as one if some aspect of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its component parts [...]. Psycholinguistic evidence suggests that patterns are stored even if they are fully predictable provided they occur with sufficient frequency (Bybee 1995; Barlow and Kemmer 2000; Toma- sello 2003, quoted in Goldberg & Casenhiser 2007:349). These highly frequent expressions, even if fully compositional, are also sometimes labelled “constructions”. These are simply listemes in terms of the present study. Examples, which are claimed by the authors to be especially clear cases of constructions, include (i) the TIME AWAY construction (e.g. danced the night away ); (ii) the “incredulity construction” (e.g. Him, trapeze artist?! ); (iii) the covariational-conditional construction (e.g. the more..., the more... ); (iv) the benefactive ditransitive with non-reflexive pronoun (e.g. I’m gonna make me a sandwich ); (v) the WHAT ’S X DOING Y? construction (e.g. What are your shoes doing on the table? ); (vi) the stranded preposition construction (e.g. What did you put it on? ); (vii) the NPN construction (e.g. day after day ); and (viii) the TO N construction (e.g. to school, to hospital ).

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Neither the three quasi-definitions in three different places of Goldberg & Casenhiser (2007), nor the examples above provide a remotely clear picture of what “construction” is; if one were to invent examples based on these definitions, the examples would not at all be similar to (i)–(vii) above. If one were to devise a definition based on these examples, that would also be doomed to failure. The first definition above, “conventional pairing of form with (semantic or discourse) function”, is so broad as to be the definition of any linguistic object. The second – “patterns that have unusual quirks in either their formal properties or their semantic interpretation (or both) that make them ill suited for universal status” – classes any inflectionally irregular word with “constructions”. In addition, the exemplifying items are extremely heterogeneous: (i) is probably better regarded as a “partially filled” verbal idiom , i.e. one with a slot in it; (ii) is a syntactically well-definable object, a small clause 51 , which just happens to have the typical function of expressing incredulity (but also has other functions, or modal shades); (iii) is really unique in that it is an idiosyncratic combination of a form and a function (one that cannot be expressed in any other way); (iv) is simply a heavily marked usage of personal for reflexive pronoun; (v) is simply a special meaning of do , mainly or exclusively found in this pattern, which may be simply translatable (e.g. into Hungarian with the verb keres ‘look for’ – literally ‘What are your shoes looking for on the table?’); (vi) is a most productive syntactic object, obviously generated “on the fly” without regard even to the kind of preposition involved; (vii) and (viii) are simply prepositional phrase idioms (and this is what their label would be in all other standard frameworks).

One part of the above definition, which uses “unusual formal or semantic quirks”, may be salvaged by claiming that these patterns have a specific combination of the formal and the semantic, or functional/pragmatic aspects, and it is this combination that is idiosyncratic rather than either the form or the function. That definition, while jettisoning (i), (ii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) and (viii), would save only one of the above as a construction: the one that is called the “covariational-conditional” the more..., the more... pattern. The most explicit definition of a construction of the three, the one that uses predictability – “some aspect of the construction’s form or function from its component not strictly predictable” – effectively classifies it with “idiom” without specifying what the difference would then be. Also, and more importantly for the notion of listedness, it claims that patterns (which themselves are not defined here or anywhere else in the article) are stored even if fully predictable, provided they are frequent enough. This claim of storage amounts to labelling them listemes . There is no way, however, that items such as the “incredulity construction”, the “stranded preposition construction”, and “the passive” can be considered as stored patterns, whatever “pattern” might mean; if these are to be included among constructions, then the term effectively ceases to be of any use.

2.9.12 Multiword units in Abu-Ssaydeh (2005)

MWUs are “lexical phenomena [...] which are conventionalized form/function composites that occur more frequently and have more idiomatically determined meaning than the language that is put together every time” (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992:1, quoted in Abu-Ssaydeh 2005:125). Abu-Ssaydeh (2005) also note that MWUs have been studied under various labels: “lexical phrases, multi-word units, fixed phrases, formulaic phrases, chunks, preassembled chunks, prefabricated

51 The “small clause”, a typical example of the rift between theory and (lexicographic) practice, is explored in 3.1.6.

159 Chapter Two chunks, holophrases, and so on” (Willis 1997, quoted in Abu-Ssaydeh (2005:125). MWUs straddle lexicon and syntax, ranging from a single phrase ( pipe dream, green thumb ) to compound sentences ( look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves ); from binomial fixed phrases ( beck and call; knife and fork ) to “slot-and-filler frames” (as ...-er, ...-er as e.g. in the more, the merrier ); even proverbs. They are claimed to interact with textuality and serve a multitude of pragmatic and social functions. MWUs represent “probably close to half the lexis of the English language”. Abu-Ssaydeh (2005) classifies MWUs into the following categories (four plus two that they add because they are claimed to have been overlooked by most researchers):

(a) Fixed phrases (Lewis 1997 polywords ) It only confuses matters that “polyword”, which does not seem to be used in any other framework, is equated here with “fixed phrase”. Abu-Ssaydeh (2005) takes his definition from Sag & al. (2003) [= Sag & al. (2002) in the Refer- ences of the present study]): “fully lexicalized and undergo neither morpho-syntactic variation... nor internal modification”; preassembled, extremely stable language chunks that cover a fairly heterogeneous group of MWUs including binomials [...]. They also include conventionalized discourse formulae ( on the one hand, last but not least ), and Latin and Greek borrowings such as ad hoc, ad infinitum, ipso facto, persona non grata, post mortem, carpe diem etc. To this can be added many French phrases such as joie de vivre, bon appetit, crème de la crème .

(b) Institutionalized utterances These are complete sentences or fragments thereof which have been lexicalized and serve as con- versational routines or social formulae such as greetings [...] etc: nice to meet you, so long, how do you do, have a nice weekend, take care now, come off it . “Institutionalized” and “lexicalized” are also among those fuzzy notions that are “perhaps defined ostensibly” or “by implicit opposition to related categories” (an euphemistic wording of Nunberg & al. (1994) for not defined ).

(c) Lexicalized sentence stems “Units of clause length or longer whose grammatical form and lexical content is wholly or largely fixed”. Their fixed elements “form a standard label for a culturally recognized concept, a term in the language”. Lexicalized sentence stems include sentence heads : ( if I were you, would you mind if, that’s ... for you ); sentence tails : as it were, and what have you, and so on ); and sentence slots : ...-er, ...-er

(d) Idioms Abu-Ssaydeh (2005) remind us of the disagreement as to what counts as an idiom (although it is not clear why idioms should be singled out when this disagreement is not greater than any concerning what constitutes any other MWE). Some researchers, he goes on, include similes and proverbs, others list single words ( blarney, ergo ), even acronyms ( WASP , VIP , UFO ) and Latin phrases borrowed into English ( magnum opus, de facto ). The Oxford Idioms Dictionary for Learners of Eng- lish (OIDLE 2001), the author tells us, considers as idioms almost all the categories listed here as MWUs, but despite the confusion, there is general consensus that idioms are semantically opaque and syntactically fixed (or frozen, or fossilized) MWUs. Examples include light at the end of the tunnel, ball and chain, hold your horses, clear the decks, lock stock and barrel .

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It is difficult to visualize remotely general consensus on the semantic opacity, syntactic fixity, or any trait of idioms, for that matter, when such disparate terms as similes, single words, acronyms and foreignisms are included within this category.

(e) Similes There are claimed to be either (i) lexicalized ( as clean as a whistle, stubborn as a mule, as drunk as a skunk / a lord / a judge / a newt / fiddler ), or (ii) created by the language user on the basis of actual similarity ( behave/sweat like a pig; work like a Trojan/hell/automaton/a madman/a beaver/a slave ). It is hard to see how this distinction helps a better understanding of similes, let alone any broader category, such as MWEs, that they may be part of.

(f) Proverbs In an oft-encountered non-linguistic quasi-definition of “proverb”, Abu-Ssaydeh (2005) describes them as “sentence-long encapsulations of popular wisdom”. The thrust of Abu-Ssaydeh (2005), however, is that the variation of MWUs is not adequately represented either in general or specialized dictionaries. That is certainly a valid observation, but this problem is dwarfed by the well-known hardships of the classification of MWUs.

2.9.13 Multiword expressions in Sag & al. (2002)

Sag & al. (2002) is a classic example of how, in current linguistic research, computational concerns such as NLP and lexicographic endeavours apparently merge into one another 52 . Multiword expressions, according to Sag & al. (2002), are not a problem for lexicology, lexical semantics or lexicography, as they always have been, but “a pain in the neck for NLP” . Sag & al. define MWEs “very roughly as idiosyncratic interpretations that cross word boundaries (or spaces)” – a semantically-based definition (which, incidentally, ignores the spoken language variety). Writing about the significance of the MWE issue, Jackendoff (1997:156, quoted in Sag & al. 2002:2) also claims that their role is far greater than has traditionally been realized within linguistics, and puts the number of MWEs in a speaker’s lexicon at the same order of magnitude as that of single words. Sag & al. think this is an underestimate, since “specialized domain vocabulary, such as terminology, overwhelmingly consists of MWEs”. They claim that “the theory of MWEs is un- derdeveloped, and the importance of the problem is under-appreciated” (Sag & al. 2002:2). In the Conclusion, they argue that MWEs are far more diverse and interesting than is standardly appreciated. Linked in obvious ways to the apparent gradual shifting of such problems as MWEs from traditional to computational lexicography is the coming into the foreground of the written medium: this is seen in definitions like the “or spaces” part of the above definition: “idiosyncratic interpretations that cross word boundaries (or spaces)”. The framework of Sag & al. (2002) describes how the treatment of MWEs ranges from simply analyzing them as words-with-spaces, through “restricted combinatoric rules, to simple statistical affinity”. Crucially, the spoken variety – as everywhere in corpus linguistics – is relegated to second place.

52 Kilgarriff (1999), for example, remarks that “computer scientists [understand] formalism, mark-up, inheritance relations, maybe syntax codes, so it is these aspects they consider when considering dictionaries”.

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Sag & al. (2002:2ff) offer a taxonomy of MWEs exactly in terms of the analytic techniques that can be used for dealing with them. MWEs are thus neatly classified into (i) lexicalized phrases; (ii) institutionalized phrases. (i) Lexicalized phrases have at least partially idiosyncratic syntax or semantics, or contain words which do not occur in isolation [referred to as “lexically bound words” in the present study]; they can be further broken down into: (i/a) fixed expressions ( by and large, in short, kingdom come, ad hoc, ad hominem ) (i/b) semi-fixed expressions ( spill the beans, car park, part of speech ) (i/c) syntactically flexible expressions ( look up, sweep under the rug, make a mistake ) – in (roughly) decreasing order of lexical rigidity.

(ii) Institutionalized phrases are syntactically/semantically compositional but occur with markedly high frequency (in a given context).

(i/a) Fixed expressions are “immutable expressions in English that defy conventions of grammar and compositional interpretation”; they are fully lexicalized and show no morpho-syntactic variation (cf. *in short er ) or internal modification (cf. *in very short ). The truly fixed expressions, such as ad hoc and of course can be dealt with as words-with-spaces .

(i/b) Semi-fixed expressions “adhere to strict constraints on word order and composition, but undergo some degree of lexical variation, e.g. in the form of inflection, variation in reflexive form, and determiner selection. This makes it possible to treat them as a word complexes with a single part of speech […]”. Subtypes: (i/b 1) non-decomposable idioms: no internal modification; no passivization; possible inflection; variation in reflexive form ( kick the bucket, trip the light fantastic ); (i/b 2) certain compound nominals: syntactically unalterable but inflect for number – some left-headed, some right-headed ( car park, attorney general, part of speech ); (i/b 3) proper names: syntactically highly idiosyncratic (e.g. US sports teams)

(i/c) Syntactically-flexible expressions Subtypes: (i/c 1) Verb–particle constructions: idiosyncratic or compositional ( look up, brush up on ) (i/c 2) Decomposable idioms: syntactically flexible ( let the cat out of the bag ) (i/c 3) Light verb constructions: highly idiosyncratic ( give a demonstration ).

The most important insight for lexicography, and for the present study, comes from (ii) in Sag & al. (2002:2ff):

(ii) Institutionalized phrases are semantically/syntactically fully compositional but statistically idiosyncratic. In traffic light , both traffic and light are supposed to retain simplex senses and combine to produce a compositional reading. If such strict compositionality obtains, the same basic concept could be expected to be expressed in other ways, e.g. * traffic director or *intersection regulator . No such alternate forms exist because traffic light has been conventionalized : its idiosyncrasy is thus statistical rather than linguistic, in that it is observed with much higher relative frequency than any alternative lexicalization of the same concept.

Other examples include telephone booth (or telephone box in British/Australian English), fresh air and kindle excitement . One subtle effect observed with institutionalized phrases, the authors claim, is that association with the concept denoted by that expression can become so strong as to diminish decomposability. Traffic light , for example, could conceivably be interpreted as a device for communicating intended actions to surrounding traffic. However, partly because for that device

162 Chapter Two institutionalized terms ( turning signal or turn signal ) exist, and partly because of the convention- alization of traffic light to denote a stoplight, this reading is not readily available. This observation usefully broadens the domain of idiomaticity. The “statistical idiosyncrasy” of an expression involves that it is unpredictable , whatever its degree of compositionality. It is doubtful that, as the authors claim, it is decomposability that gets diminished in processes like this: once one knows the meaning of the expression, it will remain decomposable. What is relevant is that absolutely decomposable phrases can be unpredictable , which is the valid measure of idiomaticity.

2.9.14 Semantic/syntactic compositionality, statistical idiosyncrasy

Institutionalized phrases in Sag & al. (2002) are both semantically and syntactically compositional, but statistically idiosyncratic. Such information, with the Hungarian translations added, is presented in the following table:

Meaning Hunga- Other meaning Could just as Meaning could rian equi- well mean just as well be ex- valent pressed by traffic light — device for in- traffic director, dicating turn traffic signal közleke- — device for in- traffic regulator, ‘coloured dési(jel- dicating turn stoplight lights at ző)lámpa, brakelight intersection traffic control crossroads’ — regulator, signal lámpa light illumination, device for in- signal light ... lamp, aspect, view dicating turn turn(ing) signal — traffic signal, turning sign — coloured lights turn indicator ‘device for index, — at crossroads traffic sign, indicator indicating any instrument/ for turning turn’ irányjelz ő measure traffic traffic indicator, blinker smth blinking; eye winker smth winking; eye direction indica- trafficator — tor ... Note: Singular has been used for all the items expressing the concept ‘traffic light’ throughout, although all items, with the exception of trafficator , are typically used in the plural. The items expressing the notion ‘turn signal’, of which always one (the right or the left one) is used, seem to prefer the singular. Five variants for traffic light , and eight for turn signal have been given. Three Hungarian equivalents my be assigned to the former, and two (one of them rather formal) to the latter. Typically, just as English variant light as in at the lights , is used most often, in Hungarian this corresponds to lámpa as a lámpánál ‘at the lights’ as the most frequent one. As quasi-synonyms of ‘traffic lights’, the obsolete Hungarian villanyrend őr (lit. “electric policeman”) as well as the (strictly official/written) phrase forgalomirányító fényjelz ő készülék , which is “marked as formal”, appears in EHCD (1998). The border between statistical idiosyncrasy (institutionalized phrases) and idiomatic idiosyncrasy (lexicalized phrases) is a flimsy one. As is acknowledged by Sag & al. themselves: “association with the concept denoted by [the institutionalized phrase] can become so strong as to diminish decomposability”. This is what they claim, but especially in the light of Nunberg & al. (1994), the most important single source for the present study, this is not so: it must be stressed again that it is not decomposability but predictability that diminishes.

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The system of MWEs in Sag & al. (2002), a neat taxonomy, is much clearer in tabulated form; this is given below with just one example for each type.

MWEs Institutionalized Lexicalized phrases phrases: traffic light Fixed expressions: Semi-fixed expressions Syntactically flexible expressions of course Non- Com- (Proper Verb–par- Decompos- Light decompos- pound names: ticle con- able idi- verb con- able idi- nominals: the structions: oms: sweep structions: oms: car park 49ers ) look up under the make a shoot the rug demo breeze

Summarizing Sag & al. (2002) in diagram form:

Lexicalized phrases Fixed expressions

Non- decomposable Compound idioms nominals Semi-fixed expr’s MWEs (Proper names)

Syntactically flexible expr’s

Verb–particle constr’s Decomposable idioms Light V Constr’s

Institutionalized phrases

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2.9.15 Bundles in Biber & al. (2000)

Biber & al. (2000) focus on the “lexical end of grammar, describing systematic patterns of use that can only be identified through large-scale corpus studies”. This approach is supposed to show language in its aspects often ignored. Grammar, they claim, is not just a study of abstract classes and structures, but of particular words and their particular functions within these. Biber & al. (2000) state that such information is also important for the learner, which is why they are relevant to bilingual lexicography too: producing natural, idiomatic English is evidently not just a matter of constructing well-formed sentences but also of “using well-tried lexical expressions in appropriate places” (2000:989). Biber & al. (2000) recognize bundles as a type of MWE in addition to idioms. MWEs, as defined here, are structural and semantic units, the most common type of which are phrasal verbs in the broad sense. Different MWEs can be distinguished according to idiomaticity/invariability, at one extreme being (the relatively invariable) idioms, and at the other collocations (associations between lexical words such that the words co-occur more frequently than expected by chance). The longer sequences in which words co-occur are called lexical bundles , and these can thus be regarded as extended collocations. Statistically, the authors claim, idioms are not necessarily common expressions; lexical bundles, by contrast, are the sequences that most commonly co-occur in some register. Usually they are not fixed; it is impossible to substitute a single word for the sequence; most importantly, the majority are not structurally complete at all.

Lexical bundles are recurrent expressions, regardless of their idiomaticity and structural status: they are simply sequences of word forms that commonly go together in natural discourse. They are supposed to be “identified empirically, as combinations of words that recur most commonly in a given register”. The same expressions that are called “bundles” in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber & al. 2000) are termed clusters in the Cambridge Grammar of English (Carter & McCarthy 2006). Here, clusters are “unitary or fragmentary and grammatically incomplete structures, usually in patterns of two, three or more words, that repeatedly occur”. Significantly, while no such claim is specifically made in Biber & al. (2000), clusters are claimed to be “usually retrieved from memory as whole units and contribute to fluency”. Examples include the in the in I’ll see you in the morning , the string you know what I mean ? and the linking but I mean . This purely statistical approach to clusters, or bundles simply ignores whether the objects that it investigates are structural units or not, and thus effectively shows a total neglect of syntax/structure as such. Also, at least in Carter & McCarthy (2006), this approach considers its objects as psycholinguistically real in the sense of stored items. It is small wonder if, in view of these, the “rationalist” tradition regards this kind of approach to language as an abuse of the corpus, a veritable lunatic fringe of the “empiricist”. Discussing MWEs, Atkins & Rundell (2008:166–7) also claim that this term covers different types of phrases that have some degree of idiomatic meaning/behaviour, and that “[m]any groups of words, such as she put it in the or immediately below the , co-occur frequently in corpus text but are of no real interest to lexicography”. In the Footnote they remind us that some theorists call such fragments “collocations”. This is so confusing that it is hard to believe that their authors actually mean this. These are exactly the “bundles” or “chunks” or “clusters” mentioned in Biber & al. (2000).

This neglect of syntax is barely excusable, but the taxonomy that it provides delivers useful items that are best included in, for example, a learner’s dictionary. The judgement of Atkins & Rundell (2008:166) concerning the uselessness of such “groups of words” for lexicography may be too re-

165 Chapter Two strictive. Contra Atkins & Rundell (2008), some of these “groups” (at one end of the gradience) do merit inclusion because they are idiomatic in the sense of being unpredictable; some (at the other end of the scale) may be usefully listed as illustrative material in the entry of some of their components. The former type includes I mean... , a couple of , at the time , as well as , you now and you know what I mean . If one considers their translation into another language, this receives further support: in idiomatic Hungarian, e.g. there may be several ways to express the meaning, or rather pragmatic content, expressed by I mean.…: these include úgy értem... , szóval... and akarom mon- dani... , none of which is predictable. The latter type includes to be honest with you and I know what you mean . To be sure, these are not 100% predictable either: to be honest with you , e.g. could easily be in all honesty (cf. in all fairness ), and it is not an impossible variant. Biber & al. 2000 argue that some of the most frequently repeated word clusters reveal grammatical regularities. It is hard to see how this could be if, as they claim, “the most frequently repeated ones often are not complete phrases or clauses ” (italics mine). It is also not clear why it might be grammatically revealing to identify as recurrent chunks the differently underlined sequences in the sentence I mean I don’t know , you know . It is even less obvious how it may be significant that we can identify the cluster I don’t on the one hand, and the chunk don’t know on the other hand, in the same sequence, when they overlap. It is hardly useful to identify all or most two-word, three-word, even four-word sequences as significant e.g. in the sentence Do you think I don’t know? repeated below, especially if most of them are not units of grammar in the first place. This is what this identification of all such clusters would involve: — do you; I don’t Do you think I don’t know? — you think; don’t know

— do you think; I don’t know — do you think I

However, the misgivings and scepticism of this general kind notwithstanding, the resulting lists may be of good use to lexicography. What makes clusters relevant for the whole of the present study is that they are retrieved from memory as whole units; and (obviously linked to this claim in some form) that “they are formulaic, and very possibly not assembled afresh each time”. A sample of clusters is given below; clusters of more than two words in written, mainly academic, English have been ignored; nevertheless, the 2-word examples are given for illustration.

List No12

2-word clusters in spoken texts 1. you know 6. I don't 11. I was 16. don't know 2. I mean 7. of the 12. on the 17. to the 3. I think 8. and I 13. and then 18. at the 4. in the 9. sort of 14. to be 19. have to 5. it was 10. do you 15. if you 20. you can

2-word clusters in written texts 1. of the 6. with the 11. at the 16. I was 2. he was 7. on the 12. was a 17. for the 3. in the 8. of a 13. and the 18. had been 4. in a 9. it was 14. she was 19. from the 5. to the 10. by the 15. to be 20. with

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3-word clusters in spoken texts: 1. I don't know 6. do you know 11. do you want 16. a couple of 2. you want to 7. I don't think 12. but I mean 17. it was a 3. a lot of 8. a bit of 13. one of the 18. you know the 4. you know what 9. do you think 14. and it was 19. you know I 5. I mean I 10. I think it's 15. you have to 20. what do you

4-word clusters in spoken texts 1. you know what I 8. that sort of thing 15. I think it was 2. I thought it was 9. do you know what 16. I was going to 3. know what I mean 10. I don't know how 17. I don't know whether 4. I don't want to 11. I don't know if 18. have a look at 5. I don't know what 12. if you want to 19. what do you think 6. you know I mean 13. a bit of a 20. you don't have to 7. do you want to 14. well I don't know

5-word clusters in spoken texts 1. you know what I mean 8. and that sort of thing 15. this that and the other 2. and all that sort of 9. do you want me to 16. to be honest with you 3. at the end of the 10. I don't know what it 17. I know what you mean 4. I was going to say 11. in the middle of the 18. an hour and a half 5. do you know what I 12. all that sort of thing 19. all the rest of it 6. and all the rest of 13. I mean I don't know 20. it's a bit of 7. the end of the day 14. do you want to go

2.9.16 Idioms in Nunberg & al. (1994)

Most importantly for the present study, Numberg, Sag & Wasow’s massive study in Language claims that in both linguistic discourse and lexicographic practice “idiom” is a fuzzy category, usually defined by (i) ostension of prototypical examples, such as kick the bucket (ii) implicit opposition to related categories: to formulae, fixed phrases, collocations, clichés, saying, proverbs, allusions, and these terms also “inhabit the ungoverned country between lay metalanguage and the theoretical terminology of linguistics” (Numberg & al. 1994:492). It is exactly this fuzziness that is true of all the various types of MWE in the other frameworks explored so far in the present study.

Idioms are claimed to occupy a multidimensional lexical space, and have distinct properties: semantic, syntactic, discursive, poetical and rhetorical. For kick the bucket to be a/the prototypical idiom, it probably needs to display the following “more or less orthogonal” properties, including: 1. conventionality 2. inflexibility 3. figuration 4. proverbiality 5. informality 6. affect Chapter Two

1. Conventionality: “the meaning or use of an expression cannot be (entirely) predicted on the basis of a knowledge of the independent conventions that determine the use of their constituents when they appear in isolation from one another”. A footnote clarifies “conventionality” itself 53 .

Conventionality , then, amounts to (or is explained in terms of) unpredictability , which in turn is tantamount to a definition from arbitrariness .

2. Inflexibility: idioms appear only in a limited number of syntactic frames/constructions, unlike freely composed expressions (e.g. *the breeze was shot, *the breeze is hard to shoot ).

3. Figuration: idioms typically involve metaphors (take the bull by the horns), metonymies (lend a hand), hyperboles (not worth the paper it’s printed on) or other kinds of figuration. Speak- ers may not perceive the motive for the figure, e.g. why shoot the breeze should be used to mean ‘chat’; they do, however, usually perceive the (fact of the) figuration – at least they can assign a ‘literal meaning’ to the idiom. “Figurative”, then, opposes “literal”, and not all idioms need to be figurative; this is why e.g. shoot the breeze is seen as prototypical. 4. Proverbiality: idioms typically describe recurrent situations of particular social interest in virtue of their relation to a scenario involving homey, concrete things and relations. 5. Informality: idioms are typically associated with relatively informal/colloquial registers and with popular speech and oral culture. 6. Affect: idioms typically imply a certain evaluation or affective stance toward they denotata. It may be noted right here that some of the most obvious idioms of certain structural types are not like this: the PP idiom by and large e.g. implies no “evaluation or affective stance”. Apart from conventionality, none of these properties is obligatory. Property 1 is the decisive one. Property 2 is syntactic. Properties 3–6 are the ones usually associated with the kind of “colourfulness”, which is so characteristic of the lay view of idioms and idiomaticity. For any collocation, conventionality (a) is a matter of degree, and (b) depends on the interpretation of “meaning” and “predictability”.

Predictability itself might, in principle, be defined more broadly and more narrowly. • More broadly: If a native speaker who knows the meaning of the idiom’s constituents but has no knowledge of any conventions governing the use of the collocation as a whole can generate it in appropriate circumstances (and with the regularity with which it is used in the language), then the idiom is predictable. This definition, then, uses production or encoding . Under this definition, many transparent and literal phrases like industrial revolution and center divider (Nunberg & al.’s examples) are idioms. Center divider , though transparent/literal, is idiomatic because it is used to the exclusion of other expressions that might do as well if there were no convention involved. E.g. middle separator would do just as well. The conventions that mandate how a MWE is used vary across space and time. • More restrictively, predictability might be defined as follows: If a native speaker can recover the sense of an idiom on hearing it in an “uninformative con-

53 The original footnote: “ Conventionality is a relation among a linguistic regularity, a situation of use, and a population that has implicitly agreed to conform to that regularity in that situation out of a preference for general uniformity rather than because there is some obvious and compelling reason to conform to that regularity instead of some other; that is what it means to say that conventions are necessarily arbitrary to some degree.” [italics mine]

168 Chapter Two

text”, it is predictable. Under this definition spill the beans is an idiom because it is unpredictable (while industrial revolution is not, or is less prototypically one). This definition uses recovery or decoding .

It must be noted that while users consult dictionaries during tasks which usually do involve contexts, the dictionary itself is a most uninformative context .

