The Lexical Semantics of Social Categories: Demonyms and Occupation Words in English Michael Roberts A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts (Honours) of the University of New England December 2010 Please be advised that this thesis contains chapters which have been either published or submitted for publication. Earlier versions of the following chapters have been retained in this version of the thesis: Chapter 2 Roberts, M. (2017). The semantics of demonyms in English. In Zhengdao Ye (Ed.) The Semantics of Nouns (pp. 205-220). Oxford Scholarship Online. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198736721.003.0008 No proof of publication could be located for the following chapters: Chapter 3 Occupational categories: Doctors, teachers, plumbers Downloaded from [email protected], the institutional research repository of the University of New England at Armidale, NSW Australia. Table of Contents Preface ................................................................................................................................v List of Figures and Tables ................................................................................................ vi Abbreviations .................................................................................................................. vii Chapter 1 Introduction..............................................................................1 1.1 Human social categories ...........................................................................................1 1.2 Higher-level categories .............................................................................................4 1.3 Previous research outside linguistics ........................................................................6 1.4 The NSM method of semantic analysis ..................................................................11 1.4.1 The Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Primes and their exponents...............11 1.4.2 NSM explications and the use of semantic molecules ..................................14 1.4.3 NSM analysis and the organisation of the lexicon ........................................17 1.5 Sub-classes of the nominal lexicon.........................................................................20 1.6 Thesis outline ..........................................................................................................23 Chapter 2 Demonyms: Germans, Queenslanders, Londoners ............25 2.1 Introduction.............................................................................................................25 2.2 Demonyms: words designating people “of” a place ...............................................27 2.3 Demonyms of different kinds (designating people from places of different kinds).......................................................................................................................31 2.4 Using ‘country [m]’ as a semantic molecule in explications of demonyms ...........35 2.5 Further discussion ...................................................................................................39 Chapter 3 Occupational categories: Doctors, teachers, plumbers ......41 3.1 Preliminary discussion ............................................................................................41 3.2 Doctors and lawyers................................................................................................43 3.2.1 Doctors...........................................................................................................43 3.2.2 Lawyers .........................................................................................................47 3.3 Teachers ..................................................................................................................50 3.4 Interlude: Discussion of an aspect of the template .................................................53 The lexical semantics of social categories in English iv 3.5 Plumbers and electricians.......................................................................................55 3.5.1 Plumbers ........................................................................................................56 3.5.2 Electricians ....................................................................................................60 3.6 Further Discussion ..................................................................................................61 Chapter 4 Issues and implications..........................................................64 4.1 Taxonomy and human social categories .................................................................64 4.2 Categorising social category words ........................................................................66 4.3 Collocational characteristics of social category words ...........................................68 4.4 Grammatical characteristics of social category words............................................72 4.5 Future directions .....................................................................................................74 Bibliography ...............................................................................................77 Preface The first year of this project was sponsored by the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), which is a division of the Australian Defence Force. The second year was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award. The aim of the original DSTO project was to explore the syntactic and phraseological properties of social nouns in order to identify the types and sub-types of social categories; and also to investigate the semantic properties of a selection of social categories in order to establish whether or not these semantic properties could also identify types and sub-types of categories. The eventual aim was to determine whether the syntactic and phraseological properties of social categories correlated with their semantic properties. It was hoped that the result of this project would enable someone to develop an automated method for arranging social categories into a type of structured ontology. As the work continued, and was no longer sponsored by the DSTO, the focus moved to the lexical semantics of English social category words using NSM, with less focus placed on the identifying their syntactic and phraseological properties. Given the complexity of this thesis, a great deal of effort has been devoted to providing the results in the most concise and most easily understood form. As a result, this thesis is shorter than the average, but hopefully no less substantial in content. I would like to thank my supervisor, Cliff Goddard, for his advice and guidance, and my wife Pam for her support in so many ways. Michael Roberts UNE, December 2010 List of Figures and Tables Figure 1.1. A simple taxonomic hierarchy ......................................................................3 Figure 1.2. Diagrams representing correct and incorrect understandings of taxonomic and collective superordinates (from Goddard in press).............22 Table 1.1. English exponents of semantic primes (Goddard, in press)........................13 Table 1.2. A non-exhaustive list of productive semantic molecules of English, with possible universal molecules marked with * (Goddard 2010)...........16 Table 1.3. Sub-classes of concrete non-countable (“mass type”) nouns (constructed from Goddard (2009) and Wierzbicka (1985; 1988)) ............21 Table 1.4. Sub-classes of functional-collective nouns (Goddard, 2009)......................22 Table 3.1. The 10 most frequent “verbs of saying” immediately following the noun doctor (COCA).............................................................................44 Table 3.2. Top 20 collocates for lawyer (in a span of four words before and after) in Collins Wordbanks Online, with function words omitted ......................49 Table 3.3. Top 20 collocates of the noun teacher (in a span of four words before or after) in Collins Wordbanks Online, with function words omitted ........53 Table 3.4. Top 10 noun collocates of the terms electrician and plumber (COCA) .....56 Table 4.1. Adjectives preceding the word American in BYU-BNC and COCA .........70 Table 4.2. Selected social category words and grammatical properties.......................73 Abbreviations Dictionaries CALD Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary Cambridge Online Cambridge Dictionaries Online CLD Collins Latin Dictionary LDOCE Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Macquarie Macquarie Dictionary Merriem-Webster Online Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary OALD Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary OED Oxford English Dictionary Oxford Online Oxford Dictionaries WID Webster's International Dictionary Corpora COCA Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008–) BYU-BNC British National Corpus-Brigham Young University (Davies, 2004–) Wordbanks Collins Wordbanks Online 1 Introduction Categorising is seeing sameness in diversity (Taylor, 1989) First and foremost, this thesis is an exploration of the lexical semantics of selected English social category words, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). It will explicate two sets of social category words, identify commonalities between the explications, and in turn identify sub-classes based upon the shared semantic structures. A subsidiary goal is to explore the syntactic and phraseological properties of each subclass, using online corpora and journals and newspapers from a variety of sources. The three corpora are the British National Corpus–Brigham Young University,