Numberg & al. (1994) argue that this latter, narrower definition is quite unnatural, because it is never in uninformative contexts that idioms are typically learned: you do not ask explicitly what idioms mean; learning takes place in context. For native speakers, we should add, the “recovery task” is simpler than for the language learner.

The main point of Numberg & al. (1994) is that when the idiom’s meaning is known (e.g. from an informative-enough context), it can often be devolved on (or: transferred on to; distributed over; “spread out” over) the constituents of the expression. Numberg & al. (1994) argue that on hearing John was able to pull strings to get the job, since he had a lot of contacts in the industry , it may be concluded that pull strings means (something like) ‘exploit personal connections’ – and they could not have guessed this meaning hearing it in isolation. The thrust of the argumentation is just this: it is possible to establish correspondences between the parts of the structured denotation of an expression and its parts, in such a way that each constituent will be seen to refer metaphorically to an element of the interpretation. The idiom will be given a compositional, albeit idiosyncratic, analysis. Conventionality, of course, is there: by convention, strings can metaphorically mean ‘personal connections’ when it is the object of pull ; and pull can be used metaphorically to refer to ex- ploitation when its object is strings .

Importantly, idioms that are compositional in this sense are not the same as transparent expressions: speakers need not wholly recover the rationale for the figuration that it involves. Some idioms are transparent without being compositional: it is obvious why both to saw logs and mean ‘to sleep’. But sleeping is not decomposed into elements that correspond to the meanings of the parts of the expression. This contrasts e.g. with the Hungarian húzza a lób őrt ‘saw logs’, which uses a different metaphor – literally, it is draw the horse’s hide : this is neither transparent nor compositional. (Since the etymology is obscured, it is not completely evident what the meaning of húz is, but most likely the metaphor has to do with sound.)

Decomposition is thus also a semantic– syntactic notion in that it has to do with argument structure. Whether an expression is decomposable, i.e. compositional, in this way is easy to see in the case of VPs, whose argument structure is straightforward. Sleeping is not a situation involving two, just one argument, so the two-argument saw logs cannot possibly be mapped onto it. This holds for the Hungarian expression húzza a lób őrt as well. Other phrases, such as noun phrases, that have a poorer argument structure do not show this compositionality, and it is doubtful whether e.g. a prepositional phrase may ever be decomposable along those lines. Numberg & al. (1994), who only use VP examples, are silent on this point.

A compositional expression need not be one for which speakers can explain the figural interpretation. Spill the beans means ‘divulge the information’; we can assume that spill denotes the divulg- ing and beans the information, even if it is unclear why beans should have been used in this expression . Spill does not mean ‘divulge’ when it does not co-occur with the beans ; beans does not mean ‘information’ without spill : the availability of these meanings for each constituent depends on the presence of another. The meaning ‘divulge the information’ need not attach to the phrase as a

169 Chapter Two whole: rather, it comes about through a convention that assigns meanings to its parts when they occur together. Clearly, not all idioms are compositional: the idiomatic interpretations of numerous expressions cannot be spread over their parts: e.g. saw logs, kick the bucket , and shoot the breeze .

Crucially, this conventionality is why “compositional” expressions must be entered in the lexicon; these compositional expressions also have to be lexically stored because they are unpredictable . Moreover, for the non-native speaker, learner or dictionary user, it is the predictability criterion that is relevant, and compositionality, as well as transparency, is of minimum relevance.

Although the thrust of Nunberg & al. (1994) is the rethinking of compositionality, they compare the three features of MWEs: conventionality , transparency , and compositionality . Of these three, however, it is the first one that is really relevant for – especially bilingual – lexicography.

2.10 Implications for lexicography

The Nunberg & al. (1994) framework discussed above is summarized below, and the most important conclusions for lexicography are drawn, which also provides a summing-up for the whole of section 2.9.

• Conventionality involves predictability , which is roughly the same as arbitrariness . The meaning of simplexes, whether morphemes or words, cannot be guessed/predicted, i.e. it is arbitrary, i.e. governed by convention. The meaning of complexes, whether derivations, compounds or MWEs, can also be unpredictable.

What also transpires from Nunberg & al. (1994) for bilingual lexicography, even it is not explicitly claimed, is that because the existence in a language of an expression itself, or the fact that a language uses one type of expression to the exclusion of some other, is also unpredictable, the domain of idiomaticity is much larger than usually thought.

Prediction is to be interpreted productively/generatively/actively , not passively: an expression is predictable only if native speakers (or learners) can reliably guess the form that belongs to some meaning (or content or function) that they wish to express: “How is this in English?” – or any other language. The passive kind of “prediction”, i.e. the guessing of the meaning of existing expressions is thus not prediction – it is recovery, not production; an after-the-fact phenomenon.

Conventionality (or predictability, or arbitrariness) shows both variation and gradation .

• Opacity (or its counterpart: transparency) contrasts with predictability since it is interpreted passively : it refers to the inability of a native speaker (or learner) to see the motivation, or recover the rationale, for the makeup of existing complex expressions, reliably or unreliably; the guess need not be (etymologically) correct.

• Compositionality is again interpreted passively : it refers to the ability of native speakers (or language learners) to “spread” the meaning of the whole existing complex expression over its parts. An expression is thus compositional if its holistic meaning is distributable over the individual constituents.

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Opaque Non-composi- Conventional [non-transparent; tional [non- [unpredictable] badly motivated] analyzable] – see a bird – H. lát egy madarat ‘see a bird’ – – – – center divider – H. elválasztósáv ‘centre reservation’ – – + – saw logs – H. húzza a lób őrt ‘saw logs’ [=snore] – + + – spill the beans – H. otthagyja a fogát ‘bite the dust’ [= die] + + +

When a bilingual dictionary such as an English ↔Hungarian dictionary is being used in either direction, the three types (i) conventional, (ii) conventional plus non-compositional (but not opaque), and (iii) conventional plus opaque (but not compositional) present exactly the same difficulty, since they are unpredictable .

“Guessing” the English (i) center reservation , (ii) spill the beans , and (iii) saw logs on the basis of these Hungarian expressions, on the one hand, and guessing (i) elválasztósáv, (ii) húzza a lób őrt and (iii) otthagyja a fogát on the basis of these English phrases, on the other hand, will be equally impossible. Guessing see a bird from see , a, and bird is possible; the same is true of the Hungarian version of this sentence.

True, an idiom such as wash one’s hands , which happens to use the same metaphor as in Hungar- ian, may therefore be easier to remember than take the cake or spill the beans ; and even if it did not, the metaphor would help memorization for the learner as it does for the native speaker. But spill the beans is not at all easier just because it is “compositional” than saw logs , which is not.

In summary, three examples illustrating the transparency—predictability cline will be offered. The first, a simple case of an English compound with no compound equivalent in Hungarian; the second, a formal compound–compound coincidence between the two languages with a very different meaning ; and the third, an entire set of Hungarian compounds, many of which are transparent but nevertheless unpredictable.

• The English eye chart is rather at the transparent end of the spectrum, but completely unpredictable: in Hungarian no compound can be used to translate it; szemorvosi tábla ‘opticians table/chart’, látásvizsgáló táblázat ‘vision examination table’, and snellen tábla ‘snellen 54 table’.

• The Hungarian pápaszem (lit. ‘pope eye’, i.e. pope’s eye ) is a two-edged example of compound unpredictability, a. While the Hungarian compound has the – quite transparent and motivated – meaning ‘spectacles’, pope’s eye is used in two senses: 1. (in sheep and cows) a gland in the middle of the thigh surrounded by fat 2. (in Scotland) denoting a cut of steak CED&T (1992)

• If a random Hungarian animal name is taken, and is combined with another randomly selected noun, the chances are fair that an existing compound results. The meaning of these nominal

54 An obviously completely unmotivated expression, from Dutch opthalmologist Hermann Snellen’ name. (The compound snellen chart is also used in English.)

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compounds may range from the totally opaque to the fully transparent, but none will be predictable. Transparency, in the cases illustrated below, ranges from egérút and farkastorok (0%) to bárányfelh ő and maybe csigalépcs ő (100%): English speakers may well be unable to guess the meaning of many these Hungarian expressions even on being shown the “literal” gloss. Total unpredictability in both directions will guarantee total idiomaticity.

Examples from the beginning of the alphabet include: bárányfelh ő [lit. ‘sheep cloud’], mackerel sky cicamosdás [lit. ‘kitten wash’], ( a lick and a promise ) csigalépcs ő [lit. ‘snail stairs’], spiral staircase disznósajt [lit. ‘pig cheese’], brawn 55 egérút [lit. ‘mouseway’], escape route farkastorok [lit. ‘wolf’s throat’], cleft palate

55 The word brawn is not an idiom because it is a simplex.

172 Chapter Three: Grammar and lexicon

3.1 Grammar in the dictionary

In this section several grammar-related issues will be touched upon. Explored in more or less detail will be the role of grammar in definitions in monolingual dictionaries; the issue of countability as manifested lexicographically; and the use of grammatical devices one’s and oneself (vs. smb and smb’s ). General issues of parts of speech are explored in a more bulky section; this is followed by sections focussing on determiners (with a case study of many and such , and a case study of ago and gone ), on complementizers and on prepositions. Small clauses will demonstrate one of the central claims of the present study, that dictionaries seem to do without input from theoretical syntax. These sections either flesh out claims in Chapters Two and Three, or introduce phenomena thus far not touched upon. The focus is on the potential input from theory; lexicographic aspect of grammatical points will be illustrated.

3.1.1 Grammar in definitions

Though irrelevant for bilingual lexicography, finding a suitable level of complexity for the grammar of definitions is a challenge for monolingual works, the extent of which often goes unnoticed. The example of prepositional phrases will be picked out for illustration. The expression bottom drawer is defined in CALD (2008) as follows: ‘clothes, sheets, etc. that a young woman traditionally collects for use after she is married ’

Owing to the structure of English (this must be established if it is to be clear that this is neither the user’s nor the editor’s fault) a prepositional phrase, after she is married in this case, can syntactically relate to different earlier parts of a structure. The relative clause is thus structurally ambiguous: the relevant part can be construed as (a) collects for [use [after she is married]] , i.e. the use is in the marriage, or as (b) collects for use [after she is married] i.e. the collecting is in the marriage

Given that the understanding of bottom drawer (a compound nominal idiom that is opaque partly because it involves a “container/object” metonymy) hinges on the syntactic parsing of the PP structure, understanding of the definition is thus both syntactically and semantically hindered. Relative clauses are an indispensable element of definitions, and this type of PP-related ambiguity is a highly typical stubbing block in monolingual dictionaries. A careful rephrasing, possibly at the cost of losing precious space, could make them much easier to understand. In the above case, if (b) were the intended meaning, this rephrasing could be done by moving the PP, and separating it on either side by commas, to the right of the verb: ‘...that a young woman traditionally collects, after she is married , for use’. Since, however, not (b) but (a) is the intended meaning, movement is no solution; collects can only be separated by a comma (that is otherwise not needed): ‘...that a young woman traditionally collects, for use after she is married ’. Chapter Three

The use of the relative which instead of that in definitions, while it may make the defining styles less colloquial or natural-sounding, achieves the aim of removing another ambiguity. Apparently, these are among the aims that will always be at cross purposes, a constant source of clash. Even if it were easy to compile a list of such potential ambiguities that the editors agreed on, revis- ing all the definitions accordingly would present insurmountable difficulty.

3.1.2 Number and countability

Landau (2001) reminds us that

“there is good reason to include countability information in ESL and bilingual dictionaries, especially when the translation in the target language is a count noun, whereas the source-language term is a mass noun, or vice versa” (Landau 2001:114) He does not consider a situation where the target language is without such a category, as Hungarian is commonly assumed to be, or where it has a really intricate, barely noticeably, and not widely recognized system of countability, one that Hungarian arguably has. He argues, however, that native speaker dictionaries should not contain such information. Native speakers do not need this, because the “distinction is given to many exceptions” among them. (McCawley disagrees when he misses the countability information in Crystal’s A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (4th edition), which is obviously not just for native speakers but specialist natives. In his review of it, he says that the “definitions often leave unclear whether the word being defined is a count noun or a mass noun” (McCawley 1999:67). Landau claims that we must “therefore be weary of presuming that practical guidelines for the foreign-born student have any theoretical basis or practical utility for the native speaker...” Landau 2001:115). Without assuming that he is right, this is a clear example of how “localization” considerations over- ride “theoretical” uniformity.

It will be noted that from the outset, the bilingual dictionaries in the gradually developing Országh range, which have grown into EHCD (1998) and HECD (1998), have not included such information. This was reasonably claimed to be notoriously difficult, partly because this information was unavailable in the then current native speaker dictionaries.

Three approaches will be outlined here that yield drastically different classifications of English nouns in terms of countability. They are given chronologically, from 1973 to 2005, spanning thirty years. If there is such a thing as progress in linguistics (no positive answer is implied), or if one be- lieves in some kind of continuous improvement of methodological and analytical tools (a tentative yes may be risked), then these approaches should reflect this.

They are presented in a table each: first, Quirk & associates, summarized on the basis of Quirk & Greenbaum (1973); second, the one to most radically depart from the tradition, Varga (1993); and third, the simplest and most elegant, which is thus the most suited to lexicographic applications, Huddleston & Pullum’s, economically summarized in Huddleston & Pullum (2005):

174 Chapter Three

Quirk & Greenbaum (1973) Nouns 1 2 3 4 Countable Uncountable can be both C &U bottle furniture cake go by car, be in bed, have lunch, arm in arm, news, the true, scissors, thanks, cattle, the rich, the Dutch, measles, the classics, lyrics, darts, maths, Naples, pains, the army, the clergy, the Kremlin Column 4 contains various “hard cases” which have no label; these differ from all the other columns. The fact that in this way the system probably has too many “exceptions”, i.e. Column 4 types of noun, does not seem to worry the authors.

Varga (1993) Nouns +Count –Count xCount bottle furniture trousers, scissors, thanks, arms, lyrics the Dutch, the rich family, clergy measles, darts, maths, news; people, cattle, police, vermin

The system is one with three values: count, non-count, and “neutral”, i.e. “xCount”. Some nouns occur in more than one group: The people support you is xCount vs. The people supports you is +Count.

Huddleston & Pullum (2005): Nouns Variable number: Invariable/Fixed number contrasting sg and pl sg only pl only cat vs. cats crockery , footwear, harm, alms, auspices, belongings, clothes, nonsense, indebtedness genitals, scissors, spoils, trousers (s =/= plural marker:) (no inflectional marking of plurality:) italics , linguistics, news, mumps cattle , police , vermin

Count and noncount Definition: Count nouns take cardinal numerals; Noncount nouns do not. Importantly, no mention is made of the indefinite article.

Noncount nouns that are singular only usu invariably singular – furniture, clothing, equipment, footwear; eagerness, perseverance sg with Det the sg w/ Numeral one pl with numerals Count the chair one chair two chairs Noncount the furniture *one furniture *two furnitures

Noncount nouns that are plural only invariably singular: few in number – credentials, genitals, proceeds pl with Det the sg w/ Numeral one pl with numerals count the corpses one corpse two corpses noncount the remains *one remain *two remains

Note: nouns that have only a count or only a noncount interpretation are a minority.

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Dictionaries show no sign of change in the treatment of countability. Any countability information that is given is exactly in the same time-honoured (?) binary terms: this means being marked for [C] vs. [U], with an indication that the odd noun – or many, depending on how systematically it is done – can be used as both. If indicated before sense breakdown, as is often done, then information on this twin usage is practically useless. The user will have to guess which sense is the U and which is the C one.

• Native speaker dictionaries characteristically do not use these labels. • In learner’s dictionaries , it is usually not just the “hard ones” (cf. Landau’s reference to SL–TL pairs that differ in this respect) that are marked for countability, but all nouns that can conveniently be handled in such binary terms. Marking just the Top 50 or 100 of these would be learner-friendly and space-saving, and it would make it possible both for editors and users to focus on the real problems (and would unnoticeably sweep under the carpet all the “non-binary” cases). Providing linguistically adequate labels for all of them, be these to the tastes of any descriptive framework, including the three above, is apparently something that (mono- and bilingual) dictionaries are neither capable nor willing to do. If they lack the capacity, i.e. the extra grammatical apparatus, then the reason is clear. If the willingness is missing, it can be a sign of several things, from lack of expertise to simple inertia that has famously guided so many (non)decisions in lexicography.

Giving lexicography the benefit of the doubt: while native speaker dictionaries do well not to opt for completeness in this area, learner’s dictionaries may be excused for not providing enough of countability information if this is motivated by user-friendliness. Giving a near-complete picture of this aspect of grammar would hardly be imaginable without a lot of technical detail. Learner’s dictionaries should nevertheless provide more countability information on all nouns, preferably not just in the binary terms above. The problem is how the balance between completeness and usability/clarity is found. Bilingual dictionaries should ideally contain the Top 50, or Top 100, depending on size, meaning by this the ones that involve the most pitfalls.

3.1.3 One’s vs. smb’s : coreferentiality in MWE “slots”

It is a commonly accepted claim about multiword units (or as, e.g. Kuiper & al. (2003) 56 calls them, phrasal lexical items) that they can have slots, i.e. unfilled positions within them, which behave as variables. Some of these are empty argument positions, e.g. the NP complement in take NP to task ; some are not, e.g. the NP in get NP’s goat .

Some non-argument slots have coindexing restrictions. In the MWE get NP’s goat , the genitive NP cannot be coreferential with the MWEs subject; it must be coreferential with a non-subject, which may be a lexical NP. A simple way of wording this, in accessible grammar book style, is that such MWEs are “really” of the form “ get smb’s goat ”, where the item smb’s is simply shorthand for “somebody else ’s, i.e. “someone else than the subject’s”, i.e. not the subject’s. In a MWE like lose one’s way , by contrast, the relatively easy way of indicating this is that one’s effectively means “one’s own”, i.e. “the subject’s own”, so: smb’s = “somebody else’s, while one’s = “one’s own” Because smb’s may be expressed by a pronoun or a lexical NP ( This really got his goat vs. This really got Jack’s goat ), whereas a syntactic restriction (that the second “copy” of subject must be pronominalized and cannot remain lexical) requires that one’s be always expressed by a pronoun

56 The examples in this section are from Kuiper & al. (2003), hence reference to their use of PLIs.

176 Chapter Three

(Tom lost his way vs. * Tom lost Tom’s way ), one cannot capitalize on their (partial) similarity and write the two formulas identically: it does make sense to use “NP” for get NP’s goat , but not for lose NP’s way : NP suggests lexical nominals not pronominal ones. This is why get smb’s goat but lose one’s way are used. The MWE lose one’s way , accidentally, is very much of an idiom for a Hungarian speaker, since Hungarian expresses this with the single word eltéved . By contrast, e.g. lose one’s voice , which is expressed in the same “analytic” way in Hungarian as in English ( elveszti a hangját ‘lose one’s way’), is not perceived as an idiom but a standard literal expression.

The status of oneself vs. somebody parallels that of one’s and somebody’s both in descriptive and lexicographic terms, but these will not be examined. (The form oneself , unlike one , shows no homonymy, and is more clearly a non-subject pronoun, just like its Hungarian equivalent.)

It is not easy to judge how complicated this tiny portion of English syntax seems to a linguistically unsophisticated non-English user, but one thing is certain: the editors of some English learner’s dictionaries (including LDCE 2005, CALD 2008 and MED 2008) have seen it fit to radically break with the tradition of presenting this information in this dual way, as has always been done, see e.g. the smb’s vs. one’s contrast in COED 2004. This decision creates unexpected problems. CALD (2008) now uses the general pronoun your instead of one’s in its definitions: lose your way (in the entry of lose ) is defined as ‘to become lost’

MED (2008) opts for the same: lose your way 1. ‘to not know where you are or how to get to where you want to go’ 2. […]

In the entry of best , the expression to the best of your ability is included, and defined as ‘as well as you can’ ( do the job to the best of your ability) . Users will never suspect that you(r) is not the only person with which this MWE can be used, i.e. that this is not a grammatical restriction, but that you(r) is really lexicographic shorthand. The pronouns you and your generically may be useful in example sentences, but here their use is more than doubtful.

More seriously, MED (2008) has the same MWE entered twice. In the entry of ability it has: PHRASES to the best of your ability ‘as well as you can’ Just try to do the job to the best of your ability while in the entry for best it has: to the best of someone’s ability used for saying that someone does something as well as they can I promise to carry out my duties to the best of my ability

This is a double error: (i) the same expression is worded in two different ways, and thereby different grammatical explanations are used for the same thing – the MED-type generic your and the traditional one. (ii) Instead of someone’s , the form one’s ought to be given: to the best of ONE ’S ability . This may simply be an oversight, but it would not be there, were it not for this experimenting.

From the user-unfriendly to the more accessible is a welcome tendency. It is always a question, however, whether a (general, e.g. grammar-related) decision actually helps along those lines or hurts the logic of the system. It is appreciated that learner’s dictionaries go for simplicity when they use the generic you/your instead of one/one’s . An advantage may be that this also avoids the

177 Chapter Three homonymy of one (numeral vs. pronoun), but whether the homonymy between genuine 2nd person and “general subject” that is created instead is potentially less or more dangerous is difficult to say.

3.1.4 Parts of speech

3.1.4.1 A bird’s eye view “Partes orationis quot sunt? Octo. Quae? Nomen, pronomen, verbum, adverbium, participium, co- niunctio, praepositio, interiectio”. Thus speaks Aelius Donatus of the partes orationis in his Ars grammatica more than sixteen hundred years ago. The same parts of speech, with adjective in place of the participle, still serve much of English lexicography and everyday discourse about language. The likes of this would surely have been unthinkable already fifty years ago in the most oversimpli- fying popularizing brochure of any other science, and would be even more so today. In dictionaries, this is still a fact of life, and as far as the lay public is concerned, the same situation obtains in linguistics. How is it possible that today’s lists do not significantly differ; that they do not, as far as can be known, significantly vary with language; that they do not, as far as can be judged, very much vary from author to author?

It may be as difficult as it ever was to find points of agreement between linguists. Yet except for authors whose purpose is expressly the shaking of such traditional foundations of linguistic thought as the framework of word classes, everyone working in any area of linguistics takes for granted the existence of a grammatical system of (more or less firmly identifiable) “parts of speech”. Richard Hudson in an article that also lists eighty-three points on which he has found agreement among linguists of different persuasions, claims that “The analysis of syntactic structure takes account of at least the following factors: the order in which words occur, how they combine to form larger units (phrases, clauses, sentences etc.), [and] the syntactic classes to which the words belong (including those marked by inflectional morphology) [...]”. Hudson (1981)

Hudson (1994) refutes the claim that “linguists can’t agree among themselves”. He reminds the Linguist List of the list of the 83 points on which he found that about fifty of his UK colleagues agreed (i.e., Hudson 1981). He claims that “When we’re talking about school-level linguistics, most of the things we disagree about are out of sight”.

Since dictionaries represent, and one might say promote, just this domain of “school level linguistics”, they might as well agree as to word classes. Agreement does exist to the extent that syntax must consider “syntactic classes to which the words belong (including those marked by inflectional morphology)”, but there never has been consensus on what these classes might be. This is reminis- cent of the situation of semantic/thematic roles in the previous decades: while there has been agreement that some version of these probably enjoy some kind of existence, the size and member- ship of the category has been considered irrelevant and even asking such questions has been regarded with suspicion. The difference is that dictionaries never have to work with thematic roles: they never have to present them in a watered-down way.

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3.1.4.1.1 “Lumping vs. splitting” for word classes

As has long been recognized, “the near-universal use of a small number of PoS labels has obscured the existence of deep problems” (Crystal 1967:24). Also, “the terminological vagueness is en- demic”, and people can rarely be sure that their use of a term is not significantly distinct from another’s. Word classes are things that either theoretical linguistics or teaching grammars and, more relevantly for us, lexicography cannot do without. The public are convinced that there is one real classification out there which must be, or has long been, captured by science. Little is it realized that PoS frameworks may be legitimately different depending on theoretical and pragmatic considerations. The misconception stems from the idea that PoS’s are an end for themselves. They actually are not: they are just instruments of grammatical description and analysis. As Crystal (1967:25) puts it, “word classes should not be taken as being in some way part of a terminological preamble to grammar”. This notion, however, is fostered by the simplification in dictionaries. Simplification as such, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing; that is exactly what word classes are for, to simplify work with language. Consequently, if this work is the kind of didactically oriented lexicographic description that is expected of an instrument dictionary, especially a learner’s dictionary, a different kind of simplification is needed than in the case of a portrait dictionary. The practice, however, has been that while the lexical contents of these two kinds of work obviously differ, their grammatical apparatus is largely the same. This is a contradiction that mostly gets lost sight of. For linguistics in general, explicating the word classes involves explicating the grammar; the word classes, therefore, must be a system set up by an ideal application of an ideally established set of criteria. The end result will depend on the selection of criteria. The attention of structural linguistics has been on form: as many classes are set up as words of different formal behaviour are found.

3.1.4.1.2 Delicacy of analysis: the wood and the trees

The aim must be a system of PoS’s characterized by

“maximum homogeneity within the classes 57 ; ‘a class of forms which have similar priv- ileges of occurrence in building larger forms is a form class’ ... ‘a part of speech is a form class of stems which show similar behaviour in inflection, in syntax, or both’ 58 ; form classes are treated as separate when they show ‘enough difference’ from other classes 59 . […] such statements only postpone the central issue, namely, How can notions of […] ‘maximum homogeneity’, ‘similarity of behaviour’ and ‘enough difference’ be precisely defined? This question does not seem to have been answered. If the decision is arbitrary, […] then perhaps there is no one answer – but people should at least be aware of this weakness and limitation of the word class concept, and note the extent to which decisions become little more than a matter of linguistically sophisticated taste […]. (Crystal 1967:28–29; references are to the works in the footnotes below).

As Crystal (1967:29) argues, the ideal situation for linguistic science is to “assign all words of a language to a very few classes by applying a very few general criteria – a balance between the number of classes, and the number and degree of

57 Gleason (1965:130) 58 Hockett (1958:162, 221) 59 Hall (1964:163)

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complexity of the criteria; […] the more criteria […] the more classes […]. The current tendency is towards a more delicate or refined subclassification […]”. In this scheme, it becomes clear that the difference between class and subclass is one of degree.

“[T]hat the more subclassification one allows, the more points of general similarity become less clear: one begins to see some new trees […], but one also begins to lose sight of the wood. And […] there is the danger of finding oneself with such small classes if items that general statement becomes impossible […]. On the other hand, too few criteria produce […] under-classification – major classes, e.g. bipartite (e.g. noun vs. non-noun), tripartite, with a very uncertain and miscellaneous constitution, lacking any readily perceivable homogeneity.” Crystal (1967:30) Crystal speaks for linguistics at large, not for applied linguistics, and certainly not for lexicography. In linguistics, “splitting vs. lumping” trends may and do change, i.e. perceptions as to whether more or less delicate subclassifications are ideal do vary. Dictionary editors, on the other hand, need not have a stand on over- vs. under-classification, i.e. whether the one or the other is the greater danger. In their daily work it is the most natural thing that they constantly find new trees, and since their work is basically lexical, i.e. just the opposite of the general, there is never the danger of losing sight of the wood. If there is one area where lexicography might use the insight of linguistic thought, then it is here: not by slavishly following theoretical trends, but by realizing that because word classes are not God-given products but have always been manufactured with a particular purpose and sphere of application in mind, there might be one set of PoS’s for one application, and a different one for another. To be sure, changes in the approach to the part-of-speech treatment in dictionaries have occurred, but these are often unnoticeable , and often really unnecessary . If they are small and piecemeal, it is not necessarily a criticism of lexicography, since drastic changes for whole readerships of dictionaries can only be introduced in tandem with the general sentiment for change, e.g. in grammar teaching – and that sentiment is certainly not there. Quirk & al. (1985:67–68), the most comprehensive and reliable descriptive grammar for decades, recognizes the most commonly used parts of speech for pedagogical purposes, and thus found in dictionaries: (a) the closed classes: Prepositions, Pronouns, Determiners, Conjunctions, Modal Verbs, Pri- mary Verbs (b) the open classes: Nouns, Adjectives, Full Verbs, Adverbs (c) the “lesser category” of Numerals (d) the “marginal and anomalous class of Interjections (e) “a small number of words of unique function, which do not easily fit into any of these classes: e.g. the negative particle not and the infinitive marker to . Importantly, Quirk & al. add that “there is nothing sacrosanct about the traditional part-of-speech classification”, and that they have also deviated from it when they subsumed the Article under the larger heading of Determiner, and when they divided the traditional “Verb” group into three categories. They state that these adjustments are well-motivated for modern English (Quirk & al. 1985:73). These two changes are there to be seen in almost all of English lexicography. In another tripartite split that Crystal cannot possibly have had in mind in 1967, the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English distinguishes three “major word classes”, three super- categories that have not been recognized before: “Words can be broadly grouped into three classes according to their main functions and their grammatical behaviour: lexical words, function words, and inserts.” (Biber & al. 2000:55)

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Setting up a third major category of inserts in addition to the standard groups of lexical words and function words, the approach of Biber & al. (2000), which is both corpus-driven and discourse- based, apparently claims that, looked at from the living spoken language, the “real word classes” are completely different from the standard assumptions. Lexical words have the usual features: (i) low frequency; (ii) heading of phrases; (iii) length: yes; (iv) lexical meaning; (v) variable morphology; (vi) open class; (vii) large number; (viii) strong stress. The characteristics of function words are: (i’) high frequency; (ii’) non-heads of phrases; (iii’) length: no; (iv’) no lexical meaning; (v’) invariable morphology; (vi’) closed class; (vii’) small number; (viii’) weak stress. (The four main classes of lexical words here are: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, and Adverbs.) More relevantly, the third group, that of inserts, is “a relatively newly recognized category of word”; these words are claimed “not to form an integral part of a syntactic structure, but are inserted rather freely in the text”. (This of course is another way of saying that they are not word classes in the strict sense.) This may remind one of the bifurcation between “competence grammar” and “competence linguistics” vs. “performance grammar” and “performance linguistics”. Thus, beside the “traditionally” recognized syntactic word classes, there exist “text word classes”. This may be a legitimate distinction, even if the claim that these types of words are not part of syntactic structure but “inserted rather freely in the text” raises the question of speaker knowledge of the obviously rigorous syntactic, certainly not only pragmatic, rules that govern their use. Both their intonational features and distributional facts show their integration within the grammar – even if not in the sense of being able to form phrases with members of either of the lexical or the functional categories. Predominantly spoken and morphologically simple, inserts include such (still diverse) items as yeah; hm hm; Bye. Cheers man . Inserts are more marginal than lexical and function words, and

“it can indeed be debated whether some [of them] should be recognized as words at all. But there is no doubt that they play an important role in communication. If we are to describe spoken language adequately, we need to pay more attention to them than has traditionally been done” (Biber & al. 2000:56). This group of lexical items were termed vocables in 2.6.4–5. That the old phenomenon with the new term – insert – is by far not insignificant is shown by the statistics in Biber & al. (2000), who claim that the distribution of word types in the spoken register is as follows: lexical words – 41 %; function words – 44 %; inserts – 15 %. This is a huge quantity of lexical items, not to be taken lightly. Of inserts, interjections seem to be the only type that have always had a place in most grammars (and consequently in dictionaries). The variety of forms of inserts, however, shows that there is just a slight overlap between the two categories; interjections are at best a subcategory of inserts. There is reason to believe that what have been termed interjections for centuries have been a really mixed bag.

Lexicographically, it seems that the recent relatively generous treatment of interjections, e.g. in both MED (2002) and (2007) reflects this relatively new interest in the pragmatic aspect of language and the spoken medium in general, as well as the “newly-discovered” category of inserts. Most of what are called interjections in MED, to be sure, are not members of the narrower class of “genuine” interjections but inserts of various kinds; this also may explain their high number.

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3.1.4.2 “Determiner”: lexicographic lip service, no real utility Lexicographically, “determiner” is a recognized word class of high generality, above the level of the members of the traditional systems. It is hard enough for applied linguistics to work with a hard-to-delimit class like that of determiners in an Anglo-Saxon setting where determiners have long been part of linguistic discourse. It is impossible where they have never been: “determiner” is an unheard-of category in Hungarian lay grammatical discourse. But the missing notion of determiner is absolutely no problem: the Országh range of dictionaries, which dominated the bilingual scene for decades, have never used this term. In a Hungarian setting, there is very little to be gained from the knowledge that articles and “possessive” pronouns (and some other “little words”, the full list of which is never given and is much controversial anyway) belong to some hitherto unheard-of supercategory with the baffling name “determináns”. This is why AMSZ (2000) also does not use the category “determiner”. It is, of course, fortunate that my has no homonym in another word class and thus need not be PoS-labelled. Unfortunately mine , however, which has both a verb and a noun homonym, must be PoS-labelled; and within the standard Hungarian system, it can only be labelled a pronoun – which it clearly is not. But a dictionary will never be able to change the whole school grammar tradition, where both my and (possessive) mine are just that: pronouns . It would be a welcome feature, then, of EHCD (1998) that it does not recognize determiners as a class. On the other hand, it does serious disservice to users on several accounts, of which three will be singled out. (a) It labels the independent/pronominal this as nm , i.e. pron , while it classifies the prenominal/determiner this as mn , i.e. adj – going back half a century lexicographically/grammatically. (b) It labels both my and mine pronouns – the former is not one by any standard today; (c) moreover, it labels as an adjective the mine in mine ears and in mine host (which are, in addition, stylistically labelled as vál , i.e. “literary” style, in an abuse of the “literary” label). Interestingly, Kenesei (2008), who also distinguishes articles for Hungarian (among the word-level functional categories, along with auxiliaries, complementizers, negative words, the “interrogative particle” 60 ), specifically equates “article” with “determiner”. Moreover, only the definite article is recognized as an article (= determiner). This yields a perverse, although not unheard-of, situation whereby (i) the general public’s list of articles contains two, definite and indefinite; (ii) a state-of- the art syntactic framework recognizes just one; (iii) Hungarian learners working with English monolingual dictionaries may encounter Determiner but never Article (even if the list of determiners does include the articles); and (iv) Hungarian learners working with English ↔Hungarian dictionaries will find Article but not Determiner.

Just because a dictionary does not use the PoS label Determiner, it may contain that term as a headword. EHCD (1998) does not use “determiner”, but in its entry for determiner , the following misleading information is given: determiner fn 1. meghatározó / eldönt ő / megállapító személy / dolog 2. nyelv determináns [nével ő, névmás stb.] While some of the determiners are indeed what are called pronouns in very traditional systems, this is misleading. The Hungarian equivalent without the explanation part would be sufficient in a non- specialized dictionary and thus avoid the problem. In Hungarian school grammatical terminology, the prototypical pronoun is the personal pronoun; and those are obviously definitely not included in the determiner class. The treatment of grammatical terms is a very uncertain area for (especially bilingual) lexicography, because what is involved here is the ever-changing terminology of a discipline; bilingually this means having to juxtapose two never-identical systems.

60 Somewhat below the level of words: Hungarian -e is dependent word in Kenesei (2000), (2001), (2006), (2008).

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3.1.4.2.1 Determiners in GB syntax

As an up-to-date introduction to syntax (roughly after GB and before or simultaneously with mini- malism), Newson & al. (2006) recognizes eight basic syntactic categories, which fall into two types: thematic – V, N, A, P – and functional – inflection (I), determiner (D), degree adverb (Deg), complementizer (C). The thematic vs. functional divide seems to feature high in current syntactic thinking (this is the basis of distinguishing, e.g. lexical verbs from auxiliaries in Kenesei (2008). Similarities and differences between word categories can be captured using binary features: [±] distinguishes between thematic and functional categories: e.g. nouns are [–F, +N, –V], while verbs are [–F, –N, +V]. Crystal (1967) argues that the standard three or sometimes four bipartite divisions of words into (i) full vs. empty, (ii) open-class vs. closed-class, (iii) variable vs. invariable and (iv) lexical vs. grammatical, although they are often used synonymously, or at least without an explanation of the differences, do not yield the same sets of words. To these four have been added, as (v), the grouping into thematic vs. non-thematic. This expansion makes the equivalences even less complete and the picture even more elaborate. Determiners have something in common with nouns, and modal auxiliary verbs with verbs, and this can be captured by establishing that determiners are the functional equivalents of nouns, and modals, the [+F] equivalents of verbs. This kind of attempt at achieving a high degree of generality is a kind of information that is never to be included in a dictionary.

A further refinement, one that nevertheless retains the binarity and high generality of the system, is introduced in Newson & al. (2006) with the notion of underspecification. With all these [±F] categories (the categories underspecified for the Functional feature) also in place, Newson & al. (2006) now has 3×4 rather than 2×4 members in the following arrangement:

VNAP thematic, T see her a cup of tea fond of her on the desk functional, F can see this cup so fond for me to go underspecified, T/F aspectuals; measure/group “post- picture of Mary light verbs: nouns: cup of determiners”: seen by her have (it) tea many /more / seen few desks

traditionally: traditionally: [ T] traditionally: [ T] traditionally: all verbs of prepositions all and [ T/F] are and[ T/F] are different (with no kinds nouns; [ T] is adjectives; refinement Pron or Det [F] is Adv? group-internally)

The following table, simplified from the one above, containing the four times three word classes in this framework, highlights the differences between e.g. Newson & al. (2006) and what may be considered as the most widely used traditional “Quirkian” classification. The smaller/italicized terms below are the classes of Quirk & al. (1985):

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VNAP thematic, T see her a cup of tea fond of her on the desk

Full Verbs Nouns Adjectives Prepositions functional, F can see this cup so fond for me to go

Modal Verbs Determiners —— —— underspecified, aspectuals; light measure/group “postdetermin- picture of Mary T/F verbs: have (it) Ns: cup of tea ers”: many etc. seen by her seen

(Primary Verbs) —— PostDeterminers ——

Missing from this table (because missing from Newson & al. 2006) but included in (Quirk & al. 1985) are the following: Adverbs, Pronouns, Conjunctions, Numerals, and Interjections. Because of the partial overlaps and the functional non-identity of identical terms, the two systems – as expected – are not be compared in this simple way. As can be seen, English dictionaries are true, if not to Donatus’ (3.1.4.1) system, but to the Quirkian taxonomy, and take no notice of these developments.

3.1.4.2.2 The U turn of many : dormant adjective

The word many used to be generally treated as an adjective in school grammars of English, and a combined internet search on “many” and “adjective” still returns dozens of amateurish sites where many is classified as one. This claim often comes accompanied by such statements as “some adjectives modify nouns by telling HOW MANY ( several , few , many , one , all , seven )” and “the indefinite adjective many modifies the noun people ” and “adjectives of quantity tell how much or how many”. In the descriptive tradition, many is classed with the determinatives (or determiners61 ), which are sometimes supposed to come in three distributional classes (predeterminers, central and postdeterminers), with sequences of different determiner types possible. Thus all the many problems will be a string of PreDet, CentrDet and PostDet. The existence e.g. of many a big problem , however, would classify many with the predeterminers. Many has been analyzed variously in the literature: Huddleston, Pullum & al. (2002:539ff) treat it as a determiner, similarly to Quirk & al. (1985), arguing from the existence of many of the books and the impossibility of e.g. * nice of the books : the position before the of cannot be adjectival. In the generative framework, it has been treated as adjectival. Kayne resorts to movement to explain the determiner-like features of many : it is claimed to move to a determiner position (Kayne 2002, quoted in Aarts & Haegeman (2007:121). Under the analysis of Newson & al. (2006), which uses binary features for N, V, A and P as well as “F[unctional]” and “ T[hematic]” and underspecification for the “F” feature, the “postdeterminer” many is an adjectival element, although a special one: a non-thematic/non-functional adjective. It is

61 The Quirk et al. range of grammars (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985) use determiner as a form label and determinative as a function label, while Huddleston, Pullum et al. (2002) recognize determinative as a formal and determiner as a functional category.

184 Chapter Three not thematic (cannot even be a predicate 62 ), but inflectionally it patterns with adjectives (cf. more , most ). It is a +N, +V, ±F item. The analysis of Newson & al.(2006) solves the problem of many of the books by claiming many to be in Specifier position of a NP headed by an empty noun (the slot of the [ e]mpty symbol may be thought of as being taken by books ):

DP g D’ 3 D NP e 3 AP N’ g 3 A’ N PP g g g A e P’ g 3 many P DP g 6 of the books

While the above analysis does offer a solution to the issue of multiple determiners, it offers none to the many a book problem. It is ironic that having come full circle many is an adjective again (albeit a semi-functional or semi- thematic one), this time solidly based on strict distributional principles of a fairly recent syntax of GB-cum-X-bar theory and also on morphological behaviour, because more and most are forms of many that prove its adjectival rather than determiner status.

How does all this, one wonders, translate into dictionary practice? In a sample of electronic dictionaries 63 listed below chronologically, this “mainstream” many, seen in e.g. all the many (problems ), is labelled as (i) adjective, (ii) determiner, (iii) determiner, pronoun [with no hint as to which example is which]. LDCE (2000) simply uses the label quantifier . NSOED (1997) even explicitly points out that what is generally termed an a(djective) goes by the “modern” term determiner . LDCE only uses the determiner label for many in all of its uses and functions. All American dictionaries use the adjective label; all British publications use determiner , sometimes in combination with pronoun (with none of them distinguishing which example is which of determiner and pronoun ).

Crucially, although the word much , the noncount counterpart of many , does not have the problems associated with the distribution of many (there is no *much a big difficulty , for example, on the analogy of many a big problem ), the issue of PoS labelling is contentious here as well. The problem of the existence of much of the information is not less grave than many of the books .

62 This is claimed in Newson (2006), although e.g. His faults were many is grammatical. 63 As usual, there is no reason to think that their print versions have used a different classification.

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Native speaker dictionaries:

CED&T (1992) –determiner as in: many coaches ; many are seated ; many a man ; too many clouds –noun as in: the many ‘the majority of mankind’ AHD (1994) –adjective as in: many a child , many another day , many friends –noun as in: a good many of the workers , the many fail –pronoun as in: for many are called NSOED (1997) –a. (in mod. usage also classed as a determiner) as in: many things , many a year , many is the time –pron. & n as in: many of his ideas , many served , a good many were RHWUD (1999) –adjective as in: many people ; for many a day –noun as in: a good many of the beggars ; the many the greater part of mankind –pronoun as in: many of the beggars ; many were unable to attend MWUD (2000) –adjective as in: many people ; the many advantages ; many a man –pronoun as in: many are called ; many of the statements –noun as in: a good many of the books ; contempt for the many MWCD (2003) –adjective as in: many years ; many a man –pronoun as in: many are called –noun as in: a good many of them ; the many

Learner’s dictionaries:

LDCE (2000) –quantifier as in: many people , many of our staff , many a person , many a time, many’s the day, the many CALD (2003) –determiner, pronoun as in: many clothes , as many , many a time , many’s the OALD (2005) determiner, pronoun as in: many copies , for the many , many a good man LDCE (2005) –determiner as in: many people , many of our staff , a great many , many a parent/time , the many CALD3 (2008) –determiner, pronoun as in: many clothes , as many , many a time , many’s the

The Macmillan English Dictionary (MED 2002 and MED 2007) is unique not only in (i) distinguishing four different many types/functions, but also (ii) in separating determiner from predeterminer, as well as (iii) in providing examples and explanations for each of these. 64 The illustrative examples are full sentences but have been edited to make them conform to the examples of the other dictionaries.

64 In the very first line, adverb, determiner, predeterminer, pronoun are given, but this is a misprint: the boxed summary at the top of the entry is correctly printed.

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MED (2002) & (2007) 65 The first line specifies many as a function word and quantifier (without explaining what these two things mean) –determiner : many years –pronoun : not many (followed by of ): many of you –predeterminer (foll. by the indefinite article a and a singular noun): many a long day –adjective (after a word such as the , his , or these , and foll. by a noun): his many friends –noun in the phrase the many : the enjoyment of the many

EHCD (1998), the only bilingual English →Hungarian dictionary checked for comparison, distinguishes just two word classes for many : adjective and noun. –adjective as in: many a time , many times , a good many people , many have seen it –noun as in: the many , a great/good many

While the syntactic treatment of determiners, exemplified here in detail by many , has been varied and in constant change, from this random sample it will be apparent that dictionaries have not simply been lagging behind these developments but most of them have ignored most of them completely. Quite a few still use the largely pre-structuralist label, Adjective; some just label the item many as a twin class of determiner/pronoun without the distinction either made clear or exemplified anywhere; just one (LDCE 2005) gives determiner for all of many ’s diverse uses; some distinguish a separate noun use ( the many in the ‘mankind’ sense); one is so explicit as to distinguish five different classes (warranted by distribution, not by meaning); and one actually calls attention to an instance of relabelling, thereby explicitly teaching a bit of syntax: that for this function, “modern usage” has determiner . Finally, one learner’s dictionary, LDCE (2000), uses the intuitive meaning- based label quantifier , grouping many with other items that it clearly does not belong with syntactically/distributionally.

3.1.4.2.3 The anomaly of such

The word such is at least as anomalous as many : it has also been regarded either as an adjective or as a determiner. As pointed out in Aarts & Haegeman (2007:122), if one wants to treat it as a determiner, it will either have to be a pre- or a postdeterminer: predeterminer in such a nice day , where it precedes a; postdeterminer in no such thing , following no ; postdeterminer (possibly adjective), in the next such event , where it follows next , which is another postdeterminer (possibly adjective). At this point one is overwhelmed by the notion that the dictionary user in general would really be better off without grammatical labels altogether. If such is regarded as an adjective, problems only arise with such a nice day , where some kind of fronting movement has to be hypothe- sized to get such before the article – but of course any reference to movement is unthinkable in a descriptive grammar or a dictionary. Biber & al. (2000) invent the term “semi-determiner” for the word such , which shows its intermediate status but further messes up the system.

3.1.4.2.3 Splitting vs. lumping: determiners

It would, of course, be also conceivable that for the syntax, there are two different words many (and such , and much and the like): one a predeterminer, the other a postdeterminer. (No such alternative has been outlined above.) The introduction of indeterminate, or intermediate, categories, such as “semi-determiner”, along the lines of Biber & al. (2000) is also a theoretically viable solution. (These, however, should not be on an ad hoc basis, and ideally should also be independently motivated.) A neat theoretical framework such as GB syntax and/or X-bar theory may clearly show that

65 No change between the two editions.

187 Chapter Three there are no separate pre-, central and postdeterminers, and their existence has been an optical illu- sion. In pedagogical grammars, and even more relevantly in dictionaries, however, one gains very little indeed either by “splitting” or “limping”. By “splitting”, that is, claiming. e.g. that many belongs to different determiner categories in view of some highly abstract syntactic pattern that it dis- plays. By “lumping”, which is intuitively even more problematic, and amounts to claiming, in this particular instance, that the items all , the and many – which three can occur in exactly this order – are really the same kind of syntactic object. Current practice is just this: the three items are all De- terminers”. Their observable behaviour and visible distribution – predeterminers precede and postdeterminers follow centrals is no less of a fact than that they all precede their nouns – must be accounted for somehow. Blurring the distinction may be wholesome for the theory but harmful for any practical application. Because in traditional Hungarian school grammar determiners are unheard-of anyway, for the Hungarian user the Determiner label is not too helpful in the first place.

Nothing can be a bit of noun and a bit of something else in a dictionary. It is not unimaginable that there may be new, intermediate classes established, but this will never happen first in, and spread from, a practical tool such as a dictionary. On the other hand, theoretical linguistics of one denomi- nation will tend to aim at simplification and generality, thereby reducing the numbers of categories; another may prefer a more delicate analysis, which results in the growth of categories. Crucially, however, because – understandably – neither has lexicography in mind, no advances in linguistic thought will have a bearing on this aspect of dictionary-making.

The limits of what dictionaries can do to make clearer the classification and exposition of word classes and facilitate the user’s orientation, among other things, however, also depend on the native language and metalanguage of the prospective user. It is arguable, for example, that auxiliaries, and modals among them, have less in common with lexical verbs than would justify a common name. Yet since the Hungarian term is segédige i.e., ‘helping verb’ for “auxiliary”, and modális segédige , i.e., ‘modal helping verb’ for “modal”, all of these are clearly looked upon as kinds of ige ‘verb’: this is the way the average user thinks of them. Auxiliaries may well be less prototypical than lexical verbs, and modals even less so (most of them being even inflectionally irregular), with the word do (sometimes, but not always considered as a modal) being even more deviant than the rest. (This is a clear case of subsective (as opposed to intersective) gradience in the well-defined sense, for example, of Aarts 2007 and Aarts 2008:254-256). It is a lot easier to keep the three of them consistently apart in a language such as English where they also have distinct names: verbs; auxiliaries; modals.

3.1.4.3 “Complementizer” in dictionaries One minor grammatical issue is whether dictionaries show signs of the syntactic category “complementizer” (once standardly abbreviated to COMP, and further to C), which has been around in linguistic argumentation since the early 1970s, and hardly an unavoidable term in syntax today. A learner’s dictionary (CALD 2008), a native speaker dictionary (AHD 2004) and two bilingual ones (AMSZ 2000 and EHCD 1998) have been examined for information on the complementizers of English: (1) that , (2) for , (3) i f and (4) whether 66 . They are all recent enough to recognize these somehow .

66 These three are currently listed in standard theoretical syntax; whether has been removed from the initial list and classed with wh- items. The point, however, is that it has never featured as a complementizer in dictionaries even when it was still looked upon as one.

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First of all, it turns out that “complementizer” as a term is not used in any of these four dictionaries. If that is so, there is obviously no way the user/learner can see them as types of the same linguistic object. What remains to be examined, then, is whether the sources contain examples of the phenomenon in question at all.

The words that , if and whether receive standard treatment as conjunctions; the complementizer for , however, is missing from all but one.

that for if whether CALD (2008) conjunction ——1,2 conjunction conjunction AHD (2004) conj. ——1 conj. ‘whether’ conj. AMSZ (2000) köt őszó [conj.] köt őszó [conj.] 5 ——4 ——4 EHCD (1998) ksz [conj.] ——3 ksz [conj.] ksz. [conj.]

1 There is not one sentence exemplifying the COMP for in the entry of for itself: this use is not recognized. (The term “use” is used because the other three words are adequately covered by the label conjunction, and it would not do to introduce a new word class for the sake of for . 2 To be sure, CALD (2008) does contain sentences that illustrate the COMP for , just these are not in the for entry. The examples below, which are hits on a search for the sequence “ for him to ”, are exactly like that. COMP is followed by the subject him ; the clauses below have been bracketed: delinquency n: His past delinquencies have made it difficult [ for him to get a job] go ahead phrasal v: I got so fed up with waiting [ for him to do it] that I went ahead and did it myself lag v: He's lagging behind a bit - I think we'd better wait [ for him to catch us up] night after night : She stayed in night after night, waiting [ for him to call] plug v: That interview was just a way [ for him to plug his new book] referral n: The doctor gave him a referral to (= arranged [ for him to see) the consultant] reject v: The prime minister rejected the suggestion that it was time [ for him to resign] struggle n: It was a terrible struggle [ for him to accept her death] 3 EHCD (1998) lists all of the following sentences, which contain clearly different types of for , in the preposition section of for (the entry has been slightly edited):

vk / vm részér ől / szempontjából, esetén; as for him ami őt illeti ; as for that ami azt illeti ; […] it is difficult for him to come nehéz eljönnie ; it is not for him to blame us nem hivatott minket bírálni ; […] it is usual for the mother to accompany her daughter az anya el szokta kísérni lányát ; you are gazing too long for politeness at her az már nem nevezhet ő jó modornak, hogy ön ennyi ideje bámul rá […].

Still, even if the equivalents that are offered – vk / vm részér ől / szempontjából, esetén – do not work in the case of one single example, the example sentences at least are given. 4 Since AHD (2004) only provides PoS labels where there are word class homonyms, if is not PoS- labelled. To be sure, the noun if (e.g. …a big if hanging over the project ; CALD 2008). 5 In addition to the ‘seeing that; because’ for , AMSZ (2000) enters the COMP for before the other one to highlight its importance. This is the entry (slightly edited):

for köt őszó 1. hogy, ha wait for her to speak várja, hogy megszólaljon […] I think it important for her to go to college fontosnak tartom, hogy egyetemre menjen she spoke too softly for us to hear túl halkan beszélt ahhoz, hogy halljuk 2. mivel, mert […]

This is an illustration of how an insight from theory may be lexicographically utilized without the terminological apparatus also used. In the Hungarian grammatical tradition, conjunctions are of two types, subordinating and coordinating; the difference is obvious. It is of course questionable whether users will simply believe that for is a conjunction here.

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The opposite of this – introduction of a more recent term for an old category that remains to be used in the traditional way – may also happen, but there is probably less need for this than for introducing some genuinely new notion.

3.1.4.4 Parts of speech lexicographically: MED (2002) and (2007) The most obvious way that a dictionary presents syntactic information is the treatment of word classes, and it is here that insights from theories of syntax, if there are any, may be captured.

A part of speech (PoS) count was done with two versions of the Macmillan English Dictionary, MED (2007) and MED (2002), both carefully designed and up-to-date works with vocabularies of close on 100,000 words, which can safely and rightly be regarded the ultimate in dictionary design. These two e-dictionaries were chosen because of the very easy access they offer to all types of grammatical information. (MED happens to be the first learner’s dictionary in whose case the electronic form preceded the print product.) It was also hoped that potential differences between the versions would reveal facts, possibly motives behind syntactic decisions that are otherwise impossible to get at 67 . Some of the findings below may only be relevant just to these versions of the same dictionary; some only for English monolingual lexicography; most, however, will characterize any mono- or bilingual English dictionary that does, and even some that do not, offer PoS labels with every headword. Any other grammatical but non-part-of-speech information has been ignored. It was not the aim to assess MED’s treatment of grammar in general. MED (2007) on CD-ROM has been laboriously reviewed from several points of view, albeit grammar has not featured high in them, e.g. in Rizo-Ro- dríguez (2008), which praises MED (2007) because it lets the results obtained with the advanced search be exported to a word processor. While the copy and print functions will certainly be appreciated by EFL teachers and language researchers, it must be stressed that studies like the present one would also be virtually impossible without such search/copy facilities. It was also found that a few bugs, which may be editing lapses or software faults, easily distort the findings. When these have been noticed and found significant, note has been taken of them. It was found that the PoS lists itself and the treatments of its items significantly differ in the two editions, and both these differences and the lists themselves may be very instructive. The first two tables (alphabetically ordered for easy reference) show the PoS’s of the 2007 and the 2002 version. Empty boxes have been marked conspicuously. MED (2002) has “function word”, “linking verb”, “phrasal verb” and “quantifier”, which are missing from the newer version; MED (2007) has “predeterminer”, which was not featured in the older one.

3.1.4.4.1 Part of speech search and grammar search in MED

Although they are not treated as a PoS in MED (2007) – and cannot be searched as such – “auxiliary” is included in the CD’s Grammar search options. The search finds three such items: be , do and have (the “primary” auxiliaries of Quirk & al. (1985) and the “Quirkian” tradition generally). Included in the Grammar search option are also “linking verb” (the search finds 19), as well as “transitive” (4 412 hits), and “intransitive” (2 604 hits). These have also been appended to the table. Similarly not treated as a PoS in MED (2002) but included in the Grammar search are “transitive”, “intransitive”, and “linking verb” . These have been numbered and appended to the table.

67 While the MED 2002 version does not at all allow copying of hits lists, the 2007 version only allows copying or saving/printing of the first 200 items on any search. The user can manually work with them, copy them out individually, but not retrieve all of them at one go.

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The more recent state is the left-hand column:

List No13

MED (2007), ABC MED (2002), ABC 1 abbreviation 431 1 abbreviation 406 2 adjective 9 718 2 adjective 8 987 3 adverb 2 796 3 adverb 1 040 4 conjunction 67 4 conjunction 32 5 determiner 60 5 determiner 22 6 function word —— 6 function word 133 7 interjection 231 7 interjection 244 8 linking verb —— 8 linking verb 9 9 modal verb 13 9 modal verb 13 10 noun 28 004 10 noun 25 510 11 number 65 11 number 61 12 phrasal verb —— 12 phrasal verb 11 980 13 predeterminer 7 13 predeterminer —— 14 prefix 110 14 prefix 101 15 preposition 115 15 preposition 66 16 pronoun 107 16 pronoun 61 17 quantifier —— 17 quantifier 23 18 short form 69 18 short form 69 19 suffix 111 19 suffix 111 20 verb 5 235 20 verb 5 408

21 auxiliary verb 3 21 auxiliary verb —— 22 linking verb 19 22 linking verb 0 23 transitive 4 412 23 transitive 3 131 24 intransitive 2 604 24 intransitive 1 379

The set of PoS’s

Some boxes contain numbers that are conspicuous in themselves. What the part of speech labels precisely cover is something that we do not have to bother now; users are known to have widely varying notions about these anyway, and some of them will turn out to be much too heterogeneous , or not word classes at all. The facts (ignoring numbers for the moment) that can most immediately be read off the tables are as follows:

1. Both MED (2007) and MED (2002) list “ ABBREVIATION ” as a PoS. 2. MED (2002) had a general term: “ FUNCTION WORD ”; it is now gone. 3. MED (2002) had LINKING VERBS ; they have vanished. 4. There is no “ PHRASAL VERB ” in MED (2007). 5. “PREDETERMINER ” is now an independent category. 6. Both MED versions contain two kinds of item below word level: PREFIXES and SUFFIXES , apparently considered as PoS’s. 7. QUANTIFIERS are gone. 8. “SHORT FORM ” was and is considered to be a PoS. 9. Virtually nothing has happened to “ MODAL VERBS ”, “ PREFIXES ”, “ SHORT FORMS ”, and “SUFFIXES ”.

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10. “AUXILIARY VERB ” has appeared in MED (2007). 11. MED (2002) offers Grammar search on “LINKING VERB ”, but then finds no results: this is apparently a bug , whose status can never be ascertained. There is, however, a PoS search, which returns 9 linking verbs. The “linking verbs” thus yielded by the MED (2002) Grammar Search are not marked as “linking verbs” in MED (2002). Did the editors, one wonders, really want such a category, just the software fails to find its exemplars? Did the change their minds, and the program failed to follow up? 12. There is, in both versions, a huge class of “ TRANSITIVES ” and “ INTRANSITIVES ” (presumably within that of verbs).

3.1.4.4.2 The parts of speech in MED numerically considered

The two “quantity” tables below, rearranged by number of items in the individual PoS classes, contain the same information as above the same empty boxes have been marked. In both tables, the PoS’s returned by the Grammar searches have been added to their relevant places according to number, and have been italicized. This arrangement will permit number comparisons between the individual PoS’s.

The more recent state is the left-hand column:

List No14

MED (2007), quantity MED (2002), quantity 25 noun 28 004 1 noun 25 510 26 phrasal verb —— 2 phrasal verb 11 980 27 adjective 9 718 3 adjective 8 987 28 verb 5 235 4 verb 5 408 29 transitive 4 412 5 adverb 1 040 30 adverb 2 796 6 transitive 3 131 31 intransitive 2 604 7 intransitive 1 379 32 abbreviation 431 8 abbreviation 406 33 interjection 231 9 interjection 244 34 function word —— 10 function word 133 35 preposition 115 11 suffix 111 36 suffix 111 12 prefix 101 37 prefix 110 13 short form 69 38 pronoun 107 14 preposition 66 39 short form 69 15 number 61 40 conjunction 67 16 pronoun 61 41 number 65 17 conjunction 32 42 determiner 60 18 quantifier 23 43 linking verb 19 19 determiner 22 44 quantifier —— 20 modal verb 13 45 modal verb 13 21 linking verb 9 46 linking verb —— 22 predeterminer 47 predeterminer 7 23 auxiliary verb 48 auxiliary verb 3 24 linking verb 0

The boxes containing numbers that are conspicuous in themselves, as well as the numerical differences that are most immediately visible, will be commented on.

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1. The number of NOUNS has gone up from around 25 000 to around 28 000, a both expectable and welcome change from 2002. 2. PHRASAL VERBS , of which there were close on 12 000, have disappeared. 3. ADJECTIVES have grown in number, which is also explicable with the five-year span between the two editions. 4. There are fewer VERBS than in 2002; this decrease is odd in itself, and would alert the user to some serious discrepancy . 5. The fact that there are slightly over 5 000 VERBS altogether (and roughly the same number were there in 2002) shows that the data for verbs cannot be used for our purposes . The number for verbs is smaller than for adjectives. Even with modals, linking verbs, and auxiliaries added, this is not a real figure in either version. 6. In 2002, the joint number of VERBS (5408) and “phrasal verbs” (11980) was 17 388; the added number of “transitives” (3131) and “intransitives” (1379) was 4510. If verbs and “phrasals” were counted separately, then “transitives” and “intransitives” added should yield the number of verbs, but they do not. The verb zoom is marked as “verb” (without transitivity label), zone is given as “transitive”, while ad lib is marked as “transitive or intransitive”, which means that for verbs, these categories criss-cross in ways that make reliable calculations impossible . In the 2007 version the situation is worse: while there are no phrasals, transitives and intransitives add up to 7016, which is significantly more than the figure for verbs. 7. There are more than twice as many ADVERBS in the new edition: this is an unexpected rate of growth. It is not clear why this has happened. 8. Both the “ TRANSITIVES ” and the “ INTRANSITIVES ” category have grown more than 30 percent. 9. “ABBREVIATION ” shows a slight increase, while INTERJECTIONS have grown smaller in number. 10. Figures for “ SUFFIX ”, “ PREFIX ”, “ SHORT FORM ” and “ MODAL VERB ” have remained practically unchanged . (The numbers may of course hide different items.) 11. The more drastic changes (ignoring now “zero” in either version) include “ PREPOSITION ” (doubled); “ PRONOUN ” (almost doubled); “ CONJUNCTION ” (almost doubled); “ DETERMINER ” (trebled).

3.1.4.4.3 Parts of speech in MED: issues of content

Some of the PoS’s listed in MED have never been treated as separate parts of speech, although they may have their own labels in dictionaries (as PoS’s or other entities): “abbreviation”, “function word”, “linking verb”, “number”, “short form”, “suffix” are such classes. The inclusion of these, however, is not motivated by any novel idea from the theory of syntax: some are (probably welcome) upshots of a classification which may be inconsistent with standard theory and also fly in the face of classifications in other dictionaries, but which may actually well serve the user.

In this section the PoS’s that are unique to MED, or are traditionally not treated as PoS categories are examined, again alphabetically.

“ABBREVIATIONS ” are not a unique word class; moreover, the term itself is highly loaded functionally. It may refer to at least two kinds of thing, initialism, and acronym, but these two are not clearly separable to the average user. Also, an “abbreviation” may be a written-only form that is never said aloud ( Mass. for Massachusetts) ; it may be a truncated form like pram for (the almost extinct

193 Chapter Three perambulator ); it may be a spoken form not usually expanded , such as BBC or CIA . Before users start a search, it cannot be taken for granted that they have exact knowledge of what sense “abbreviation” is used in; that problem, however, is there with any term listed, used and explained in any dictionary. Three sources will be quoted here which may give an idea of the lay notion of “abbreviation”; it is probably even hazier than these definitions suggest. Only the Britannica (EBURS 2009; included because the wide currency of the term outside linguistics) seems to appreciate the complexity of the term. (Just the relevant senses have been printed.)

AHD (1994) has one undifferentiated entry for the two senses of abbreviation : “shortened form of a word or phrase used chiefly in writing to represent the complete form, such as Mass. for Massachusetts or USMC for United States Marine Corps . “Acronym” is defined thus: ‘a word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps , or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for ra dio detecting and ranging ’. The term “initialism ” is not listed in AHD (1994).

MWCD (2003) is more refined: it defines abbreviation as ‘a shortened form of a written word or phrase used in place of the whole < amt is an abbreviation for amount >; for acronym it has ‘a word (as NATO , radar , or snafu ) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term; also: an abbreviation (as FBI ) formed from initial letters : INITIALISM; and initialism is explained thus (but not exemplified): ‘an abbreviation formed from initial letters’.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica (typography modified) has: There are several important forms of abbreviation. One form entails representing a single word either by its first letter or first few letters (as n for noun or Co. for Com- pany ), by its most important letters (as Ltd. for Limited ), or by its first and last letters (as Rd. for Road ). These abbreviations are usually spoken as the whole word they represent (though Ltd. is sometimes spoken as “el-tee-dee”). Truncation is especially common in popular speech, as, for example, Mets for Metropolitans . The combination of the first syllables or letters of component words within phrases or within names having more than one word is common and often produces acronyms, which are pronounced as words and which often cease to be considered abbreviations. An example of this type of abbreviation is the word flak [...] Other popular acronyms are the well-known radar [...] and snafu [...]. Acronyms are to be distinguished from initialisms such as U.S.A. and NCAA , which are spoken by reciting their letters. (abbreviation EBURS 2009)

Atkins & Rundell’s 2008 lexicography textbook does not at all clear up the situation when it classifies abbreviations into alphabetisms, acronyms, and contractions (Atkins & Rundell 2008:165). It is not at all helpful to include contractions as well; “abbreviation” is functionally loaded enough without it.

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To summarize the parts of speech in MED (the boxes of unproblematic cases have been left empty):

List No15

1 abbreviation not a PoS: all abbreviations belong to some PoS 2 adjective 3 adverb 1 4 conjunction no distinction between subordinating and coordinating 5 determiner does the user need it? Article, Demonstrative etc. arguably better 6 function word not a PoS; supercategory: content =? 7 interjection has no word status? 8 linking verb subcategory of verb 9 modal verb subcategory of verb 10 noun unproblematic but see Countability 11 number not a PoS 12 phrasal verb subcategory of verb 13 predeterminer traditionally subcat of Det 14 prefix not a word – no PoS 15 preposition 2 16 pronoun what is the content =? personal? all? 17 quantifier what exactly does it cross-cut with? 18 short form not a PoS 19 suffix not a word – no PoS 20 verb

21 auxiliary verb subcategory of verb; cross-cuts with linking verb? 22 linking verb subcategory of verb; cross-cuts with aux? 23 transitive subcategory of (non-aux, non-linking, non-modal) verb 24 intransitive subcategory of (non-aux, non-linking, non-modal) verb 1 It is ironic that the adverb class, which is by far the most problematic – to the point of non-existence in several frameworks – seems problem-free, and has (consequently?) not been experi- mented with in dictionaries. 2 The syntactic innovation that many lexical items such as after are not separately an adverb, a preposition, and a conjunction, but the preposition in all their uses only distinguished by their complementation (zero vs. NP vs. clause) has no reflection whatever in dictionaries. Some recent descriptive grammars (e.g. Huddleston, Pullum & al. 2002 and 2005) do experiment with this novelty.

3.1.4.5 Differing PoS labels for the SL and TL For the Hungarian dictionary user, such niceties as the part-of-speech details of the source language are largely irrelevant when they are not needed for lookup. It is sufficient, to give the source-language PoS on the tacit assumption that an item of PoS X in the source language will have an equivalent of the same PoS X in the target language. The part of speech of the target language word is never specified; the source language PoS is assumed to be simply carried over to the target language PoS. One does not fond the most fleeting, even implicit, mention either of this strategy in all bilingual dictionaries, or indeed of the possibility of some kind of loosening of this “requirement”. If bőrbarát , e.g. is marked as an adjective, then it will be taken for granted that skin-friendly is also one. This is usually a legitimate expectation and strategy, but the correspondence does not always hold.

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This aspect of bilingual dictionaries, the incidental non-correspondence between the part of speech of the SL and the TL will be briefly explored in this section. First, most Hungarian ↔English dictionaries do use PoS labels for all source language (SL) items: this apparently has always seemed an obvious and unavoidable feature of bilingual works. To the best of my knowledge, no dictionaries except AM&MASZ (2000) dispense with this traditional labelling. In bilingual works (which are instrument dictionaries) perhaps not less than 90% of the total cases for English and Hungarian, a situation holds where either (i) the obvious meaning/form of the translations (in the E →H part) or (ii) the easily identifiable form of the source expression (in the H→E part), or both (i) and (ii), adequately inform about the word class of the SL item. It seems, therefore, that uniform PoS labels are not needed, and they must standardly have been included only because both the English and Hungarian sources on which they have been based – quite legitimately for portrait dictionaries, which they have necessarily been – always include PoS labels. In respect of the SL–TL part-of-speech (non)correspondences, a dictionary that uses PoS labels uniformly, e.g. EHCD (1998) or HECD (1998), is no different from one that employs them only in cases where neither (i) nor (ii) above obtains. In both types there will be cases that present a special difficulty: (a) where the above assumption of “always equate item of PoS X with item of PoS X” does not hold – where no such translation exists for an entire syntactic category due to typological differences between languages (which is not relevant for E ↔H); (b) where simply no PoS-for-PoS equivalent exists for some individual item (this situation does, of course, occur in E ↔H relation); and (c) where a source-language expression may not be outright “translation-resistant” but still, expressions of a different PoS in the TL are also possible or even better “equivalents” 68 . (This probably holds for any language pair.) The only (partly technical) problem for both types of dictionaries is that there exist no conspicuous devices employed systematically and uniformly, to mark those TL equivalents whose PoS is different from that of the SL . Such simple, straightforward non-equivalence between SL and TL part-of-speech labels does not seem to be a widely appreciated lexicographic problem. Paradoxically, while the lack of semantic equivalences between lexical items is a widely recognized fact, and is indeed one of the truisms in dictionary production, cf. e.g. “The perfect translation – where an SL word exactly matches a TL word – is rare in general language […]. The equivalence relationship between a pair of words, SL and TL, varies from exact to very approximate, from perfect to just-adequate […]” (Atkins & Rundell 2008:467–468) there is no accepted convention for the marking of just those cases where this match unavoidably and necessarily, moreover, quite visibly breaks down: right at the grammatical level. Discussing types of translations and sense indicators in bilingual dictionaries, Atkins & Rundell (2008: 211–218; 501–506), e.g. mention two types of translation: (i) direct, i.e. given without context and often with sense indicators, and (ii) contextual, i.e. attached to an idiom or example phrase. Where no translation exists, a (iii) near-equivalent, or a (iv) TL gloss, or both can be used. While these are supposed to, and largely do, cater for all kinds of translation non-equivalence, none of them covers the “no PoS-for-PoS equivalent” situation at hand.

That said, there nevertheless are two strategies for a bilingual dictionary to follow to handle the PoS non-equivalence situation: (a) using a (type of) contextual translation ; this, to be sure, is not exactly what contextual translations are usually used for (b) using the device of sense indicators , e.g. between square brackets.

68 The term “equivalent”, to be sure, may only be legitimately used between quotation marks in lexicography in general, but here the word rings even more obviously untrue.

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Slang expressions, the Hungarian gáz / gázos ‘sucks’ ciki / cikis ‘sucks’, will be used as illustration. With both pairs, the latter is an adjective (also formally marked with -s ) derived from the former, which is a noun. Both of the nouns, gáz and ciki , however, are often predicatively used (maybe actually adjectives), synonymously and interchangeably with the adjectives derived from them. If something, e.g., is naff , it can be referred to as gáz or gázos , ciki or cikis . A somewhat similar case may be made for the more Hungarian slang expressions király ‘rocks 69 , rules, rulez’ and királyság ‘rocks, rules, rulez’, which are both nouns. The former is a noun literally/originally meaning ‘king’, and the latter, also a noun that means ‘kingdom’.

(a) MASZ (2000) uses “contextual translation” in the ciki VAGY cikis entry, offering crusty , naff , tacky , ropey , crummy as well as the example tök ciki ez a ruha this dress sucks big time . This does not explicitly say that suck is a verb, that consequently this is a verb-based MWE, and that sucks is almost exclusively used in this, Sg 3 Pres form; at least the former, however, can be in- ferred. Nothing points to a grammatical difference between the SL and the TL expression.

(b) Square brackets or some other type of bracketing may call attention to cases where a different word class from that of the SL expression is offered; such bracketing does get used, e.g. in CEHD (1976) and CHED (1977). In the same entry of MASZ (2000) for the item ciki VAGY cikis , we thus find: 1. [nehéz*:] dodgy , risky , dicey cikis helyzet dicey/ticklish situation 2. [kínos/vacak**:] crusty , naff , tacky , ropey , crummy , [igével***:] sucks tök ciki ez a ruha this dress sucks big time (* = hard; ** embarrassing, naff; *** = with verb) In this case, too, an example with contextual translation is still in order, which effectively means combining methods (a) and (b) above.

3.1.4.6 Perspective shift between SL and TL lexical items A special type or grammatical non-correspondences between SL and TL equivalents involves what may be called perspective shifts. The prototypical perspective shift is one where in both languages the same PoS, mainly verb, is featured, but the arguments which describe the same state of affairs get arranged differently, as e.g. in the commonest case of the possessive verb in different languages. Hungarian uses ‘essere’ where English uses ‘habere’: X-nek van Y-ja corresponds to X has Y ‘for X there is Y’ This case is (i) so general, i.e., so much part of grammar as opposed to the lexicon, thus moving the problem so evidently outside the realm of lexicography, and (ii) involves no major word class shift (it is a case of a verb translating a verb) that it would be hard to imagine a dictionary even with the heaviest didactic bias that uses some devices to call the user’s attention to this change of perspective. While it is true that few, if any, users will turn to the dictionary to check the meaning of the English possessive have , failure to accord proper grammatical treatment to have may result in seriously distorted profiles of verbs. This will not harm the utility of this particular dictionary as an instrument , but it does offer a false picture of have . The entry of have in EHCD (1998), e.g. begins as follows: have 1. van (vknek vmje), vmt bír ; have a cold megfázott ; have faith in sy bízik / hisz vkben ; have an idea van / támadt egy ötlete « have no idea/ notion of sg fogalma / sejtelme sincs vmr ől; have measles kanyarója van; have a name to lose van veszítenivalója; have need of sg szüksége van vmre; have a right to sg joga van vmhez; have a taste for sg ér- zéke van vmhez; have sy in one's power hatalmában tart vkt; have to deal with sy dolga van vkvel; have to do with sg köze van vmhez, dolga / kapcsolata van vmvel; have to do with sy kapcsolata / dolga van vkvel , köze van vkhez; have nothing to do nincs semmi dol-

69 It is interesting that rocks , also a verb, itself has no verbal equivalent just adjectival and nominal ones in Hungarian.

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ga; have nothing to do with semmi köze sincs (vkhez / vmhez); have nothing to gain by … semmit sem nyerhet azzal, ha / hogy …; have no place to go (to) nincs hova mennie, nem tud hova menni; we don't have many visitors nem sok látogatónk van, van, nem sok vendég jár hozzánk; he had only himself to thank for it csak magának köszönhette; all I have mindenem, amim csak van; which one will you have? melyiket óhajtja / választja? […] The entry exemplifies two faults, one of which has to do with inadequate emphasis on grammatical information. One, that under the first sense, which is translated in two ways, with both the ‘essere’ verb, i.e. van , and a bookish-sounding transitive verb (with the wrong complement: vmit bír instead of vmvel bír ), a genuine possessive example does not come before have a right (Line 4), but even this is not a prototypical context for possessive have . The expressions have no idea/notion do come before that, but because they are negated, the equivalent verb van must be replaced with the formally unrelated nincs ‘is not’. The majority of the examples, beginning with have a cold , are not related to possessive have , and though a dictionary of such impressive size may list them under have , they have a much better place under their nominal elements. The second shortcoming, more relevant to the issue under scrutiny, is that although van is obviously the first equivalent offered, apparently the need was still felt to use a transitive verb as Hungarian equivalent, as if to suggest transitivity of the English SL verb to the user in this way, i.e. by providing a transitive TL item. This produces the unnatural example with bír . One consequence (or subtype) of this particular “habere–essere” perspective shift is that Hungarian igaza van (lit. ‘have right’) is be right in English. Paradoxically, this is not usually seen as con- forming to the above pattern, rather as an isolated “idiom”. More often than not, in school teaching practice all of the English equivalents below are taught as exactly that: phrasal expressions, or idioms. Given the general ambivalent feeling of awe before idioms and “expressions”, this suggests to the learner an additional layer of difficulty of English – which it naturally does not have in excess of any other language. Some of the most salient shift-of-perspective scenarios in H →E include the following (where, unlike above, a major PoS shift does occur: here, Hungarian verbs are translated with be + Adjective): csalódik → be disappointed csodálkozik → be amazed/surprised fázik → be cold fél → be afraid/scared késik → be late megdöbben → be astonished megijed → be frightened meglep ődik → be surprised örül → be happy/pleased/glad sajnál → be sorry téved → be wrong/mistaken vigyáz → be careful

Similar points of clash from E →H are provided by “passive perception” verbs such as feel, look, smell, sound, taste , followed by an Adjective Phrase ( X feels Q; X smells Q ), where the expression encodes that X has some K kind of Quality; Q is perceivable; Q is encoded in the verb itself while Hungarian expresses this state of affairs with (i) an Adjective for K; (ii) Q expressed by a noun; (iii) possession (which itself, as seen above, is expressed with ‘essere’ rather than ‘habere’: a levesnek furcsa íze van → the soup tastes strange lit. ‘there is a strange taste for the soup’

There are many examples of similar minor shifts, some containing more and some fewer members, which are well worth exploring in grammars of English for Hungarians with any contrastive bias. There also exist what are quite idiosyncratic cases such as wear perfume or wear a smile → mo- soly van az arcán in E →H direction, which cannot be translated with a transitive verb and keeping as the subject the wearer of the perfume or the smile. Neither perfumes nor smiles are worn in Hungarian. Thus when actual rather than usual situations are to be described (in the latter case használ ‘use’ being a suitable equivalent for wear ), the perfume will have to become subject, and the only possible verb is van ‘be’: what perfume is she wearing? is milyen parfüm van rajta? ‘what perfume is on her?’.

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There is, in conclusion, just one kind of – negative – uniformity across possible types of dictionary in the lexicographic treatment of these shifts of perspective (involving a shift in the thematic con- figuration, in the more difficult cases): that there is no dedicated device used to show this syntactic peculiarity. Most of the time the examples will have to take care of the problem.

A typical and inevitable but partial-only correspondence between PoS labels in bilingual dictionaries involves the case of a language having a complex verbal–nominal expression (e.g. with a light verb) which is translatable only, or fares much better if translated, in verbal-only form. The equivalence kárt okoz/tesz vmiben → damage smth, cause damage to smth is a case in point. This sense of ‘damage’ cannot be expressed in Hungarian differently (the single-verb károsít ‘wrong; harm; hurt’ is not suitable), so the verbal–nominal form must be used. This phenomenon is rather pervasive: the non-match is only partial, and perspective change is not involved; this results in even less noticeability than with the other types discussed above. As concerns the consequences of this for lexicography, no special device showing this is necessary.

Failure to recognize this PoS non-equivalence as a general grammatical problem may result in, or at least massively contribute to, heavily skewed presentation of entries, such as the one quoted below from EHCD (1998). Here, several obsolete “equivalents” are placed at the top of the entry as if these were the (tacitly more frequent and) natural ones. While the most natural/neutral translation of örül [vminek] is (and no doubt was at the time of EHCD’s publication) the English be + Adj sequence be happy [about] , this be -construction only emerges as the 7th option, and even here as part of a colloquial idiom 70 , seriously distorting the equivalences. örül […] 1. (vmnek ) rejoice (at/in sg), be glad (of sg), be delighted (of sg), glory (in sg), be pleased (with sg), exalt (at/in sg); örül, mint majom a farkának biz szl be happy as a clam / lark, be pleased as punch; el őre örül vmnek look forward to sg, be delighted at the prospect of sg; örül a mások boldogságának rejoice (v. be happy) in the happiness of others; igen örülök neki I am very happy about it; örülj neki, hogy otthon maradtál you should be glad that you stayed at home, you are lucky you did not go; csak örülhet neki he can only con- gratulate himself (upon having done sg); még örülhet neki, ha he can consider himself lucky / fortunate if; örül a szerencséjének he blesses his stars; mindennek örül he is happy / pleased with everything; nem örül semminek he does not find pleasure in anything; nagyon örül be overjoyed, be very happy / glad; örülnénk, ha elfogadná we would be glad if you accepted v. would accept it; tudom, hogy örülnének neki I know they would be glad (if sg…); 2. örül, hogy be delighted / pleased (to); örülök, hogy láthatom I am glad / pleased / happy to see you; örülök, hogy megismerhettem it was a pleasure to meet you, [bemuta- tásnál] how do you do, pleased / glad to meet you biz ; nagyon örülök, hogy beleegyezik I am very glad that you consent; örülhet, hogy ilyen olcsón szabadult he is lucky to have gotten off so easily

There are altogether seventeen equivalents offered for örül in the entry above in its two (not easily justifiable) sense sections, out of which seven are verbs. Worse, the first translation for örül is rejoice at/in , No4 is glory in , and No7 is exalt at/in ; even the first be + Adjective variant is not one with happy but with glad (of sg) .

70 Translated, quite unfortunately and further distorting the picture, with three literary phrases: be happy as a clam/lark, be pleased as punch .

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3.1.5 Prepositions

3.1.5.1 Prepositions: a class with two faces One clear manifestation of the flimsy line between grammar and lexicon is the no man’s land, or rather “two men’s land”, of prepositions. The class of prepositions is as heterogeneous as to include both lexical and functional members. While prepositions are functional items for traditional and structuralist grammar, they are a lexical/thematic class for Government and Binding, or Principles and Parameters theory. Their heterogeneity is effectively acknowledged with the recognition of a class – albeit not of , but related to , the prepositions – which is underspecified for the Functional feature (as mentioned in 3.1.4.2.1 based on Newson & al. 2006 passim ). Crucially, however, prepositions are thematic (i.e. non-functional) in feature terms. The claim that different subtypes of preposition exist is current: in Huddleston & Pullum (2005), e.g. what are termed grammaticized prepositions are not supposed to “express spatial relations, as prepositions often do”, but mark certain grammatical functions; “where they are placed in sentences does not depend on what the mean but entirely on rules of the grammar” (Huddleston & Pullum 2005:136).

3.1.5.1.1 Prepositions: one syntactic class lexicographically

These two preposition types, whether subordinated types or placed beside each other, never show any difference in terms of lexicographic treatment. Keeping them apart by reserving a constant/separate zone in the entry for “grammaticized” prepositions would perhaps add to consistency, maybe elegance, of the PoS system in a portrait dictionary. Spatial senses could be followed by temporal and these in turn by other senses, so that the “grammaticized” prepositions go to the end of the entry. (The ordering of senses within the entries may, of course, be based on totally different considerations.) Alternatively, the “grammaticized” ones could be placed first, better to draw attention to them. What actually characterizes dictionaries depends on type: these are surveyed in the following sections.

(i) Native speaker dictionaries

These, especially the larger ones, list each and every “meaning” of every preposition, which means that they will have as many meanings for a P as there are governing heads, i.e. mostly verbs, that require that P: in RHWUD (1999), e.g. with is entered with 21 meanings, No. 10 being ‘(of separation) from’: to part with a thing . It is obvious that this sense does not come from the preposition (which could well be from ), but the verb, and the P is a “blind” syntactic complement. In a bigger dictionary, this can assume absurd proportions: MWUD (2000) has just 13 senses for with because most senses have subsenses such that No 4 looks like this: with […] 4 a used as a function word to indicate one that shares in an action, transaction, or arrangement *[…] worked with them […]* *[…] business […] is now done with Americans […]* b used as a function word to indicate the object of attention, behavior, or feeling *[…] satisfaction with the institution* *get tough with him* *angry with her* *in love with her* c : in respect to : so far as concerns *on friendly terms with[…]* *expressed agreement with his views* *[…] be all right with her […]* d used to indicate the object of an adverbial expression of imperative force *off with his head* *away with him* e : as the doer, giver, or victim of *charged with murder* *threatened with tuberculosis* f : OVER, UPON *no longer has any influence with him* g : in the performance, operation, or use of *prospering with their dairy industry […]* *the trouble with this machine* *something went wrong with the radio*

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(ii) Learner’s dictionaries:

If they have a sense breakdown by means of some kind of signposting, layout considerations will always force them to aim at economy with these signposts, and not with the senses themselves. This means that a danger is there that identical senses will be spread under different signposts. CALD (2008) e.g. has 18 such “meanings” plus the usual idiom/phrase etc hits (which are extremely useful but irrelevant and so not copied here):

List No16

1. with prep COMPANY 7. with prep OPPOSITION 14. with prep UNDERSTANDING 2. with prep METHOD 8. with prep SEPARATION 15. with prep DESPITE 3. with prep DESCRIPTION 9. with prep AND 16. with prep EXPRESSIONS 4. with prep RELATIONSHIP 10. with prep COMPARISON 17. with it adj FASHION 5. with prep CONTAINING / 11. with prep SUPPORT 18. with it adj MIND COVERING 12. with prep DIRECTION 6. with prep CAUSE 13. with prep TIME

There are far too few labels even in this way, and arguably not just same-sense shades but different senses have been lumped together under one of these signposts: this is shown e.g. by work with [smb] and Ice cream with your apple pie and left my coat with the cloakroom attendant , which are all supposed to illustrate the COMPANY sense.

At the same time, the examples […] make a clean break with the past and […] part with my cash are all supposed to illustrate the SEPARATION sense; this suggests that there may be just too many labels, MWUD (2000) style: the meaning of with in these two is not that of the P itself but the noun/verb governing it.

3.1.5.2 The issue of English “complex prepositions” Paradoxically, while prepositions (traditionally supposed to express “relations”) were considered as “grammatical”, they had to be recognized as an open class. (The paradox is still there: in frameworks where prepositions are thematic , which aligns them with the open classes, their closed nature may be seen as a problem.) This was necessitated by the recognition of the class of “complex prepositions”, i.e. consisting of two to four words, including at least one simple preposition. The following is a list of the ostensible “complex preposition” types 71 (based on Huddleston 1984:341) broken down by number of elements:

71 Some other types of what may equally be considered as “complex prepositions” have never been controversial. The units from below and from behind , e.g., can be analyzed lexically as complex and syntactically as prepositions governing a PP, but this has never seemed to be a clash.

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ABC 2 elements: X–P 3 elements: P–N–P 4 elements: P–D–N–P 2 of 6 contain of 11 of 16 contain of 6 of 7 contain of APART from in ACCORDANCE with in the CASE of ASIDE from on ACCOUNT of in the COURSE of BECAUSE of in ADDITION to to the DETRIMENT of DUE to on BEHALF of in the RANGE of INSTEAD of in CASE of for the SAKE of OWING to in COMPARISON with on the STRENGTH of by DINT of with a VIEW to in FRONT of in LIEU of by MEANS of with REFERENCE to on TOP of in SPITE of in VIEW of by VIRTUE of in RELATION to

Both their distributions and meanings ( in front of e.g. opposes behind both distributionally and semantically) have been used as proof that they are not simply sequences of P1 + lexical N + P2, where P1–N–P2 do not form a constituent – as in (b) – but one complex P – as in (a).

(a) Complex preposition recognized (b) No complex preposition recognized PP PP 3 3 P NP P NP fgh 4 1 P N P N PP 1 P NP 4

Thus, in front of could be a complex P, as in (a), while just a sequence of P–N–P–NP, as in (b):

(a) (b) PP PP 3 3 P NP P NP fgh 5 in 2 P N P the building N PP in front of front 2 P NP of 5 the building

A simple compromise is to claim that a sequence of P–N–P, or even P–D–N–P, may exhibit lexicalization (= forming lexical items), i.e. lexical listing. These larger items are idioms , and it is then expected that there will be conflict between what counts as a unit from the lexical and the gram-

202 Chapter Three matical point of view. Such a mismatch between lexicon and grammar may be argued to be found in these sequences. Lexically, and perhaps psycholinguistically, there do appear to exist complex prepositions. Just as there is nothing against treating a sequence as S in the syntax and M in the morphology, there is nothing against treating a sequence as S in the syntax and L in the lexicon. While psychological considerations of storage and retrieval, listing vs. ad hoc generation, may be considered irrelevant for syntax, they certainly are relevant for semantics and for studies of the lexicon in general. The lexicon may include elements such as the by dint of in the expression by dint of hard work , while the expressions themselves have the same syntactic structure as after years of hard work , where no such complex preposition is posited. The lexical entry for dint in dictionaries will just have to specify, suitably for idioms , that this dint is unique (possibly to the extent of not being a noun at all; this, however, would not have to be worried about in the entry if the sequence is an idiom ). Under such an analysis, “complex preposition” may, of course, be said to be a misnomer: by dint of is no syntactic constituent but rather a (preposition-based) idiom. Didac- tically, “prepositional idiom” or “preposition-based idiom” is no better than “complex preposition”, but if these two do not distort the syntactic facts as much as “complex preposition”, then one of those two may be a better term. If so, dint ought to have its own entry, unspecified for word class, and left undefined/untranslated (depending on dictionary), since only the prepositional idiom which it is part of can have a definition/translation.

This still does not answer the question whether by dint of should have a PoS label. Should it be decided that labelling it as a P is both superfluous and misleading (because syntactically inaccurate), then no PoS label will be offered.

The actual strategies for this situation are different: • COED (2004) has a nominal dint entry, followed by a verb dint , and then a PHRASES section, which has by dint of by means of. No PoS label is given either for dint or by dint of . The place in the entry, though, suggests that this dint is not the noun dint – but the user probably does not notice this anyway. • CALD3 (2008) enters dint as a noun, with two senses: 1. (formal) by dint of sth as a result of sth 2. [C] a small hollow mark in the surface of something, caused by pressure or by being hit. Here, a PoS label is given for dint but none for by dint of . • EHCD (1998) is similar to CALD: though the dint entry has both a nominal and a verbal section (predictably unlike the smaller CALD), but by dint of is listed in the nominal section, with four translations, without a PoS label of its own.

3.1.5.2.1 Biber & al. (2000) on complex prepositions

The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber & al. 2000) classifies prepositions with function words, which, however (in its highly odd wording), are “links which introduce prepositional phrases”. Now uniquely among the new comprehensive English grammars 72 , Biber & al. (2000) recognize complex prepositions, which “function semantically and syntactically as single prepositions”. While

72 Biber et al. (2000): Longman grammar of spoken and written English; Carter & McCarthy (2006): Cambridge grammar of English ; Huddleston & Pullum (2002): The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. This was once accepted in the descriptive tradition up until Quirk et al (1985): A comprehensive grammar of the English language .

203 Chapter Three semantically, this is certainly true and probably warrants unique lexical memorization/retrieval, i.e. these are listemes, syntactically they are clearly not units: it is no accident that because of this, complex prepositions are not recognized in modern grammars. Symptomatically, on one hand Biber & al. (2000) recognize four-word prepositions (which are supposed to be variants of three-word ones, augmented, so to speak, by the determiner the or a, and which usually end in of: as a result of ; at the expense of ; for the sake of ; in the event of ; with the exception of ); on the other hand, in the case of these four-word sequences they still note that some of these can be considered “free combinations”, adding even that the distinction between complex prepositions and free combinations is a matter of degree. They fail to add, however, whether this concerns their syntactic analysis (where this is less likely) or a lexical approach. The distinction between “complex prepositions” and “free combinations”, to be sure, may be a matter of degree, but this may hold true even if syntactically they belong to the same class. There may still be analyzability and/or predictability and/or storage-related differences between them that place them on a gradience. It is difficult to prove a point like this, but sequences such as by virtue of , by dint of and in spite of , which are completely opaque, are more likely to be stored/retrieved as wholes than e.g. on top of , in line with and in the light of ; and these in turn are more likely to be so than e.g. in conformity with , in comparison with , at the back of , and at the centre of .

Lexicographically, for the sake of and similar P–D–N–P sequences must be registered one way or another, whatever be the dominant syntactic view of handling them. With many other phenomena, changing syntactic views may, and often do, affect lexicographic treatment, but not in this case: for the sake of always has to be entered under SAKE , the noun member, and so do all similar sequences. These noun “cores” under which all of them will have to be entered are in small caps in columns B and C in the table in 3.1.5.2 above where they were first introduced. They will have to be entered as idioms, or MWEs cf. COED (2004), CALD (2008) and EHCD (1998) above – and it will not matter to the user which of (1) or (2) is more adequate syntactically , the complex P in (a) or the “free combination” in (b):

(a) [ P on ACCOUNT of [ NP me] ] (b) [ PP on [ NP account of me] ]

3.1.5.2.2 A mystery word: ago

Huddleston & Pullum (2005) call ago “the exceptional preposition”, suggesting thereby that this is the way a preposition can be exceptional (Huddleston & Pullum 2005:141). They offer a description and an explanation of the deviance. The nature of the deviation is that the head–complement relation is inverted, i.e. the head ago comes on the right and its complement on the left, uniquely among all prepositions. Even the idea of this kind of exception – understandably – would be impossible in mainstream theoretical syntax, since heads and complements are not supposed to be reversed like this in isolated instances, and it is not very fortunate in a descriptive but heavily theoretically oriented framework either. The explanation of the deviation that Huddleston & Pullum (2005:141) provide is a historical one: ago is supposed to derive from agone , a participle (of ago , cf. OED 2002). This could well be what has happened, but it would be even diachronically more convincing if prepositions of a similar derivation, which obviously exist, showed similar kinds of deviance, which they do not. Many prepositions originate as participles: past , e.g. is still marked as prep. and adv . in the OED (2002), and the “prepositional use appears to have arisen out of the perfect tenses of pass v.”. The word gone , for example (see 3.1.5.2.3), also functions as a preposition in the sense ‘past’. It is also entered in AMSz (2000) with the Hungarian equivalent után, kés őbb vminél , e.g. she's gone eighty nyolcvan éves is elmúlt .

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Huddleston & Pullum just use part of the information of the OED’s entry for their description. They use the etymological information to explain the exceptional phenomenon, but not the PoS classification of ago : the OED does not classify ago as a preposition but a “ppl. a. and adv.”. Gone is also a preposition, and though it is hard not to see its connection with go , which could explain any similar wayward behaviour, it does not show the same distribution as ago , i.e. does not behave like a “postposition”. Huddleston & Pullum (2002, 2005) claim that “dictionaries classify ago as an adverb”, which is too much of a generalization: both learner’s and native speaker dictionaries label it as adverb, adjective or both. It is hard, of course, to see how it could be either of those. Native speaker dictionaries: • CED&T (1992) marks it as adv . • COED (2004) labels it as adv. • NSOED (1997) labels it as adj. and adv. • MWCD (2003), RHWUD (1999) and MWUD (2000) label it adjective or adverb; • AHD (1994) quite inadequately labels it adj. at the head of the entry, but then adv. in the example two years ago .

The word ago does not fare better in learner’s dictionaries either; these also fail to do justice to its grammar: • LDCE (2000) labels ago as adjective • OALD (2005) labels ago as adverb • CC (2003) does not label it anything; it gives a sentential definition, examples and, at the end of the entry, the following unhelpful grammatical information: ADV ADV with v, n ADV, long ADV. 73 • CALD (2003) and CALD (2008) both label ago as adverb. • MED (2002) and (2007) both label ago as adverb. • CCAD (2009) labels ago as follows: ADV [ADV with v, n ADV] 74

Not one of these recognizes that for ago in the phrase five days ago to be an adjective, the whole expression would have to be a NP and have nominal distribution – which it evidently is not and does not. This means that all of the dictionaries above offer an erroneous, and hardly defensible, PoS label – adverb, adjective, or both.

Dictionaries may be rather unreliable when it comes to grammar as basic as word classes. In all fairness to dictionaries , the issue of ago as a descriptive point is so difficult that, e.g., Carter & McCarthy’s grammar (2006) avoids it altogether; it is hard to find another explanation, since they do not even list it among the simple prepositions, and do not alert the reader to its deviant behaviour.

The question is whether ago is a preposition that is somehow exceptional, or not a preposition. If it were indeed an adverb or an adjective, it would still be exceptional – not less, even more so; this, however, does not bother any of the editors above, who actually think that it is . This has rarely, if ever, bothered users, who do not need PoS information after they have, basing themselves on the examples, located the sense needed.

73 This source is so user-unfriendly that one always has to go back to check the abbreviations; this time, the search for the items ADV with v, n ADV, long ADVERB has failed. 74 CCAD (2009) offers no explanation whatever for these grammatical symbols, once the forte of the Collins COBUILD series.

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3.1.5.2.3 A neologism: gone

The word gone shows an area where derivation and inflection, or put more generally, lexicon and grammar, are hard to separate – and even more difficult to find both an adequate linguistic and lexicographic presentation for; to find a balance, if not the balance, between description and presentation.

If gone were just the past participle of go , an E →H dictionary could easily do justice to it by providing some sign of referral, as in the case of all irregulars, from it to go . Gone , however, is also a preposition, and labelling it as such hardly causes difficulty for the user: “rigour” will not lead to confusion. More interestingly, the same string gone is also an adjective (and CED&T 1992 prints ten adjectival senses of gone ). It is obvious that out of the gone types in (i) he had gone back and (ii) he was gone (in any of the ‘dead’ or ‘faint’ or ‘missing’ senses) and (iii) he was gone ninety , only (i) is an participial form, which will be adequately covered by a referring sign. It should also be obvious that (ii) and (iii) do not exemplify the same kind of gone , and that the gone in (iii) distributes exactly as a preposition (e.g. the preposition past – contra CED&T 1992, e.g., which claims that this gone is an adverb meaning ‘past’ in it’s gone midnight ). Then the details may be argued, but gone ought to receive three entries:

AMSz (2000) gone adj 1. elveszett, reménytelen, [betegségben] el őrehaladott he was too far gone to understand what we were saying túl volt már azon, hogy felfoghatta volna, amit mondunk 2. elt űnt it's gone elt űnt, elveszett 3. be gone elvan, távol van I won't be gone long nem maradok / nem leszek el sokáig here today, gone tomorrow ma itt, holnap ott/sehol / ma még itt van, holnap már nyoma sincs 4. terhes she is six months gone hat hónapos terhes 5. be gone on smb bele van esve vkibe 6. be gone el van varázsolva, be van l őve gone prep után, kés őbb vminél she's gone eighty nyolcvan éves is elmúlt they didn't come until gone midnight / four o'clock csak éjfél/négy után jöttek gone verb go

The adjectival function of gone is widely recognized, but the preposition function of gone is not. This is not a problem word (as is ago ), since the preposition PoS of gone is not universally recognized: of the native speaker dictionaries, it is not mentioned in CED&T (1992), NSOED (1997), MWCD (2003), RHWUD (1999), MWUD (2000) and AHD (1994); it is only featured (as a British- only preposition) in COED (2004). This use of gone is featured in all the five learner’s dictionaries: as prep. in informal British usage in the LDCE (2000); prep. in informal British usage in the OALD (2005); prep. Brit/informal in CC (2003); prep. UK in the CALD (2003) and CALD (2008); as British informal in MED (2002) and (2007) 75 .

75 It is telling that the definition is the inadequate ‘after a particular time’ (a whole PP): it shows that gone itself is regarded as some kind of time expression, even if it is apparently acknowledged that its grammatical status is preposition. If this indeed were what gone meant, it could never appear in the MED (2007) example: It was gone ten o’clock by the time they arrived .

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3.1.6 Small clauses

Small clauses, which never have existed for lexicography, are a good illustration of how dictionaries can do without input from (theoretical) syntax. Over the past over thirty years, since the publication of Stowell (1981), the construction called “small clause” has been analyzed in many different ways, depending on the dominant framework. Small clauses, in one syntactic framework, are supposed to be one of the three major clause types besides standard/ordinary clauses (CPs) and exceptional clauses (IPs). In the GB strain of generative grammar, there are supposed to be verbless small clause types (universally recognized) and verbal small clause types (which some sources ignore). They come in different shapes, from the ones functioning as complements of verbs to complements of with and what with 76 ; they may also be independent main clauses 77 . The only constant feature they share is their minimal predicative structure (usually contrasted to both ordinary and exceptional, clauses).

Radford (1988) defines the small clause as [NP XP], where XP = AP or PP or NP or VP, and accordingly recognizes such types as the following: (1) believe [him incapable]; make [him sick] (2) want [him out of the team]; let [him into the house] (3) find [him a drag] (4) let [him go] modified from Radford (1988:324ff)

The verbal type, exemplified by (4) above, is often further classified into bare infinitival, gerundive (-ing ), and participial ( -en ): (4a) saw [him go] (4b) imagine [him singing] (4c) imagine [him shot]

Of these structures (1) and (3), which contain AP and NP predicates in the clause and (4), the verbal types, have long figured in descriptions of English grammar under the traditional label “Accusative with the Infinitive”. They were also singled out for Hornby’s Verb Patterns (e.g. Hornby & al. 1948) and figured prominently in many editions of the first two learner’s dictionaries, the OALD and LDOCE, until they proved – or rather were assumed to be – both too technical and not mnemonic enough to use.

Some of the relevant structures are as follows: want him to stay – Hornby’s No. 17, characterized as S + vt + (pro)noun + to Infinitive; feel the house shake – Hornby’s No. 18a, characterized as S + vt + (pro)noun + Infinitive; consider him (to be) clever – Hornby’s No. 25, characterized as S + vt + (pro)noun + DO + ( to be ) + adj/n.

Importantly, the to-infinitival variant of this last No. 25 does not illustrate a Small Clause, while the version without it does. The three examples with the Small Clauses bracketed look like this: want [ SC him to stay]; feel [ SC the house shake]; consider [ SC him innocent]

76 I can’t sleep with [him snoring] ; What with [it raining all day], I didn’t get a chance to hang the washing out 77 The so-called Mad Magazine sentences: Me worry? or Max a doctor?

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The verbal SC structures in (4), illustrated above, have also figured among the Verb Patterns under such labels as “Accusative with the Participle”. These, however, as we have seen, are not considered as Small Clauses by all analysts.

Variations on many of the small clauses – e.g. (1), (2), (3), (4a) – above, with to infinitives rather than plain/bare infinitives, are labelled “exceptional clauses”, never small clauses: • want [him to be on the team] • believe [him to be incapable]

The relation between “Accusative with Infinitive”, the “Accusative with Participle”, the “Excep- tional Clause”, and the “Small Clause” itself, in one possible framework , can be sketched out as follows:

Small Clause Acc w/ Infin.

Exceptional Cl Acc w/ Pple

Just as a detailed summary than this may not be hoped to be given here of the various syntactic approaches to small clauses, so no overview will be attempted of the different lexicographic treatments, following in the wake of Hornby and associates, of all of the phenomena which the notion “small clause” covers. Both the phenomena themselves and the analyses offered for them are far too heterogeneous, as evidenced by the vast literature – too complex indeed for the “small clause” to ever have been used in lexicography. If just the most important syntactic developments and U turns in the analysis of the most important objects that have been termed “small clause” were to be followed up in lexicography, and dictionaries genuinely were to shape their presentation of those phenomena that might come under the label “small clause”, then dictionary-making would be impossible. Each new edition would have to be updated accordingly; and the lexical updating of a dictionary, whether print or electronic, is difficult, time-consuming, and costly enough without impossible grammar-related tasks like that. Try- ing to absorb into lexicography the most recent syntactic insights (and possibly also use the given terminology) would be a constant race against time – provided, of course, that whatever new information emerges can be used, and is worth using. The question naturally emerges, who and what is to decide which those areas are that may serve as worthy inputs for lexicography. It has turned out that even the little that was once imported from grammatical analysis – the millennia-old notion of Accusative with Infinitive and the Accusative with Participle with its subtypes – and was carefully adopted to be accommodated in learner’s dictionaries had come to be jettisoned for fear that it might be user-unfriendly. That was a methodological, pedagogical decision, by no means one to do with linguistics. Meanwhile, most of the insights from the new approaches to syntax have never found their way into dictionaries. The theoretical approaches, where explanation is obviously foremost, radically differ. Descriptively, or pre-theoretically, however, there is no disagreement as to the handling of the phenomenon at hand, and nothing indeed warrants a different lexicographic treatment since the first versions of the Verb Patterns. In the dictionary, where explanation has no place, description counts most – and that is

208 Chapter Three probably best at its simplest. In the case of the Small Clause, it is safe to say that for lexicography, it does not exist . If (a very big if that has not been answered uniformly) that kind of syntactic information is needed at all, the time-honoured approach to the structures grouped under the “Small Clauses” label suits the user better, is more intuitive, and seems to be a point where tradition ought to prevail.

3.2 Between grammar and lexicon

3.2.1 Lexico-grammar

Discussing a variety of languages, Halliday & Yallop (2007) deals with notions of “'word” in Eng- lish and, arguing from the differences between languages, introduces the notion of “lexico-grammar”. The term, first used in systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1978; Halliday 1985/1994; Halliday & Matthiessen 2004; Hasan 1987), suggests that there may be “no exact point where the lexicologist stops and the grammarian takes over” (Halliday & Yallop 2007:3–4). The view of corpus linguistics is sceptical of separating the levels of lexicon, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. A central claim is that ‘there is a strong tendency for sense and syntax to be associated’ (Sinclair 1991: 65). At different stages of twentieth-century linguistics, the lexicon, semantics and pragmatics seem to have been variously ignored, or seen as an unsystematic remainder, as opposed to syntax, which was seen as highly structured and rule-governed. Stubbs (2002:216) however claims that “a discipline progresses by turning chaos into order, and linguists and philosophers have had considerable success in showing that all of these areas are internally highly organized, and related to each other in principled ways”. Chaos, however, need not be turned into order if lexicon, semantics and pragmatics are both non-discrete, probabilistic, have fuzzy internal as well as external boundaries. This is not chaos then but the natural order of things, and the “order” that this could be turned into would unnatural and false. If fuzziness is inherent indeed in language, then corpus linguistics need not be seen as saving the (study of the) lexicon from chaos, but can rather be welcomed as an approach showing the true nature of language – “lexi-grammar”.

Dictionaries, especially bilingual ones, where grammar is less conspicuous, inevitably suggest the separation of lexicon and grammar. With the notable exception of some learner’s dictionaries (e.g. Thompson & al. 1991) and coursebook-cum-workbooks and vocabulary builders that began to show the influence of English learner’s dictionaries in the 1990s (cf. Salamon & Zalotay 1993, 1994; Dörnyei & al. 1986), Hungarian ↔English dictionaries have always contained very little grammatical information, apart from such details as part of speech labels (which are probably not perceived to be grammatical information as much lookup aids) and transitivity (which is usually clear from the translations, so superfluous). What little grammatical information the Hungarian →English part of the comprehensive HECD (1998) has contained, for example, was morphological; and because such information was mainly featured for irregulars, its inclusion fosters the impression that it was really words’ individual, lexical characterization that mattered. Syntactic information is not specially targeted; it is hidden in the examples. Even when a Hungarian explanatory dictionary offers a special feature, this will not be collocational information, but synonyms and antonyms, for example; this further augments the feeling that useful information can be found, and ought to be sought, on the paradigmatic and not the syntagmatic axis. Everything above

209 Chapter Three the word level tends to be considered a matter of “idiom” of sorts. It is possible that “idiom” is a good term to designate some or all of these above-the-word chunks of language, but “idiom” also spells trouble: it issues a false warning of a terra incognita where no man, especially not moving about in a foreign language, should venture. The scanty results available from empirical Hungarian research into dictionary use (e.g. Márkus & Szöll ősy 2006) do not at all justify optimism. Hudson (1988) discusses several notions that are relevant for an exploration into dichotomies. He uses “grammar” narrowly, to include just the rules (‘the grammar proper’) of language, and “lexico- grammar” for the combination of the general rules plus the lexicon (Hudson 1988:291). Hudson attacks the (then, or still?) standard assumption that a rule is always classified as either lexical or non- lexical, and he invokes the notion of prototype, claiming that all linguistic concepts are prototypes – a proposition with which it is very easy to identify. A lexical rule is such a prototype, “organized around clear cases but with deviation permitted in its instances”. As an example that is non-canonical because it does not fit into any normal pattern (and not derivable from any fuller structure) he provides questions of the type What about a drink? and Down with the government! A rule is thus needed to “generate the pattern found in each such case; but these rules are tied just to a few lexical items” ( what can be replaced by how ). I totally concur with Hudson’s claim that “any lexicographer must agree with […] what I have said about the distinction between the lexicon and the grammar. In practice they must often be faced with unanswerable questions about what information to include in their dictionary and what to leave out on the grounds that it belongs rightly in a grammar. The word order facts that Hudson uses as illustration are even more instructive. The two extremes, “100% lexical” and “100% grammatical”, are sufficiently clear: enough is exceptional because it follows its head ( sufficiently big vs. big enough) ; it belongs in a dictionary. The subject precedes the verb: this belongs in the grammar. However, there are a presumably huge number of intermediate cases. The some-, any- and no- pronoun series, e.g. have their modifier adjective following rather than preceding them ( someone nice , not * nice someone ). A rather small list of auxiliaries allow inversion in conditional clauses, turning e.g. If I had known... into the inverted Had I known… (Hudson 1988:294). Hudson applauds the tendency for trade dictionaries (he mentions the LDCE) to include a good deal of grammatical information (besides such grammars, e.g. as Quirk & al. 1972 including vast amounts of lexical information, i.e. on particular words). It is difficult again to see how he arrives at the following dual conclusion: “...if there is in fact no natural boundary between the lexicon and the grammar, the professional linguists should develop theories which reflect this fact. Such theories are bound to be of more interest to lexicographers than the current main-stream ones” Hudson 1988:295) These are two quite independent claims. While theories should obviously reflect what they think is linguistic reality even it is one without rigid internal boundaries , it is not clear why and how this would or should bear on the daily business of lexicographers. As has been pointed out, the two are farther removed than is usually supposed.

3.2.1.1 The odd thing about it Grammatical information is most often so general that it is indeed impossible, and unnecessary, to present it within individual dictionary entries or across similar entries. One small example of this will be provided in this section. The information, e.g. that regular nouns have -s in the plural is a matter of pure grammar and need not be placed in any entry (unless a special zone such as a Study section with such general informa-

210 Chapter Three tion is included, which is not really part of the dictionary proper). The fact is still tacitly, or nega- tively, registered in all the thousands of entries where the headwords themselves or the examples have this form. The user is expected to know that “if it is not marked as irregular, it is regular”. (The fact that this plural is variously pronounced as dictated by the relevant rules of phonology is not usually indicated; one exception is CC (2003), which provides all the verbal and nominal regular pronunciations.) How can less general facts be presented, such as the valency or government related information that about corresponds to the Hungarian suffix -bAn ‘in [position]’ wherever adjectives like odd , strange and a handful of others are used? This kind of structure is involved: Az benne a furcsa, hogy… – which is translatable as The odd thing about it is that… . One reply might be that this should be left to a pedagogical English grammar that should take care of it. But where in the grammar should this be? A thematically arranged grammar book may call attention to this, but such information will be a deeply buried lexical point within its (sub)chapter on Complementation (under this or any other label). In an alphabetical collection of difficult “grammar” points, on the other hand, the same information would have to be repeated under several adjectives where this is typical usage ( odd , strange , good , nice etc) – because this is really a lexical point . That there is no separate section in such a grammar for the individual Hungarian affixes is obvious. az benne a különös, hogy… → the strange thing about it is that… a megoldásban az a szép, hogy… → the nice thing about the solution is that… az újdonság benne az, hogy… → the novel thing / novelty about it is that… The only way for such information to be conveyed lexicographically is an indirect one, via the examples in the entry of such adjectives, since dictionaries, similarly to grammars, do not as a rule contain affix entries. This seemingly innocent structure – the Adj thing about smth is/was that… actually contains another pitfall: a typical learner error is not to use thing : *the odd was… That may be coupled with wrong preposition use: *the odd in it was…

The only reference to the omission of thing in the pedagogically oriented Carter & McCarthy (2006), with a strong contrastive bias, is the following explanation: “In cleft constructions which involve comparison, thing is needed: The most obvious thing to do is to keep out of the rain. (The most obvious to do is to keep out of the rain.)” (Carter & McCarthy 2006:74a) where the example, incidentally, is neither a comparison nor a cleft sentence. Even ignoring this serious error it must be clear that dictionaries can hope to do even less than grammars for the avoidance of such a mistake.

3.2.1.2 Grammaticization: end of a lexically bound word A minor illustration from the grammar–lexicon border will be provided by the lexical item amok . Stubbs (2002:32) mentions that amok is almost always preceded by run , but he also discusses two unique examples, however, with go . The standard collocation, then, is run amok , but in these two examples of his go amok is used: an era gone amok; journalism gone amok . The item amok , which is not used outside of the phrase run amok (and perhaps go amok ), behaves like a lexically bound word with indeterminate morpho-syntactic class. Stubbs offers no explanation for his idiosyncratic examples; one will be provided here. What must be happening here is the following. First, go comes to be used as a variant of run , since it is a synonym of run as a verb of motion. The verb run is then reinterpreted as copulative (as in run dry ),

211 Chapter Three and because amok has both a vague meaning ’crazy’, and an equally vague PoS status (or no PoS status within these expressions), it will be able to collocate with go , yielding the combination go amok . At this point the word amok , which now does have a PoS status as an adjective, stands a good chance of coupling with other resulting copulas. (The flip-side diagnostic test of this is that if it does collocate with other copulas, then it is an adjective.) Google searches on all common result copulas plus amok actually return authentic 78 hits with grow , get and become (which, unlike the other two verbs, is always copulative): 79 GROW: tumour cells to grow amok in the host body 80 GET : They will feel very uncomfortable and start to get amok ] 81 BECOME : This just makes my blood boil....starting to become amok

This, then, is a type of grammaticization, a verb of motion ( go, run ) being reinterpreted as a copula. It is noteworthy because the grammaticization of one element, the verb, goes hand in hand with the revitalization of another, the non-PoS-classifiable amok . These phrases simultaneously illustrate run and go being reclassified as copulas from verbs of motion and amok “coming back” from fossilization, i.e. gaining (adjectival) PoS of its own. At the end of the process, run amok joins the V+A pattern and parallels a number of combinations that have no lexically bound word. The process as a whole provides a challenging case of the grammar–lexicon indeterminacy. The (now largely corpus-aided) task of lexicographic capturing developments such as these, of course, is a challenge for the hedgehog, not the fox, to use the metaphor developed in 2.1.

3.2.2 Productivity: straddling the “words vs. rules” divide

3.2.2.1 Words and rules With elegant and often refuted but probably insightful simplification, Pinker (1999) distinguishes words and rules as the ingredients of language, and argues for their relative separation: this roughly corresponds with the distinction between the lexicon and the grammar (as well as inevitably sweeps under the rug such questions as how the grammar itself is compartmentalized. An ideal lexical item is individual, unpredictable; governed by nothing rule-like; an ideal rule is general and predictable. With a similar simplification, grammatical rules may accordingly be said to be rationalistic , and the lexicon, empiricist . While rules qua rules obviously cannot be observed, only their effect can, most people see in language the observable, and see it as words (perhaps their combinations). To most people, the existence of a word is an empirical issue, which can be verified by looking at specimens of E-language. Dictionaries are notorious, and innocent, suppliers of ammunition for this way of seeing things linguistic. Productivity, which has many faces and analyses in linguistics, straddles exactly this divide. Contra the lay view, knowing whether some word is really a word in a language does not mean knowing whether it has been put to use (this would be impossible to detect in the speech of speakers anyway), but knowing whether it has that potential. In that sense this is a more interesting question for linguistics. Lexicology, exploring as it does that which has been recorded, only has the happy hunting ground of E-language. Lexicography, which records it, has even less elbowroom.

78 I.e. from (presumably) English-language sites. 79 http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0959804909000537 80 http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090716072632AABqmj7 81 http://rockybru.com.my/2007/08/son-in-law-in-port-klang-ftzs-fiasco.html

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Productivity straddles the words/rules divide, the lexicon/grammar divide, the actual/potential and the empirical/rationalist divide: this much may be risked without taking a stand on whether these really amount to the same dichotomy. It is unfortunate, therefore, that the dictionary, which also spans the often wide-seeming grammar/lexicon span, is so badly suited to record – or even suggest to its users anything about the nature and products of productivity in language. The “more Saus- surean”, i.e., systemic, one’s way of thinking about it, the more it is evident that the better the dictionary, the more integration between the lexicon and the grammar it presents in every feature, i.e., the more blurred the lexical and syntactic information is shown to be. Moreover, because the dictionary, which for most lay people (perhaps even more so in an Anglo-Saxon than a Hungarian setting) is the only interface between them and language at large, conveys just this picture of clear separation of linguistic facts, the words/grammar dichotomy constantly gets reinforced.

3.2.2.2 Dictionaries and productivity Productivity is variously taken to characterize either morphological processes (or word formation rules), or the affixes themselves involved in these. It is variously considered to be a qualitative (either–or, all-or-nothing) notion, or a scalar (quantitative) phenomenon, ranging from (perhaps) 100% unproductive to (perhaps) 100% productive. Productivity in the former, qualitative, sense is often termed availability: a process is either available or not. In the latter, quantitative sense, it is called profitability: the question is how profitable a process is (Bauer 2001; Chung 2003; Plag 2006:122).

The basic opposition presupposed in the notion “degree of productivity” is that between possible words and actual words (Booij 2007:68). The claim that “all words are equal” is indeed too simplistic to ever have been made by any analyst, this opposition explicitly says that some words are more, and some less, “equal”, i.e. actual, existing, than others. This sounds like an irreparable contradiction in the case of entities of many other sciences; in linguistics, thanks to the workings of productivity, lexical items have a gradation of realness ; of all that, dictionaries show one degree. The dictionary can do nothing to suggest that some process or form is productive; what little it may do will usually go unnoticed.

3.2.2.2.1 Frequency information and its problems

The closest that a dictionary comes to indicating productivity is that it suggests the central, important nature of some pattern by a richer-than-average exemplification, or the explicit signalling of the statistical frequency of an item – but these do not actually involve productivity . Worse even, frequency data fall short of expectations also because they remain at the level of the lemma and are never given broken down by sense. Frequency information is also not something that may be used uncritically. Jackson (2009), exploring the origins and the methodologies of frequency information, looks at the usefulness of such information in various learner’s dictionaries. His findings suggest that dictionaries present this in ways that are far too different and hard (or impossible) to compare, based on criteria much too diverse and often not publicly accessible. Most importantly for the present study, however, he has found that the modifications (sometimes welcome, sometimes for the worse) from one dictionary to the other, and from one edition to the next, have been guided not so much by a more sophisticated use of more powerful and huge corpora, but on the contrary: it now seems to be realized that other factors beside frequency influence dictionary-worthiness. MED (2002), for example, already based its choice of words not just on frequency but also on their “usefulness to learners in production, their own speaking and writing” (Jackson 2009:173). Jackson (2009) investigates usefulness of frequency information from the learner’s, not the lexicographer’s point of view. If, however, the 4th edition of the Cobuild dictionary (Sinclair 2003) e.g. removes from the top frequency band such things as all the months of the year and the days of the week and the titles Mr , Mrs , Ms and Miss

213 Chapter Three

(Jackson 2009:172), then this information is probably unreliable and irrelevant. These words must be included anyway: at the top of the frequency table, which they inhabit, inclusion decisions are not influenced by frequency, just their marking is – by stars, diamonds, and/or indications of S( poken) vs W(ritten).

This again proves what are two important points about lexicography at large. The more general one, on which there largely seems to be agreement is that the importance of human intervention in dictionary making will not diminish with technological advances. And the other, specifically related to the linguistics–lexicography relationship which the present study focuses on: that most editorial modification and improvement both from one dictionary to its newer competitor, and from an older edition to the next, is not induced – not even helped along – by linguistic considerations; rather by methodological aspects internal not to lexicography but metalexicography at best. Although learner’s dictionaries seem somewhat exceptional in this respect, few of the features of dictionaries change, and fewer do so consistently, but what change there is comes mostly from considerations concerning the side of the user .

Another domain where traces of productivity can be hoped to be captured in dictionaries is style/usage labels with information on lexical items’ obsolete, or slangish/informal/colloquial character, with the tacit implication, of course, that obsolete is less frequent, whereas informal/colloquial more frequent. Expressed in productivity terms, the former label effectively says: beware – this is no more “productive”! The latter one is often taken (but obviously not meant) to be as encouragement to the user: “go ahead: “productive”! The effectiveness of these, however, is doubtful: labels like old use or obsolete tend to be ignored even if offered, while colloquialism, informal words and especially slang expressions, will be happily used.

3.2.2.2.2 Productively used words

The use of “productive” may be loosened 82 so that it makes sense to talk about words that have productive derivational affixes or have been formed by such a productive process. This is not unique: Biber & al. use “productive” in a similar informal fashion, stating that “Despite the general rarity of most idioms, a few verbs are especially productive in combining with NPs to form idioms.” Biber & al. 2000:987; italics are mine. In this informal but serviceable sense, items like watchable , clickable or saltable , and most transitive verbs thus coined with productive -able , will themselves be productive. The deverbal locative noun bakery is not productive, because it has been produced by a process that applies to few lexemes and cannot apply to new ones. The wording “ bakery is not productive” is thus effectively shorthand for “not generated by a productive process”, or “not containing a productive affix”.

3.2.2.2.3 Combinations with well-

The twin notions “predictability/productivity” will be illustrated on well- combinations (not all of which are genuine compounds, or at least are hardly classifiable as either that or phrasal adverb + adjective combinations) in CED&T (1992). For “standalone” well as adverb, CED&T (1992) distinguishes 10 senses of standard usage, and it explicitly mentions that some of these are “also used in combination”. Though the point of such a

82 The many approaches to productivity include Aronoff & Anshen (1998) as well as the more recent Bauer (2001) and Plag (2006).

214 Chapter Three remark would probably be lost on a non-native speaker (and is not certain to be much clearer to the native ones), it does suggest that the well- combinations “inherit” these but presumably not the other senses of the “standalone” well . Note also that well , being, among other things, the adverbial variant of good , is notoriously hard to split/lump for senses.

The 10 senses are: 1. (often used in combination) in a satisfactory manner: the party went very well 2. (often used in combination) in a good, skilful, or pleasing manner: she plays the violin well 3. in a correct or careful manner: listen well to my words 4. in a comfortable or prosperous manner: to live well 5. (usually used with auxiliaries) suitably; fittingly: you can't very well say that 6. intimately: I knew him well 7. in a kind or favourable manner: she speaks well of you 8. to a great or considerable extent; fully: to be well informed 9. by a considerable margin: let me know well in advance 10. (preceded by could , might , or may ) indeed: you may well have to do it yourself

Items 5. and 10., which always combine with modals, can be clearly separated. This shows that too much splitting has been done here, and in actual fact not more than just two basic senses are involved. These are: (a) a qualitative sense: ‘positive’, seen in 1., 2., 4., and 7 (b) a quantitative sense: “intensity”, seen in 3., 6., 8., 9. (Alternatively, 5. and 10. can be seen as manifestations of the “intensity” sense, as modifiers of the modal auxiliary.)

List No18

Well -combinations in CEDT (1992) well-accepted well-built well-dressed well-made well-accomplished well-calculated well-earned well-managed well-accustomed well-clothed well-educated well-marked well-acknowledged well-coached well-employed well-matched well-acquainted well-compensated well-endowed well-merited well-acted well-concealed well-equipped well-mixed well-adapted well-conditioned well-established well-motivated well-adjusted well-conducted well-esteemed well-noted well-administered well-confirmed well-financed well-organized or well-advertised well-considered well-finished well-organised well-aimed well-constructed well-fitted well-paid well-aired well-contented well-fortified well-phrased well-applied well-controlled well-fought well-placed well-argued well-cooked well-furnished well-planned well-armed well-covered well-governed well-played well-arranged well-cultivated well-guarded well-pleased well-assorted well-defended well-handled well-practised well-assured well-defined well-hidden well-prepared well-attended well-demonstrated well-housed well-proportioned well-attested well-described well-illustrated well-protected well-attired well-deserved well-inclined well-provided well-authenticated well-developed well-judged well-qualified well-aware well-devised well-justified well-reasoned well-behaved well-digested well-kept well-received well-beloved well-disciplined well-liked well-recommended well-blessed well-documented well-loved well-regarded

215 Chapter Three well-regulated well-secured well-taught well-wooded well-rehearsed well-shaped well-timed well-worded well-remembered well-situated well-trained well-written well-represented well-spent well-travelled well-wrought well-respected well-stated well-treated well-reviewed well-stocked well-tried (137 items) well-ripened well-suited well-trodden well-satisfied well-supplied well-understood well-schooled well-supported well-used well-seasoned well-sustained well-verified

The way these are handled is extremely unhelpful. The list in its present form, with its undefined items, does not tell the user which meaning is involved: well-advertised , for example, could equally mean and be synonymous with properly advertised (= quality) and much-advertised (= quantity). It is probably still true that these two (rather than ten) meanings are discernible in the well- combinations: “quantity” and “quality” sense. The opposite of “qualitative” well is badly , while that of “quantitative” well is little or rarely . It is likely that within the two broad senses these 137 items contain well in slightly different or indeterminate senses, and it is not impossible that some will be totally unrelated to these two senses. Thus, although native speakers may have quite clear intuitions in most cases, well-advertised e.g. could have the antonym badly-advertised or ( ill-advertised ?) in one, and little-advertised ; the list provides no help there. (In all fairness, learner’s dictionaries typically do not contain undefined lists such as these). CALD3 (2008) yields the following list on a search on well -X -en 83 adjectives: most of the items in the list have their own entries themselves and are defined, although (as the example of well-kept shows) some do not get a proper definition. • In this list, the adjective well-kept actually appears with two senses given: 1. ‘clean, tidy and cared for’ and 2. ‘carefully kept’ (e.g. A well-kept secret has not been told or shown to anyone (CALD3 2008) • Well-intentioned and well-mannered ill fit with the rest because here the -en attaches to noun bases. The expected default forms would thus be good-intentioned and good-mannered , which also happen to exist. The forms well-intentioned and well-mannered are thus exceptional, not generated by productive processes. • Other items found that can be thought of as idiomatic in the sense of unpredictable include well-rounded ‘involving or having experience in a wide range of ideas or activities’. While this has the base -round- , it is impossible to say which PoS of round , and which meaning, is involved here. This word is not generated by the rules of the grammar; it is also at the zero end of the transparency scale. • Well-thumbed ‘[of a book] having damaged appearance because used many times’ [definition modified from CALD3 2008], by contrast, is grammatically analyzable: it contains a verbal base, thumb . It is not less opaque, since the meaning of well- is not obvious.

The words at the completely productive end include well-adjusted , well-documented , well-balanced , well-done and well-timed , i.e., with a general formula, well -V- en : these are no less productive/regular/predictable/transparent than their corresponding verb phrases of the V NP well type. These are fully productive in that they (i) contain well- in the “qualitative” sense; (ii) have a verbal base; (iii) their verb is transitive.

The productive well -combinations are close to being syntactic objects. The unproductive ones, to the extent that they are indeed words , are complexes such that the meanings of their components do

83 I.e., well- V-ed , where -ed stands for past participle.

216 Chapter Three not add up to the meaning of the whole; they also often have unpredictable grammar between the constituents. This is the perfectly regular behaviour of idioms – and in the light of this, the undefined listing is an especially user-unfriendly strategy. For the learner, the problem is exactly that words do not show whether they are productively formed: well-used could be (a productive/free combination meaning ‘used well’, or an unproductive lexicalized item meaning ‘used a lot’. Just because such an item can be used in the lexicalized sense does not mean that it cannot occur with the free meaning (in the terminology of productivity: there is no blocking of the productive pattern). Unfortunately, not all dictionaries contain all these items in all their meanings, focusing on both the “phrasal” and the “lexical” pattern. Unless and until they do, however, the dictionary is no better place for this information than the grammar book.

It would be reassuring to know, at least, that the inclusion in the dictionary of these well- items, and all the similar combining forms of which they are symptomatic, is justified by frequency. This is probably not so: similar (non-corpus-based, CED&T 1992; and corpus-based, MED 2007) lists yield slightly different items; the lists have not been reproduced here. There are many items in other sources that are missing from CED&T (1992), but LDCE (2005), e.g., has well-hung , well- stacked , well-turned-out , and well-worn that neither CED&T (1992) nor CALD3 (2008) offers. OALD (2005)

List No19

CALD3 (2008) hits: well -X -en well-adjusted well-educated well-oiled well-advised well-endowed well-preserved well-appointed well established well-qualified well-argued well-fed well-read well-attended well-founded well-rounded well-balanced well-groomed well-spoken well-behaved well-grounded well-thought-of well-bred well-heeled well thought out well-brought-up well-heeled well-thumbed well-built well-informed well-timed well-chosen well-intentioned well-tried well-connected well-kept well-trodden well-defined well known well-turned well-developed well-liked well-versed well-disposed well-mannered well-worn well-documented well-matched well-ordered well-done well-meaning well-matched/ill-matched well-dressed well-meant well-earned well-oiled

217 Chapter Three

3.2.2.3 Combining forms: -proof and -friendly and Hungarian -barát

3.2.2.3.1 -proof and -friendly

A manifestation of the blurred boundary between grammar and lexicon, and of how hard it may be to adequately provide the related information in the dictionary, is the productivity of derivational affixes or combining forms (which two may be difficult separate). A highly productive pattern is the combining of bases with -proof . It is widespread in English; the Hungarian equivalents of the -proof words are heterogeneous: there is no comparable set of -biztos ‘-proof’ words, i.e. words containing the equivalent of -proof . There is no productive Hungarian affix or combining form, in other words, that corresponds to English -proof . The productivity of the combining form -friendly , by contrast, is closely paralleled by that of the Hungarian -barát ‘-friendly’. They will be discussed separately, under the Hungarian -barát heading. English dictionaries cannot explicitly “teach” such productivity facts, i.e., make users aware of this productive element just by entering the headword -proof . If a user chances to look into an entry that is productive in some sense, they may notice the large number of examples and thus have a clear, if intuitive, idea of the frequency, or availability, of a pattern, but not of its productivity itself. Be- cause there is no single across-the-board item that translates it, the English →Hungarian dictionary can only register one or two equivalents for -proof , e.g. -biztos and -álló . The list of Hungarian lexical units translating the various words with hyphenated -proof , however, contains not just these but quite a lot different of suffixes and combining forms, including -mentes , -biztos , -álló , -hatlan , and more importantly, various unsystematic , individual translations. • MASZ (2000) offers this entry for -proof : -proof -biztos, -álló bullet-proof golyóálló water-proof vízálló, vízhatlan while AMSZ (2000) has this to say about -biztos : -biztos -proof tűzbiztos fireproof

Unfortunately, while hyphenated -proof and -biztos are featured, neither hyphenated -friendly nor -barát is given in these two dictionaries. They actually deserve to be registered even more than -proof and -biztos , since they could simply mutually serve as convenient equivalents in each other’s entries. • In HECD (1998) and EHCD (1998) the picture is different.

While HECD (1998) does not contain either an entry for -barát or -biztos , EHCD (1998) does give both -friendly and -proof , but without indication at the headword level that these are combining forms, i.e., no self-contained entry with a PoS for -friendly and -proof . They are out of place within their entries, where their labels (“összet” 84 ), are way too deep in their entries for users to notice. More seriously, they are not exemplified, which may make it hard to appreciate what is involved in -barát below.

The case of -proof is different: -mentes, -biztos, -álló and -hatlan are all given, which are the most frequent translations. friendly I. mn 1. barátságos, kedves, nyájas, szívélyes [...... ], baráti, barátságos [...... ] 2. a) jóindulatú, jóakaratú, segíteni kész ; [...... ] b) kedvez ő, el őnyös, alkalmas [körülmények stb.]; friendly winds kedvez ő szelek c) összet -barát

84 I.e., “comb.”

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proof I. fn 1. bizonyíték, bizonyság, tanújel; jog [...... ] 2. a) próba(tétel), teszt , mat bizo- nyítás, kipróbálás ; [...... ] b) (el őírt) szesztartalom, szeszfok; US c) vegy kémcs ő, epru- vetta d) kat kipróbálás [l őszeré stb.]; tört [...... ] 3. a) nyomd kefelevonat, kor- rektúra ;[...... ] b) műv lenyomat [rézmetszeté] 4. proof coin próbaveret [érméé] II. mn 1. a) proof against sg vmnek ellenálló, vm ellen véd ő [...... ] b) összet -mentes, -biztos, -álló, -hatlan

The long [...... ] omissions indicate that a substantial portion of the entry has been cut out; this unfortunately makes it hard to see how deep the relevant PoS label is buried within the entries. A pedagogical grammar can say very little about -proof beyond sensitizing users to the productive item by mentioning it in the word formation section, labelling it “combining form” – a term that will surely be used differently in other sources – and list some of the words in which it appears. In such a practical grammar, use of the label “productive” to state that -proof is productive may be a helpful and safe idea, since the term is being used in its everyday sense: ‘creative, fertile, fruitful, prolific, rich’. “Productive” will be intuitively felt to be effectively anything that can be abundantly exemplified; this is no problem even if this just one aspect, and the linguistically less important one, of productivity. Grammar books for learners, however, do not as a rule mark either processes or patterns (let alone words) as productive. If they were not productive, they would not be in the grammar – this is how the argument tacitly goes. A search on word-final -proof in RHWUD (1999), after careful selection (i.e. removal of the items burden of proof , cosmological proof , disproof , foundry proof , high-proof etc., which contain different kinds of -proof ) yields almost sixty hits. MWUD (2000), the electronic version of “Webster’s Third”, supposed to be around 50% larger than RHWUD (1999), has even more than this: items found in MWUD (2000) but not in RHWUD (1999) include mouse-proof , musket-proof , splinter-proof , termite-proof and vapor-proof . These are so much alive that their list has probably grown ten years on.

List No20

RHWUD (1999) -proof combinations:

1. actor-proof 15. fireproof 29. ovenproof 43. smokeproof 2. airproof 16. flameproof 30. pickproof 44. soundproof 3. baby-proof 17. foolproof 31. quakeproof 45. spillproof 4. bombproof 18. germproof 32. quasi-fireproof 46. spinproof 5. bulletproof 19. greaseproof 33. rainproof 47. stormproof 6. burglarproof 20. holeproof 34. recession-proof 48. sunproof 7. childproof 21. idiot-proof 35. rotproof 49. tamperproof 8. chipproof 22. jamproof 36. runproof 50. theftproof 9. crashproof 23. leakproof 37. rustproof 51. troubleproof 10. crushproof 24. lightproof 38. shatterproof 52. waterproof 11. dampproof 25. mildewproof 39. shellproof 53. wearproof 12. dishwasherproof 26. mothproof 40. shockproof 54. weatherproof 13. drownproof 27. noiseproof 41. showerproof 55. wetproof 14. dustproof 28. nonfireproof 42. skidproof 56. windproof

Most of these have Hungarian translations other that combinations with -biztos (plus -mentes, -álló and -hatlan ). Checking nine items from the beginning and nine from the end of the above list in EHCD (1998) and MASZ (2000) yields the following table:

The superscripts are explained below. *The asterisks are my own grammaticality judgements for Hungarian.

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List No21 EHCD (1998) MASZ (2000) -biztos /-mentes / -álló / /-hatlan possible WHETHER EXISTENT OR NOT actor-proof 1 — — színészi játékkal el se rontható? *színészbiztos air-proof — — légmentes? hermetikus? baby-proof — — baba által nem hozzáférhet ő / tönkretehet ő bullet-proof golyóálló adjective/verb: golyóbiztos golyóálló(vá tesz) child-proof gyermekbiztos, gyerek által nem hoz- gyerekbiztos? gyerekek számára záférhet ő / tönk- biztonságos retehet ő crash-proof lökésmentes, — törésálló, ütközésbiztos 2 rázkódásmentes, rázkódásnak ellenálló fool-proof igen egyszer ű, (1) könnyen kezelhet ő, bolondbiztos, hülyebiztos 3 könnyen kezelhet ő elronthatatlan, kétbalkezesnek is való (2) tévedhetetlen, biztos(ra men ő) frost-proof fagyálló fagyálló grease-proof — zsírálló, zsírt át nem *zsírbiztos ereszt ő storm-proof — (1) viharálló (2) bevehetetlen tamper-proof biztonságosan csoma- hamisíthatatlan golt, záróvédjeggyel ellátott 4 theft-proof lopás / betörés ellen ellophatatlan véd ő trouble-proof üzembiztos, — hibamentes water-proof vízhatlan, vízáthatlan, vízhatlan, vízálló vízátnembocsátó, vízálló, impregnált, verb: vízhatlanított vízhatlanít, impregnál

verb: vízhatlanít, impregnál, víz ellen szigetel, vízhatlan szigeteléssel lát el wear-proof kopásálló weather-proof id őjárásnak ellenálló, viharálló, vízhatlan, viharálló, id őálló, szél ellen véd ő vízálló, vízhatlan, szél- mentes, vízmentes, szél verb: (v. rossz id őjárás) viharállóvá / vízhat- ellen védett, hézagzáró lanná tesz wet-proof — — vízhatlan, vízálló wind-proof — — szélt ől véd ő, szélnek ellenálló, szélálló?

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1 All items have been spelled with a hyphen; no claim is thereby made that this is the right/typical spelling. 2 AMMTSZ (1996) 3 A Google search (18/07/2009 14:37) returns 25 400 hits for bolondbiztos ‘foolproof’ and 13 000 for hülyebiztos ‘foolproof’. These are apparently mirror translations for the English foolproof ; this, of course, does not automatically preclude their dictionary-worthiness, but they may not catch on. What these expressions do show is the high productivity – or at least the high token frequency – of this -proof element.

It is worthy of note that the element -proof itself is rather unnoticeably polysemous : the meaning contribution of -proof to childproof is different to that of -proof to babyproof or childproof , and this, predictably, carries over to the verbs as well. Childproofing or babyproofing one’s home involves making it safe, i.e. childproof/babyproof for children/babies, while in all the rest of the cases X-proofing does not mean making something safe for X but protecting it, i.e. making it safe against X. This difference, interestingly, is not tied to the [+Human] vs. [–Human] feature of the first element (even if most of them are [–Human]), as shown by actor-proof . This adjective, used to modify play/part/script , means ‘effective no matter how badly acted’, i.e. ‘[so good as to be] safe/proofed against bad acting’, and actor is [+Human]. The productivity of English -proof is also displayed by the possibility of further conversion: the verb damp-proof is readily available once the adjectival damp-proof exists. Any ‘X-proof’ adjective A can thus become a verb meaning ‘make A’, provided that the result makes semantic and pragmatic sense. That this possibility owes its existence to this across-the-board word-formational device, conversion, is shown by the fact that the addition of a verbalizer to the relevant Hungarian suffixes (e.g. to -hatlan ) does not necessarily yield such verbs meaning ‘make A’; if you cannot vi- harállósít ‘weather-proof’, ellophatatlanít ‘theft-proof’ or zsírállósít ‘grease-proof’ something, it is not because of semantic or pragmatic constraints. The verb vízhatlan-ít ‘water-proof’ from the adjective vízhatlan ‘water-proof’ is an exception rather.

3.2.2.3.2 Hungarian -barát

Phenomena of productivity, which inhabit on the lexicon–grammar border, will be illustrated with another Hungarian example, the -barát combining form, which, in some of its senses at least, is rather productive. Its productivity argues for a self-contained -barát headword (or perhaps several -barát headwords). Another, perhaps just as weighty consideration, however, is that few users will be looking for the -barát ‘-friendly’ member of the expressions bőrbarát ‘skin-friendly’ [e.g. cream], gyerekbarát ‘kid-friendly’ [district], vakbarát ‘blind-friendly [webpage]’, zsebbarát ‘pocket-friendly’ [price], szívbarát ‘heart-friendly’ [margarine], zsebpénzbarát ‘pocket money friendly’ [price], utasbarát ‘passenger-friendly’ [railway timetable], melegbarát ‘gay-friendly’ [place] in a separate Hungarian -barát entry (and these examples are all supposed to illustrate the highly productive end of -barát ). To be sure, if one wants to have reliable access to this kind of information on user behaviour, user studies are needed; on the basis of the existing ones it is nevertheless likely that it is the whole expression that is searched, not the right-hand member. If a particular combining form is not included, it is also unlikely that the user will try a search for the second element after the lookup failure. Whether this search policy is equally true of genuine compounds is another issue, which is not easy to ascertain since, as many other lookup strategies, it depends on the combined effect of the users’ knowledge of things grammatical, on their general proficiency in dictionary use, as well as their knowledge of the particular dictionary. There is, of

221 Chapter Three course, no reason even to posit the same single uniform search policy for the same kind of linguistic expression; it was assumed above that there may be such a uniform policy. To be sure, the inclusion in the H →E dictionary of -barát ‘-friendly’ as a headword does not mean that the individual -barát combinations themselves cannot be also included. By the inclusion of -barát , the dictionary registers the productivity of (some of the meanings of) this combining form. This, however, is not supposed to be the job of an “instrument” dictionary, such as a H →E dictionary; it is a (major) “portrait” dictionary that may be expected to provide such “dynamic” information that verges on the grammatical. It is thus not surprising if only the individual -barát expressions will be entered, alphabetically under their left-hand members, in instrument dictionaries such as bilingual E →H ones. One problem, however, with entering the (right-hand, hyphenated) elements of such expressions is that when they are polysemous, their entry becomes too complicated. Such an entry can be provided in a monolingual portrait dictionary (e.g. -barát in a Hungarian explanatory dictionary) but hardly in a bilingual (instrument) one. Another pitfall is that some combinations given as illustrative examples in such an entry must be included individually anyway, as we have seen. A third, most serious problem, which actually strongly militates against the inclusion of such combining forms as headwords in bilingual dictionaries, is that often no equivalent can be given (similarly to derivational affixes, which may be similarly productive but on their own similarly untranslatable ). This lexicographic dilemma will be illustrated with the examples of the Hungarian (1) bőrbarát ‘skin-friendly’, (2) németbarát ‘pro-German’ (3) kertbarát ‘lover of gardens’, and (4) kebelbarát ‘bosom friend’. They all contain as their right-hand member the combining form -barát , but crucially, they are different types both grammatically and semantically. When items like these are entered separately, in whatever dictionary, the superficial lexical sameness – in the face of the grammatical and semantic unrelatedness – of their -barát component will pass unnoticed: nothing, understandably, refers the reader from, e.g. kertbarát to bőrbarát . When, however, the hyphenated form -barát has an entry of its own with a separate meaning profile, then at least the above four types/senses must be distinguished, resulting in an entry that is rather too complex even for a monolingual dictionary, but clearly much too inflated for a bilingual instrument dictionary. (Because two of the items (1)–(4) above are adjectival and two nominal, in a dictionary with a PoS-first macrostructural arrangement, two entries rather than one may have to be provided: the adj. and the n. entries will then have two sections each.)

In the following sections the above four Hungarian -barát combinations will be presented: in individual entries in an E →H dictionary; -barát as a self-contained entry in a Hungarian dictionary; -barát as a self-contained entry for a bilingual H →E dictionary.

As separate/self-contained entries in the E ↔H dictionary (which is the most straightforward case of the four), the expressions (1)–(4) get their PoS label (plus any other information ignored here). The first two are adjectives; the second and third are nouns:

(1) bőrbarát adj skin-friendly (2) németbarát adj / (noun) pro-German (3) kertbarát noun lover of gardening/gardens , amateur gardener (4) kebelbarát noun bosom friend

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The PoS status of -barát , the right-hand member of the complexes, is irrelevant. Their word class may pose a problem for approaches to morphology that subscribe to the right-hand-rule, which is apparently violated here, but not for lexicography. Thus, type (1) may be argued to present such a morphological problem. The likes of bőrbarát must be either compounds, or derivations, or “combining forms”, which may be just in between; in any case, by the right-hand-head rule of morphology, for bőrbarát to be an adjective, its right-hand member must either also be an adjective or an adjective-forming suffix – as its PoS is supposed to percolate up to the complex form. It is not easy to decide whether barát here is an adjective or a derivational suffix. Either way, (1) will be an adjective by percolation. If, on the other hand, barát is a noun here as well as everywhere, then both (1) and (2) are problematic: bőrbarát is, and németbarát may be, an adjective that is not headed by one. To be sure, it may also be that the adjective/noun divide is not so obviously marked morpho- syntactically in Hungarian in general: in that case all the PoS-related questions, including those concerning the rule of the right-hand head seen in (1)–(4), cease to be relevant. There is at least one environment, though, where the Hungarian nominal -barát forms do show morphological distinctions from their adjectival counterparts: the plural form, which is marked in both, but may differ. Some, but not all, Hungarian adjectives take either the vowel -A- or the -O- , while the homonymous nominals only take the vowel -O- before the plural termination. Such vac- illation thus characterizes adjectives but not nouns (the grammaticality judgements are mine): (1) bőrbarát ok = bőrbarát ak ‘skin-friendly-ADJ -P L’ ← both forms are possible as adjectives (2) németbarát ok = németbarát ak ‘pro-German-ADJ -P L’ ← both forms are possible as adjectives, but németbarát ok would likely be felt to be a noun: this is why the PoS of németbarát adj / (noun) above is given in this way (3) kertbarát ok ‘lovers of gardening’ – cf. *kertbarát ak ← only one form is possible as noun (4) kebelbarát ok ‘bosom friends’ – cf. *kebelbarát ak ← only one form is possible as noun

Lexicographically, a solution to these PoS niceties is simply not needed. For the complex bőrbarát the traditional label “adj.” will do, whatever its internal structure. The element -barát itself, which is of intermediate status, a semi-word, will have an ill-fitting label whichever of “adjective” or “derivational suffix” is opted for – if such labelling is used at all. This is simply no problem for lexicography, and certainly not one that concerns the dictionary user.

Of the -barát examples above, (1), which is an obvious adjective in both the SL and the TL, and (3) and (4), which are not less obviously nouns in both, pose no such labelling problem; (2) however is rather idiosyncratic: (1) bőrbarát skin-friendly : – the Hungarian user will (ideally) know that this SL word is an adjective (whichever form of plural they might employ in Hungarian), and will thus use the equivalent skin-friendly adjectivally without any syntactic indication of this fact in the dictionary; (3) kertbarát lover of gardening – the Hungarian user will know that this is a noun , and will thus use lover of gardening (or whatever translation) without any syntactic indication of this fact in the dictionary (4) kebelbarát bosom friend shows the same behaviour (as (3))

(2) németbarát pro-German This is truly, bi-directionally, and multiply problematic . Although both the Hungarian word is both adjective and noun (and could be marked accordingly) and its equivalent can also be used both adjectivally and nominally, from a practical viewpoint, having two entries for words such as this is

223 Chapter Three surely a waste of space. This will be perceived as such by the dictionary users; more importantly, the significance of the finer-grained analysis gained by this waste of space may be lost on them. This is what such doubling of this entry would involve: németbarát n. pro-German németbarát adj. pro-German HECD (1998) employs such doubling, offering the following not very helpful entry, with indication of the dual SL word class but with no separation of the PoS in the TL 85 : németbarát mn/fn 86 pro-German , Germanophile , Germanophilist 87

A bilingual dictionary can only do justice to such a word by providing grammatically adequate information if it adequately represents both the SL and the TL word classes. This space-saving in HECD (1998), especially since it is basically an H →E dictionary for Hungarians rather than the other way round, is a luxury that cannot be afforded: it is not the SL but the TL where more grammatical information should be offered. With PoS information adequately on both sides, the entry ought to look something like this: németbarát n. pro-German, Germanophile németbarát adj. pro-German or even, with a bit of (perhaps tolerable) simplification: németbarát n. Germanophile németbarát adj. pro-German

As a self-contained hyphenated entry, the item -barát will be very, indeed too, complex. The difficulty of its lexicographic presentation is mainly caused by the diverging degrees of productivity of this element. This means, among other things, that a general formula containing a variable X will be adequate for (1) and perhaps (2) but much less for (3), and certainly not for (4). This time not (2) but (4) presents a problem. A sketchy monolingual Hungarian entry might thus look something like this 88 : (1) X-barát adj. = helpful, easy, advantageous for X (X = thing or person) e.g. bőrbarát ‘skin-friendly’, zsebbarát ‘pocket-friendly’ 89 , ózonbarát ‘ozone-friendly’ (2) Y -barát adj. = in favour of / supporting / friendly towards Y (Y = group of people) e.g. németbarát ‘pro-German’, emberbarát ‘philanthropic’ This Hungarian sense is relatively still easy to define, but it is different in that it is usually, but not uniformly (as also shown by emberbarát ) translatable with the pro- prefix. (3) Z -barát n. = lover/friend/admirer of Z (Z = thing/activity) e.g. kertbarát ‘lover of gardening’, zenebarát ‘music lover’ (4) Q -barát n. = ? (Q = ?) e.g. kebelbarát ‘bosom friend’, felebarát ‘brother, neighbour’, szürkebarát ‘pinot gris’ (lit. “grey monk”), elvbarát ‘comrade’ (lit. “principle friend”), házibarát ‘friend of the family’ (lit. “house friend”).

85 This is adequate for English users of the dictionary, who are thus informed about the Hungarian word, but not for Hungarians, who do not need information. 86 Mn/fn translates into English as adj./n. 87 Of these, Germanophilist is contained in OED (2009) but not even in MWUD (2000), and so will be ignored. 88 It would be pointless to give Hungarian definitions and abbreviations, so all of them are provided in English. 89 The word pocket-friendly has another meaning: ‘suited for one’s pocket’, i.e. ‘(conveniently) pocket-sized’.

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For (3) a variety of paraphrases are needed in the definition, just a few of which have been given here. For (4),however, it is just impossible to offer a formula with a variable. The examples in (4), although homogeneous grammatically, are semantically so varied that they can simply not be entered under -barát but will obviously have a better place under the individual complex expressions. In is in this sense that combining forms behave as polysemous derivations. While the affix -ment e.g. means state, condition, or quality (e.g. enjoyment ), the result or product of action (e.g. em- bankment ), process or action (e.g. management )90 , and this is as much as a monolingual portrait dictionary can register, just by providing this much it has not helped the user much. In the light of this it is all the more odd that even some learner’s dictionaries contain derivational suffixes. MED (2007) has no -ment entry, but

CALD3 (2008) has this: -ment used to form nouns which refer to an action or process or its result a great achievement, successful management, a disappointment OALD (2005) offers this: -ment suffix (in nouns) the action or result of: bombardment, development; LDCE (2005) has the following: -ment [in nouns] used to form a noun from a verb to show actions, the people who do them, or their results: the government (= the people who govern a country) the replacement of something (= the action of replacing something) some interesting new developments

While the CALD (2008) entry specifies that the output is a noun, it does not say whether verbs (most typically) or other categories may also be inputs; in this sense, it fails to supply grammatical detail that would be expected of a portrait dictionary. The OALD (2005) entry, while it specifies - ment as a suffix, specifies only the category of the output, and gives a meagre definition. Interest- ingly, LDCE (2005), which comes closest to also meeting the demands of a portrait dictionary in that it offers etymology, certainly not a necessity for the learner, provides both a full grammatical description and a full definition. Of the really productive meanings, CALD (2008) gives all three: action, process, result; OALD (2005) just two: action and result; LDCE (2005) omits process but includes a rather unproductive use of -ment : “ the people who do them ”.

The item -barát is easy to define in its more productive senses, but further down the productivity scale such defining becomes difficult. The items in (4) appear to be real (non-verbal) compounds with a genuine noun as their right-hand member. Such compounds are notoriously opaque for decoding, and unpredictable from the encoding point of view. If a formula were to be found, for all items under (4), it might only be “ Q friend”, and here Q may indeed be anything both grammatically and semantically, from the noun kebel ‘bosom’ to the adjective szürke ‘grey’ and fele 91 ).

90 The source of the -ment definitions is CED&T (1992). 91 Of obscure meaning and etymology; may have to do with fél ‘half’.

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A Hungarian →English entry for the same -barát might be represented like this:

-barát

(1) -friendly X-barát X-friendly [exx:] bőrbarát skin-friendly , zsebbarát pocket-friendly (2) pro- pro-Y pro-Y [exx:] németbarát pro-German , emberbarát philanthropic The prefix pro- does not always feature in the translation; thus, a formula may be given, but the examples do not all conform to this formula. (3) lover of Z(s) / friend of Z(s)/ admirer of Z(s) / connoisseur of Z(s) [exx:] kertbarát lover of gardening , amateur gardener zenebarát music lover borbarát wine connoisseur természetbarát lover of nature A single formula cannot be given; the variety of structures testify to this. (4) friend [exx:] kebelbarát bosom friend , felebarát brother, neighbour , szürkebarát pinot gris , elvbarát comrade , fellow, házibarát 1. friend of the family 2. lover [of a married woman]

The items in (4) appear to be real compounds with a genuine noun as their right-hand member, which regularly yields a noun compound. Also, in (1) and (2), hyphenated English forms, while for (3 and (4) free phrases and compounds can be provided as equivalents.

3.2.2.3.3 “Hyphenated forms”

As has been mentioned in 2.7.2.1., in the system of Atkins & Rundell (2008:165), “partial words” include (i) bound affixes (e.g. the prefixes un-, de- and anti-; the prefix ex- in ex-wife , and the suffix the -gate in Monicagate ), (ii) productive affixes (e.g. the im- in impossible , the -ment in attainment ), and (iii) combining forms, i.e. first or second elements of hyphenated compounds (e.g. one-legged ; vinyl-covered ; flat-topped , flat-leafed , broad-leafed ). They argue that the ones with numerals as the first element are numerous, but not at all problematic. The ones with nouns and adjectives as their first member may either be self-contained headwords, or the entries of these first members may refer to the fact that they are frequently first elements in hyphenated compounds. De- cisions as to the second element of these compounds (-covered , -leafed) are more difficult: they are either given headword status or treated within the entry for cover and leaf .

This attempt at classification is a very unhelpful one, but the problems of the placement of such items are very real. This editor’s task is more difficult for the Hungarian →English part of the dictionary because, although combining forms abound, they are rarely actually hyphenated. An E →H dictionary may conveniently opt to list the hyphenated words -legged , -covered , -topped and -leafed (i.e., the items above) and e.g. -eared , -footed , -haired , -handed , -headed , -legged and -roofed , and then the hyphens will adequately call attention to their compound status even without labelling them as such (cf. the hyphenated English equivalents in HECD (1998) below). In the case of the English second members, AMSZ (2000) places such hyphenated combining forms before their non-hyphenated homographs, thus: -armed -karú before the adjective armed ; -borne (vmi által) szállított/hordott, vmiben lév ő before the verb form borne -bound vhová tartó before adjectival bound -buster -tör ő, -romboló, -irtó before nominal buster

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In the case of the Hungarian second members, MASZ (2000) places these hyphenated combining forms in their proper alphabetical place. It is rare for them to have non-hyphenated homographs:

-fej ű -headed , HÁTRAVETVE 92 : having/with a {MNÉV 93 } head -fül ű -eared elálló fül ű jug-eared -kez ű -handed -hajú is unfortunately not included (and neither does the entry for haj ‘hair’ contain such information) -lábú (1) [vmilyen lábszárú:] -legged , HÁTRAVETVE: with {MNÉV} legs gyors lábú swift-footed (2) [vmilyen lábfej ű:] -footed , HÁTRAVETVE: with {MNÉV} feet feltört lábú footsore

If in a H →E direction nothing is used to indicate that these are second members of compounds, the result is that these compound-second-member headwords will be labelled as mn , i.e. adjectives (non-existent in isolation, or at least of doubtful status), and look like this (HECD 1998): fej ű mn -headed ; deresed ő fej ű grey-headed ; hosszú fej ű long-headed [...] kerek fej ű round-headed ; kes- keny fej ű long-headed [...] nagy fej ű large / big-headed [...] rövid fej ű short-headed [...] világos fej ű clear-headed ; zavaros fej ű scatter-brained [...] fül ű mn -eared ; elálló fül ű jug-eared ; hosszú fül ű long-eared ; jó fül ű quick-eared ; lelógó fül ű lop-eared ; nagy fül ű long / flop-eared ; rövid fül ű short-eared ; vágott fül ű crop-eared hajú mn -haired ; hosszú hajú long-haired ; rövid hajú short-haired ; vörös hajú red-haired / head kez ű mn -handed ; er ős kez ű strong-armed ; fürge / gyors kez ű quick / swift-handed ; hosszú kez ű long- armed / handed ; könny ű / ügyes kez ű light-fingered / handed ; nagy kez ű large / big-handed, big- limbed, large of limb ut 94 , having big hands ut , [...] rövid kez ű short-handed ; tiszta kez ű átv 95 white-handed lábú mn with legs / feet ut , of foot ut , -legged, -footed , [...] csámpás lábú club-footed ; having crooked / bow legs ut ; [..] fájós / feltört lábú footsore ; fürge lábú nimble / swift / fleet-footed, swift / quick / fleet of foot ut ; görbe lábú bow / bandy-legged ; hosszú lábú long-legged / shanked, leggy ; [...] könny ű lábú light-foot(ed) / heeled ; nagy lábú big-footed, having large feet ut , large of limb ut ; párnás lábú with padded feet ut ; rövid lábú short-footed / legged, short in the legs ut ; szép lábú with shapely legs ut ; vastag lábú thick-legged orrú mn -nosed ; görbe orrú beak-nosed ; hosszú orrú long-nosed ; jó orrú átv sharp-nosed ; nagy orrú big- nosed, nosy biz, conky szl; pisze / fitos orrú snub-nosed szem ű ‘-eyed’ is not included tetej ű mn roofed

The majority of the examples within the entries, one suspects, would have a better place as headwords on their own: these have been underlined.

3.2.2.4 Productivity and compounds proper The domain of compounds and their lexicographic presentation is a rich topic that may be used as illustration of the lexicon–grammar interface as well as the problem of productivity. Productivity, in turn, a matter of cline rather than crisp boundaries, also raises the issue of “dichotomy vs. gradience”. Compounds point up a difficulty that may be created by inadequate knowledge of spelling on the part of the user, or by the vagaries of spelling and/or orthographic conventions of Hungarian. These will be illustrated below with English and Hungarian examples.

92 HÁTRAVETVE = in postposition 93 MNÉV = adjective 94 ut = in postposition 95 átv = metaphorically/figuratively

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As the number of grammatical sentences (in English or any other language) is unlimited, so it has been claimed that the same is true of verbal compounds 96 , cf. Bauer 2003) of the fox hunting/hunter type; such a claim has been made in e.g. (Katamba 2005:70). Compounds, not just verbal ones, do generally feature high in a dictionary of any (pair of) language(s) whose type allows this, constituting as they do a sizeable part of many a vocabulary. Which compounds to include as headwords and which are the ones whose members but not the wholes justify inclusion, however, is a difficult question of inclusion/exclusion, obviously also dependent on size and purpose of the dictionary. If a pattern, e.g. verbal compounds, is productive, then it is completely rule-governed, predictable, and general wisdom places it within the grammar rather than the lexicon. This, however, does not automatically mean that its product should not be included in the dictionary. While the products of a typical ruled-governed process such as the regular past and participle forms of verbs are usually not registered, i.e. are conspicuous by their absence, the productive process itself that generates verbal compounds is totally unobservable. This concerns print versions; in electronic dictionaries, where unlimited space is available, predictable verb forms may also be supplied. This is seen, for instance, in CC (2003), where the line of the headword, with frequency diamonds (and GB and US pronunciation icons but no transcription) provided, may look like this: cat ♦◊◊ cat cats This, incidentally, may prove too much information technically to be squeezed into one line: in the entry for dog , e.g. the missing word class discrimination plus the presence of regular forms plus the absence of transcription results in the following: dog ♦♦ ◊ dog dogs dogging dogged where dog can be both N and V; dogs can still be both N and V; and dogging can be V only. The fact that this dogged is not a past V form does not become clear until one clicks on the speaker icon and hears the pronunciation / »dÅgId/ – hardly excusably, since this is another lexeme, the adjective dogged ; this is probably a programming error that indiscriminately assigns the / »dÅgId/ string to the written dogged string.

It would be ideal to be able to state that the more productive a pattern, the less dictionary-worthy it is. Many of the institutionalized verbal compounds, however, must also be included even if they are 100% productive syntactically. The focus will first be on verbal compounds of the N V -ing pattern. First, weight watching and tojásfestés ‘egg painting’ will illustrate. The verbal compound weight watching is perfectly productive, but it has an idiosyncratic, specific meaning (‘[trying to lose weight, esp. by] dieting’) which is largely from its constituents, which justifies its inclusion. If it is not, the compound may remain perfectly opaque to the user. EHCD (1998), e.g., does not contain weight watching , it only includes weight watcher : weight watcher ‘person concerned about his/her weight because of surplus weight’)

Nor can the entry for watching be expected to make the meaning of weight watcher clear: watching fn 1. őrködés, megfigyelés 2. [...]. Similarly, the Hungarian noun tojásfestés ‘egg painting/dyeing’, a 100% productive verbal compound, has a specific meaning (‘decorating an Easter egg’), which is why it must be entered.

96 Or synthetic, or verbal-nexus, or secondary compounds. None of these terms, unfortunately, is helpful in indicating what it is about. “Verbal”, which at least points to a verb being a necessary component in them, is used in this study.

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To take another example: there is undoubtedly a difference in statistical frequency (and/or institutionalization, and/or lexicalization) between the Hungarian verbal compounds névsorolvasás ‘taking the roll call’ (more frequent) and névsorkészítés ‘making a list of names’ (less frequent) on the one hand, and névsorolvasás and novellaolvasás ‘reading short stories’ (less frequent), on the other hand. If the Hungarian compound expression is established/frequent but its compound equivalent would not be, a gerundial verb phrase or a verbal-noun-headed noun phrase may be given as translation. Whereas for névsorolvasás – an established concept that is culturally salient, if not independently of language but surely so in English and Hungarian – there is an even more idiosyncratic (completely opaque, perfectly unpredictable, thus idiomatic) English expression, roll call , this is not true of névsorkészítés or novellaolvasás : here it is not possible to offer a compound, just gerundive forms reading short stories or (the) reading of short stories . This illustrates how the “lexicon– grammar” boundary has been crossed. Similarly productive syntactic patterns are displayed e.g. by the far less frequent, non-institutionalized word faltisztítás ‘cleaning the/a wall’ (which will obviously not be included in dictionaries). One of the difficulties shown here lies in the fact that the differences between the variants may involve grammatical features (mostly aspects of referentiality), which are manifest in the choice of (i) English singular vs. plural; (ii) definite vs. indefinite article; and (iii) VP vs. NP vs. Noun. It is obviously not just words as translations for words that a dictionary is supposed to provide. In the case of verbal compounds, although these exist in both English and Hungarian and are supposed to share the same characteristics, equivalence is volatile and erratic. Wherever such equivalences are needed to be given bilingually, the alternatives, spelt out and labelled, are like the ones that follow: • (nonfinite) VP structures gerundial VP w/ O: cleaning a wall ( Det & number cleaning the wall usage in O varies) cleaning the walls cleaning walls

• (definite) NP structures verbal-N-headed 97 NP: the cleaning of a wall ( Det & number usage the cleaning of the wall in of -PP varies) the cleaning of the walls the cleaning of walls (cleaning of walls) • Noun verbal compound wall cleaning (with three possible punctuation forms, which have been ignored here.)

These patterns may all be adequate translations, in a given (pragmatic) situation, of the noun faltisztítás , and there is no amount of grammatical labelling (in the form of codes or otherwise) and there is no amount of sense distinguishers of any kind, that could guide the user to the required equivalent for a given situation. Sense indicators (as understood, e.g. by Atkins & Rundell 2008:214, 511), as navigation aids, are supposed to distinguish between senses. This is just one Hungarian word: there are no senses between which to distinguish; the problem exactly is that the senses of these ten or so expressions do not differ. Usage notes also serve a different purpose: they cannot be expected to guide to the right version either. Even if it were somehow possible (with a set of sense indicators of a different kind, or “grammatical signposts” if such were recognized) a bilingual entry that contained all of the above for just a single Hungarian compound would have to be accompanied by examples, without which even the richest

97 “Verbal noun” is the convenient standard label for the -ing form in the pattern the V-ing of NP labelled as NP (as opposed to the pattern V-ing NP labelled as nonfinite VP).

229 Chapter Three signposting of sense indicators would not work; the length of that entry would run to half a page on average. This, then, cannot be the task of the dictionary: this is a grammatical problem which the user should ideally be familiar with without consulting a dictionary. The problem is compounded by the fact that Hungarian verbal compound nouns of the novellaol- vasás, névsorkészítés, faltisztítás type, although nouns, may be argued to have an associated subject slot, since (in some form or other) they are compact “predicate + argument” skeletons. The translation of novellaolvasás közben may well be just reading the/a story , i.e. the nonfinite structure without the probably expected prepositions (* during and while ). Worse than that, adequate translations can include a finite subclause with an overt subject and (possibly) another overt subject in the main clause, while the covert subject – PRO – of the Hungarian structure is controlled by a (possibly also covert, pro) NP subject in the main clause: [PRO Novellaolvasás közben] ‘lit. during story reading’ gyakran álmodozik will be more idiomatically translated as [When/While he ’s reading stories], he often indulges in fancies [When/While he ’s reading stories], his mind often wanders off

The definiteness and specificity parameter will have to be adjusted to the situation. The average Hungarian user will have no idea about these grammatical notions, similarly to the difference between event and result nominals, which knowledge would also be indispensable for adequately translating such Hungarian -Ás verbal nouns into English. The phenomena illustrated above indicate that in an unpredictably large percentage of cases, no noun (phrase) or even nonfinite structure can be made to correspond to a Hungarian verbal compound, only a finite structure: this brings the number of possibilities listed above to (around) ten. Thus, instead of the “ideal” situation of registering for any Hungarian X-V-Ás ‘X-V-ing’ compound a similar English verbal compound of the N-V -ing template, we are left with a dozen different syntactic ways of expressing this idea. There is no “default” form available, and the dictionary entry is by far not an ideal place to represent or “teach” the variety of means that a given sense can be expressed by.

A Hungarian compound noun does not readily show either whether it is of the (i) verbal type – e.g.. portörl ő ‘dust cloth’, literally: ‘dust wiper’; lábtörl ő ‘door mat’, lit. ‘foot wiper’ ablaktörl ő ‘windscreen wiper’, lit. ‘window wiper’; or (ii) a root/primary 98 compound – e.g. papírtörl ő ‘kitchen paper’, lit. ‘paper wiper’. Hungarian compounds of the type csonttörés ‘fracture’; lit. ‘bone breaking’ can be construed in two ways: with the first member, csont ‘bone’ here as (a) patient/object (b) patient/subject. The meanings, correspondingly, are: (a) ‘breaking a bone’ (b) ‘the breaking (= intransitive V) of a bone’, i.e. ‘fracture’. Both of these are productive in the sense that any new NV- Ás pattern is only constrained by its semantics: provided that the N is “Patient”, such a compound is possible both with this Pa- tient N as object and subject. (An “Agent” or a “Theme”, e.g. cannot be the first member as subject: *gyereksétálás ‘child walking’; *id őmúlás ‘time passing’.) It is not clear that csonttörés ‘bone breaking’ and cs őrepedés lit. ‘pipe cracking’, whose first member is not object but subject, are regarded as verbal compounds in the literature. If the left-hand member is defined as an argument of the verb and if subjects count as arguments, then the likes of these two words are indeed verbal compounds; if the definition differs, then csonttörés and cs őre- pedés will not be.

98 “Root” and “primary” (not unlike “verbal”, “synthetic” and “verbal-nexus”) say very little of essence. Worse than that, “root” and “primary” also fail to visibly oppose any of these three. Therefore, where such an opposition is needed, “verbal vs nonverbal” will be used.

230 Chapter Three

The table shows some correspondences between Hungarian -Ó and -Ás verbal compounds and their English equivalents ( rókavadászat is formally different):

Hungarian English Noun Non-compound (= phrase) verbal compound -ing or -er other than -ing non-verbal simplex verbal or -er verbal compound (often Latin compound compound etc) ablaktörl ő windscreen wiper (!) cs őbevezetés intubation, cannulation cs őrepedés burst pipe csonttörés fracture breaking a bone faltisztítás cleaning the/a wall (etc.) kutyasétáltatás walking the/a (etc.) dog lábtörl ő door mat névsorolvasás roll call, calling reading aloud the/a the roll list of names (etc.) névsorkészítés making/preparing a/the (etc.) list of names novellaolvasás short story reading short stories reading rókavadászat fox hunting fox hunt portörl ő dust cloth tojásfestés egg painting decorating/painting eggs (etc.) Not verbal compound cs őberendezés pipework piping , system of pipes tubing

No amount of knowledge of productive compounding enables the learner/user to pick the right equivalent.

Whether the English equivalent of a Hungarian -ing verbal compound will also be an -ing verbal compound, a verbal compound other than -ing , a nonverbal compound, or a non-compound, including simplex words and phrases, the equivalents must be provided as though all of them were idiosyncratic . This is partly because the source-language user has no precise notions about the semantics of compounds, and partly because of lexicalization, which may distort the otherwise neatly productive patterns. If the user does not come to the translation task equipped with this grammatical (including semantic/ pragmatic) knowledge, then the consultation of the dictionary entry will never yield an idiomatic result. For the user working with the dictionary, the grammatical PoS status of the source language word is (mostly) obvious, especially if it is a noun. The question, however, of whether it is a process or a result noun which may prove important for translation, will not be known: most Hungarian users will have never heard of this distinction either in their mother tongue instruction or language learning

231 Chapter Three careers. The difference between compounds and non-compounds may be easily appreciated, but that between verbal and non-verbal compound will also be unknown. The next impediment is the notoriously uncertain intuitions and the oft-cited ignorance of users concerning sense breakdown. The notion of productivity also being unknown, users cannot be expected to know that the meaning of verbal compounds is predictable. Whether a compound is a verbal one does not become obvious from its form (cf. the example papírtörl ő ‘kitchen paper’ above, which, since its structure is ‘paper wiper’, could equally be a root or a verbal compound). And, of course, the otherwise productive pattern of ablaktörl ő (a verbal compound) does not guarantee the existence of * window wiper – the compounding syntax is predictable, but the lexical items to be compounded themselves, which are simplexes, are not ( windscreen ). Guessing the English equivalent of cs őrepedés is even less likely, since both lexicon and syntax contrive to make this impossible: the verb to be used is not crack (or break or fragment or crackle or split or chink or splinter or tear or gap or rupture or fissure , all of which translate notions related to reped ), but burst . The syntax of the expression will also be unpredictable: the pattern being burst pipe , a past participle as modifier of the noun involved, English uses not a process but a result nominal, the result of pipes bursting. Syntactically, of course, pipes bursting or bursting pipes are no less acceptable. The claim made here is, of course, not that learners will never be able to produce acceptable translations of source language texts containing compounds, but that the dictionary cannot be expected to supply the missing knowledge. Even if this information could be given, it could not possibly be repeated in the entries of all the relevant compounds. This, coupled with the decreasing importance of formal/explicit grammatical instruction, makes it hard to imagine how anything but heavy expo- sure to idiomaticity can produce acceptable expressions.

3.2.2.5 One facet of consistency: number compounds Internal consistency in a dictionary can be captured in many ways: in the most general sense, editorial consistency means uniformity, i.e. that answers to problems of type X in one (type of) entry should not be different from answers to the same (kind of) problems other (types of) entries. This is the requirement of generality, of the need to observe rule-like behaviour and present the information accordingly. This is the sense in which it has to do with the lexicon/grammar boundary: statements about language of very high generality are grammatical statements, while statements of low generality or outright isolated ones are lexical ones. Atkins (2008) mentions that in an explanatory dictionary, ideally, identical/similar senses would require identical/similar definitions. Consistency is easiest to achieve in the case of closed classes; standard examples of this type of consistency include: days of the week; months; flowers; metal.

This semantic , lexical field-related consistency can be opposed to lexical consistency, which covers the case of words lexically similar but semantically distinct. The case of the number “compounds” in MASZ (2000) illustrates this.

The precise status of the number component of these “compounds”, and the type of word thus created, is now irrelevant. Not all of them are actually compounds ( egyesével ‘one by one’ e.g. is not a compound, but a derivation of egy ); for the present purposes they will still be labelled that. What lexical similarity, i.e. partial semantic overlap, means will be illustrated on the example of Hungarian egyesével ‘one by one’ and hatlövet ű ‘six-shooter’: the only meaning component that is common to these two is the presence of the number – which is not enough to relegate them to the same semantic field: these are not one lexical set, or semantic field. The task involved in the compiling of MASZ (2000) was to ensure that all words that contain the numbers egy ‘one’, két ‘two’, etc. etc. (predominantly adjectives, and some forms derived from

232 Chapter Three them) be uniformly included. (The item kett ő, a variant of két , does not occur in such combinations: két- is the combining variant.) The aim was to have a system that was consistent in the sense that, if egylovas ‘one-horse’ was included, then kétlovas ‘two-horse’, and preferably as many similar compounds as are typical should also be. Only those number “compounds” were relevant that showed, and were recurrent in, that “number opposition”. The complexes egyhamar ‘soon’ (e.g. egyhamar nem látod ‘it’ll take some time before you see her’) or egyhangú (1) ‘monotonous’ (2) ‘unanimous’, egycsapásra ‘at one fell swoop’ were obviously not to be included. Recurrence as a requirement was important because although e.g. egynej ű ‘monogamous’ (lit. “one-wifed”) and egynej űség ‘mo- nogamy’ (lit. “one-wifed-ness”) do have to do with “one-ness” and do oppose “more-than-one- ness”, they only contrast with többnej ű (lit. “more-wifed”) and többnej űség (lit. “more-wifed”) and not with any other number “compound”. The forms kétnej ű and kétnej űség do not seem to exist. Most such items are adjectival, and some are secondary derivatives from adjectives e.g. the adjective tízcentes ‘ten-cent’ yields the noun tízcentes ‘ten cent coin’.

It must be noted that this is a typical unidirectional task: perhaps most of the items included thereby would never be headwords in a English →Hungarian dictionary. Making the list meant finding the relevant words beginning with egy ‘one’, két ‘two’, etc. and fill- ing them in a grid. The grid, so supplied, proved to be full of holes indeed, but fortunately very large. Partly because of this original vast quantity, careful selection was needed: (i) what percentage of these potential “number compounds” was to be included? And (ii) how far should one go for a particular number? A list like this is expected to include such items (with approximate equivalents given) as: egyéves ‘one-year’, kétcsöv ű ‘double-barrelled’, háromhetes ‘three-week’, négyoldalas ‘four-page’, ötszög ű ‘pentagonal’, hatlövet ű ‘six-shooter’, hétféle ‘seven different types of’, nyolclábú ‘eight-legged’, kilencesztend ős ‘nine-year’, tízcentes ‘ten-cent’. This sample illustrates that what is involved here is the fuzzy border area between the grammatical and the lexical: in a grammar book, rules and subrules for these lexical items could be given, and a host of exceptions listed; lexicographically, the dictionary-worthy ones, but only those, will have to be entered. The generality, i.e. the common pattern to them, will be there only for the editors to see, because they will be scattered, individual items.

For illustration, the second members of a sample of the compounds from the A–L range (X- ablakos to X -lövet ű) have been gathered in the grid below, a small portion of the original grid. For the purpose of the actual dictionary entries, where a ceiling had to be set at some number, not the entire combination, just the second constituent has been included as combining form above this limit:

-féleképpen VAGY -féleképp in {SZMNÉV} (different) ways hatféleképp(en) in six (different) ways

233 Chapter Three

List No22

A sample of number compounds as documented in MASZ (2000)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 100 Typical collocate *

-ablakos + BUILDING -ágú + + + + + 1 fork; star -ágyas + 2 2 + + + + room -ajtós + + + + + vehicle; room -árbocos + + + + + 3 3 3 vessel -centes 4 + + + coin -centis 5 + + line -csillagos + + + + + brandy -csöv ű + + gun -éves +++++++++++ + child -felé + + + + (adverb) ** -féle 6 + + + + + + + + + 7 -hetes + + + + + + + + + period; baby -heti + + + + + + + + + period -kamarás + + parliament -kerek ű + + + + vehicle -lábú + + + + + + living thing; furntiture -lovas + + + + + cart -lövet ű + + revolver * It is not necessarily the case that just one item collocates: depending on the noun base of the compound’s right-hand member, there may be several. ** No collocate is given for adverbs.

1 Hatágú ‘six-pointed’ is sadly missing. 2 Kétágyas and háromágyas are not given, but kétágyas szoba and háromágyas szoba are included as a headword. 3 Google returns lots of hits for határbocos ‘six-masted’, hétárbocos ‘seven-masted’ and even nyolcárbocos ‘eight-masted’. This will never be learned from this dictionary. 4 These are all nouns, and tízcentes ‘ten-cent’ is also included an adjective. 5 Any collocate that is semantically suitable. 6 Only these two are included; the combining form, however, is given as a headword: -centis -centimetre két centis vonal two-centimetre line . 7 The combining form -féle itself is also entered: -féle 1. [fajta:] kind/sort ilyenféle of this sort 2. [vki nevéhez f űződő:] smb’s a Kovács-féle {FNÉV } Kovács’s {FNÉV }.

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List No23

A sample of the actual compound entries with egy- ‘one-’ in MASZ (2000): egyajtós one-door egyoldalas 1. one-page, single-page 2. [másolat:] egycentes one-cent piece/coin single-sided egycentis one-centimetre egyoldali one-sided, unilateral egycsillagos single-star, one-star egyoldalú 1. [pl. felfogás:] one-sided, bias(s)ed, egydolláros one-dollar note partial, predisposed 2. [szerelem:] unrequited 3. egyemeletes two-storey(ed), two-story AM, two- [pl. felmondás:] unilateral storied AM egyórai 1. [id őtartam:] one-hour, an hour’s, egyéves 1. one-year-old, one year old egyéves HÁTRAVETVE : lasting-for-of an hour 2. [id őpont:] gyerek one-year-old child egyéves bevásár- az egyórai vonat the one-o’clock train lóközpont one-year-old shopping mall Freddy egyórás [id őtartam:] one-hour, an hour’s, egyéves Freddy is one year old 2. [egy évig HÁTRAVETVE : lasting-for-of an hour tartó:] one-year egyöntet ű 1. uniform, identical, like, similar, egyévi 1. [egy évre szóló, pl. fizetés:] yearly, a unanimous 2. [következetes:] consistent year's, annual 2. [egy évig tartó:] HÁTRAVETVE : egyösszeg ű lump sum, flat fee for/lasting one year egypályás [út:] single-lane egyfázisú single-phase, monophase egypárevez ős FNÉV single scull egyfedel ű repül őgép monoplane egypártrendszer one-party system egyfelé in the same direction egypennys one-penny piece-coin egyféle 1. [azonos:] HÁTRAVETVE : of the same egyperces one-minute, a minute’s, HÁTRAVETVE : kind 2. [egy fajta:] one kind/sort (amib ől: of), of-lasting a minute HÁTRAVETVE : of one kind/sort 3. [vmiféle:] cer- egypetéj ű uniovular, one egg tain, HÁTRAVETVE : of a certain/special sort/kind egypetéj ű uniovular, one egg egyfel ől (1) [azonos irányból:] from the same di- egypetéj ű ikrek identical twins rection (2) egyfel ől { MONDAT }, másfel ől egypólusú unipolar {MONDAT } on the one hand { MONDAT }, on the egypúpú one-humped other (hand) { MONDAT } egypúpú teve dromedary egyfelvonásos MNÉV/FNÉV one-act (play) egyrendbeli on one count egyfogatú one-horse egyrészes one-piece szorosan simuló egyrészes egyfokozatú single-phase, single-stage női ruha bodysuit egyfontos one-pound piec/coin egyréteg ű single-layer(ed) egyfordulós single-round egysávos single-lane egyforintos one-forint piece/coin egysíkú 1. two-dimensional 2. [unalmas:] unso- egyf ős VAGY egyf őnyi one-person, one-man phisticated, simple, uncomplicated egygyerekes VAGY egygyermekes single-child, egyszakos [képzés:] single honours one-child, HÁTRAVETVE : with one child egyszámjegy ű single-digit, one-digit egyhetes (1) [id őtartam:] one-week, one/a week's, egyszárnyú ajtó single door HÁTRAVETVE : lasting a/one week, HÁTRAVETVE : egyszarvú FNÉV unicorn of one week (2) [kor:] (one-) week-old, one week egyszemélyes one-person, one-man, old HÁTRAVETVE : for one person egyheti one-week, one/a week's egyszemélyi one-person egyszemélyi felel ősség egyhónapos (1) [egy hónapig tartó:] one-month, one-person responsibility egyszemélyi vezetés one month's, HÁTRAVETVE : lasting a/one month, one-person leadership-management HÁTRAVETVE : of one month (2) [kor:] one- egyszem ű one-eyed month-old, one month old egyszeres 1. simple, single, one-time, one-off 2. egyjegy ű single-digit [könyvvitel:] single-entry egykamarás unicameral, single-chamber egyszeri 1. [egyszer történ ő:] single, one-off, one- egykerek ű one-wheel(ed), single-wheel(ed) time, HÁTRAVETVE : done-happening-occurring egykulcsos adó flat tax once 2. [egykori:] former, one-time, ex- 3. [törté- egylábú one-legged netbeli:] this az egyszeri ember this man/guy egylépcs ős single-step, single-stage, single-phase egyszik ű monocotyledonous egylovas one-horse egyszintes single-storey(ed), single-story AM , egylövet ű single-shot single-storied AM egynapi one-day, one/a day's, HÁTRAVETVE : egyszín ű 1. [egyetlen szín ű:] single-coloured, uni- lasting/of one/a day coloured, HÁTRAVETVE : of one colour 2. [pl. egynapos 1. [korú:] one-day-old, one day old 2. monitor:] monochrome [egy napig tartó:] one-day, one/a day's, egyszobás lakás bedsit, bedsitter, studio flat, one- HÁTRAVETVE : lasting/of one/a day room flat egynapos kirándulás day trip

235 Chapter Three egyszólamú unison, unisonous, unisonant, mono- egyter ű [autó:] people carrier, minivan, multipur- phonic pose vehicle, MPV egyszótagú monosyllabic, one-syllable egyujjas keszty ű mitten(s) egytagú 1. one-member 2. [egy részb ől álló:] együléses single-seater HÁTRAVETVE: having-with-of one part 3. egyvágányú single-track [egyszótagú:] monosyllabic 4. [matematikai kife- jezés:] monomial, single term

236 Conclusions and results

By contrasting lexicological and metalexicographic ideals to existing dictionary entries, the dissertation has investigated interfaces of lexicography and lexicology, and lexicography and linguistics, to identify aspects where principled rigour can, or indeed must, be sacrificed to practical utility. The dissertation substantiates the claim that compromise is to be sought between theory and practice. Lexicographic decisions are indeed more usefully made with users in mind than based on scraps of ill-fitting theory, even where such are available. This is in the spirit of Landau’s admonition 99 that intelligibility must not be “sacrificed to a purity of style bordering on lunacy”.

One finding, however, has been that such readily usable insights from linguistics are not available . If, however, most linguistic insights have little relevance for dictionary making (a gloomy view not universally shared), and/or they would be well nigh impossible to accommodate within lexicographic praxis (a form of pessimism that many analysts would subscribe to), and/or most of these insights would be lost on most users anyway (an almost consensual claim), then editors’ familiarity with theory can at least help identify where those areas of compromise exactly are.

1. In charting the correspondences between “lists” in the mental lexicon vs. lists in dictionaries, only tentative hypotheses seem to be available as to the former. Based on the little that is available, the dissertation has proved that the printed lists produced by lexicographical wisdom are far removed indeed from the “lists” of the mental lexicon. Next to nothing that is assumed, however tentatively, about the mental lexicon can be reflected by means of lexicography .

2. The dissertation assumes that the mental lexicon is a system of multiword units rather than a set of isolated words . Unfortunately for dictionary-making, however, these are so varied and elusive, and as a consequence, their linguistic treatment is so chaotic, as to promise very little for practitioners of lexicography. A novelty of the dissertation is a lexico-semantic and grammatical examination of such lexical units of diverse types above the traditional word level, and contrasting these with potential and existing dictionary entries.

3. The dissertation claims, and proves on a variety of examaples, that very few findings of linguistics have made their way into lexicography; to show the little that has been utilized, entries from several dictionaries of different types have been explored. More recent dictionaries that have been under scrutiny include: RHWUD 1999 (Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary); MWUD 2000 (Merriam–Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary); CC 2003 (Collins COBUILD on CD- ROM); AHD 2004 (American Heritage © Dictionary of the English Language); LDCE 2005 (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English); OALD 2005 (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary); MED 2002 & 2007 ( Macmillan English Dictionary); CALD 2003 & 2008 (Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary; CCAD 2009 (Collins COBUILD Advanced Dictionary) .

4. Several claims of the dissertation are best couched in terms of – not just lexicographic and lexicological – paradoxes . It has been found and illustrated throughout that notions of gradience or cline are better suited to many phenomena than discreteness, both in and outside of lexicology. This, the present author thinks but has not argued here, probably carries over to linguistics at large.

99 Landau (2001) . (By the recognition of prototypicality and the indeterminacy of linguistic facts, the dissertation does not automatically argue for prototypes in the realm of things “out there”, and thus assumes no specifically cognitive framework.) 4. 1 Perhaps the gravest paradox of lexicography is this: almost nothing of the analogue nature of the lexicon, and possibly language at large, can be represented in the inevitably black-and-white, two-dimensional world of lexicography, which, in addition to this crispness, must add a good measure of inevitable simplification for the sake of users. This amounts to the claim that although in lexical phenomena the probabilistic nature of language clearly transpires, lexical patterns are difficult to capture in the static world of dictionaries. Also, it seems that what users expect are exactly hard-and-fast rules and rigid boundaries supplied by dictionaries that change as little as possible. 4.2 Idiomaticity itself has been found to be gradational , especially that of multiword expressions , which show a strong centre–periphery pattern in other respects as well. I have tried to show that this adds to the difficulty of their lexicographic treatment, whose inadequacy is quite clear in the most recent monolingual native speaker dictionaries, and less so in the didactically otherwise successful learner’s dictionaries. This edge of learner’s over native speaker dictionaries is a paradox specifically in English lexicography: the mundane considerations and motives of the ELT industry have apparently left on it a deeper impact than has theoretical linguistics. 4.3 The dissertation has separated the notions of idiomaticity , transparency , and compositionality 100 . Idiomaticity is best seen as defined in terms of unpredictability . In that framework, all multiwords – including compounds, combining forms, binomials, and what are referred to in the dissertation as traditional “colourful” idioms, are idiomatic since they are unpredictable across any two languages, which is the only true measure of idiomaticity . 4.4 One type of gradience is inherent in the notion of productivity : the status of lexical units ranging from frequent/existing through rare/existing and potential all the way to the ungrammatical but existing. The dissertation (especially in 3.2) captures another paradox of dictionary-making: that productivity is also impossible to capture in the static world of dictionaries, where, due to the inevitable limitations, “all words are equal”. 4.5 Another paradox identified in the dissertation is that while not just idiomaticity but many (perhaps most) lexical phenomena inhabit continua , this ill suits the purposes of lexicography. Dictionaries, especially “instrument dictionaries”, where clear-cut advice is expected, produce tools for the layperson. Aggravating this problem are the efforts at simplification , motivated by users’ perceived needs and general poor levels of grammatical informedness.

5. Numerous examples support the claim that linguistic “theory”, more and more aloof with its erratic changes and spectacular fragmentation, proves less and less adequate for a provision of guidelines for lexicographic practice, especially as regards the narrower field of grammar . It seems evident that most linguistic advances are lost on lexicography . At the linguistic input is a collection of arcane, mostly incompatible and ever-shifting findings never meant for lexicographic end use in the first place. At the output, in the dictionaries, which under user pressure to change as little as possible anyway, is a hardly noticeable imprint of linguistic science, with the gap between it and lexicography ever widening.

6. If users’ needs rather than theoretical considerations can be the real measure of evaluating works of lexicography, then the inadequacy of linguistic theory as model or theoretical basis, serving as a stable source of inspiration, is less damaging than might be supposed. Users’ needs, however, are much harder to assess than is usually thought. There are too many different users, and indeed too

100 Drawing on Nunberg & al. (1994).

238 widely differing tasks in any bilingual relation. And while the need for user research is over- emphasized in the literature, what this injunction precisely means for the praxis is unclear. Moreover, the “know your user” requirement, unfortunately, is unhelpful for small markets, and especially so for bilingual Hungarian ↔English lexicography, where dictionaries are produced for Hungarians using English rather than vice versa, and thus will never have a chance of being as diverse as to justify large-scale user studies. This means that even if users’ needs can indeed be found out, dictionaries cannot be easily tailored according to the findings. This suggests that although dictionaries will evidently be different, very few, if any, of their differences in design and editorial policy will come from user/market research. The dissertation arrives at the indeed unfortunate conclusion that because input from linguistics is insufficient and user research sparse, perhaps inevitably dictionaries will be bound to continue on their path of inertia.

239 Potentialities for further research

The dissertation, “a lexicographer’s view of linguistics”, has brought to the surface quite a few further issues which are of paramount importance. A most worthwhile path of further study is to explore and chart, in a consistent and unified framework 101 , the gradience of various types of lexical phenomena.

A list of sources pointing to further areas of exploration and thus relevant have become available after closing the manuscript is provided below. One of them 102 , a study that claims that “the standard word class framework becomes just a convenient labelling system, primarily for such everyday purposes as teaching as well as dictionary and grammar writing but without any theoretical background”, is thus a pointed illustration of an even more radical rift between linguistic theory and lexicography.

The dissertation refers to Bauer (2003) 103 , according to which some processes are more while some less (centrally) morphological and more syntactic than others, and thus may be argued to exhibit a continuum of major significance. Prefixation has affinities with (neo-classical) compounding as well as back-formation; suffixation is borders on neo-classical compounding, conversion, and back- formation; the latter shows similarities with both conversion and clipping; neo-classical compounding has affinities with blending, which is similar to acronym formation. Crucially, compounding borders on syntax. Within the theory, this may necessitate redrawing on a major scale of the boundaries of morphology and consequently of the compartments of language. The aim of lexicographic practice, by contrast, will be to capture as many as possible and represent as many as can be usefully represented , of these potential changes.

101 In the spirit of Aarts (2007). 102 Kenesei (2010); my translation. 103 Bauer (2003:122–125). Sources relevant for further research

Booij (2009): Geert Booij “Compound construction: schemas or analogy? A construction morphology perspective”. To appear in: Sergio Scalise & Irene Vogel eds. Compounding . Benjamins. Geeraerts (2010): Dirk Geeraerts Theories of lexical semantics . OUP. Kastovsky (2009): Dieter Kastovsky “Astronaut, astrology, astrophysics: About Combining Forms, Classical Compounds and Affixoids”. In: R. W. McConchie, A. Honkapohja & J. Tyrkkö eds. Sel- ected Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis , 1–13. Somerville. Kenesei (2010): “Vannak-e szófajok? És ha igen, mennyi?” [Whether word classes exist, and if yes, how many?] Presentation at the Research institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 17/06/2010, http://www.nytud.hu/kenesei/szofajokea100617.pdf, accessed 27/06/2010. Lieber & Štekauer (2009): Rochelle Lieber & Pavol Štekauer The Oxford Handbook of Compound- ing . OUP.

241

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