Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

The use of a participle form as an adjective-like modifier is even clearer in an expression such as running water.

At this point, it is appropriate to assess the implications of our discussion so far for the lexical entries which form a fundamental component of a grammar. We can now see that it is lexemes which appear in the mental lexicon. When we say that speakers of English know the word walk, we are saying that their lexicon contains a lexical entry WALK which provides several kinds of information. Firstly, there is information about the meaning of the lexeme (see section 12). Secondly, there is the syntactic information that it is a V and is intransitive. Thirdly, there is information about how to pronounce all the word forms associated with the

lexeme. Now, the lexeme itself doesn’t have a pronunciation; rather, it can be realised by one or more word forms and it is they that have a pronunciation. In regular cases the lexical entry just contains the pronunciation of the base form. For instance, the lexeme WALK has the base form walk which is pronounced /wɔːk/.

Sometimes things are more complex and the lexical entry will contain the

pronunciation of certain of the stem forms of a lexeme, as in the case of KNIFE, with its irregular plural stem. In other cases, it is necessary to include the pronunciation of a whole word form, as in the case of the irregular verb BRING

with the past tense form, /brɔːt/.

In (115), we see highly simplified lexical entries for WALK, KNIFE and BRING:

(115) a.

Lexical entry for WALK

Phonology:

/wɔːk/

base

Syntax:

V, intransitive

Semantics:

‘move on foot with alter-

nate steps’

b.

Lexical entry for KNIFE

Phonology:

/naɪf/

base

/naɪv/

plural stem

Syntax:

N

Semantics:

‘instrument for cutting’

c.

Lexical entry for BRING

Phonology:

/brɪŋ/

base

/brɔːt/

[past tense]

Syntax:

V, transitive

Semantics:

‘carry something

towards the speaker’

Other types of information (e.g. the fact that the third person singular present forms of WALK and BRING end in -s) are predictable from the principles of

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English morphology and therefore don’t need to be included in the lexical entries.

More subtly, we haven’t mentioned the perfect/passive participle form (such as occurs in has brought and was brought) in (115c), even though this is also irregular.

This is because, in the general case, the perfect/passive participle form is identical to the past tense form, and this generalisation of English morphology allows us to predict the perfect participle form of most verbs in the language. There are some exceptions. For example, sang is the past tense form of sing but sung is the perfect participle (has sung). In such cases, the lexical entry will have to contain the perfect participle form as well as the past tense form.

Having urged caution with respect to the concept of ‘word’ in the above

discussion and introduced terminology which obviates confusion when precision is called for, we shall continue to use the word ‘word’ from here on, unless it is necessary to be circumspect.

Compounds

English shares with many languages the ability to create new words by

combining old words. For instance, blackbird is clearly formed from the adjective black and the noun bird. However, a blackbird is a different thing from a black bird.

Firstly, blackbird denotes a particular bird species, not just any old bird that happens to be black; and secondly, female blackbirds are brown, but a black bird has to be black. The expression blackbird is a type of word, just like thrush or crow, but it happens to consist of two words. It is therefore called a compound word.

A blackbird is a type of bird, a windmill a type of mill, a coffee table a type of table and so on. We say that bird, mill and table are heads of the compounds blackbird, windmill and coffee table. The other part of the compound is a

modifier. It is possible to form compounds out of compounds. For instance, we can have finance committee, finance committee secretary, finance committee

secretary election, finance committee secretary election scandal and so on. Now, the way these are written makes them look rather like phrases, but they behave in sentences just like single words. The above list consists of compound nouns and determiners such as the, and adjectives such as efficient have to precede these compounds just as they would a single non-compound noun: the highly efficient finance committee secretary. The fact that they are written with spaces between the elements of the compound is a fact about English orthography and an arbitrary one at that. There are no principled criteria that would tell us whether windmill has to be written as one word, as two words (wind mill) or as a hyphenated word (wind-mill).

There is no theoretical limit to the lengths of compounds because the process of forming compounds can feed itself ad infinitum: a compound noun is itself a noun and can be subject to further compounding. This property is called recursion and we say that compounding in English is recursive. This is an important property which makes compounding resemble the syntactic processes of phrase- and

sentence-formation (see. pp. 3f. and section 19).

Building words

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Another respect in which compounding is reminiscent of syntactic processes is in the types of ambiguities it permits. Consider a compound such as toy car

crusher. This can refer to either a device for crushing toy cars (say, in a recycling factory) or a child’s toy modelled after a car crusher. The ambiguity can be represented in terms of labelled brackets and tree diagrams as in (116): (116)

a.

toy car crusher

‘crusher for toy cars’

N

N

N

N

N

toy

car

crusher

[N [N [N toy] [N car]] [N crusher]]

b.

toy car crusher

‘car crusher which is a toy’

N

N

N

N

N

toy

car

crusher

[N [N toy] [N [N car] [N crusher]]]

An ambiguity of this sort, which results from the way the words are bracketed together, is called a structural ambiguity (see also section 23). It is an important type of phenomenon because it is very difficult to see how we could explain such ambiguities without resorting to something like the structures in (116).

(exercise 3).

English permits a variety of compounds. We can combine adjectives with nouns (sweetcorn, lowlife), or nouns with nouns (windmill, coffee table). In these cases, it is the first element (sweet-, low-, wind-, coffee) which receives the most stress in the compound. We can also combine two adjectives (dark blue, icy cold) or nouns with adjectives (canary yellow, iron hard), but in these cases the stress usually falls on the last element. However, in English it is rare for a verb to participate in compounding. Examples such as swearword (verb + noun) and babysit (noun +

verb) are exceptional.

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words

We observed earlier that inflection generally appears outside derivation, a fact that we put down to derivation giving rise to new lexemes and regular inflectional processes such as pluralisation applying to lexemes. Now derivation can appear inside compounding in the sense that a derived word can be compounded with

another word. Thus, in the compound printer cable, the first element, printer, consists of the verb print suffixed with -er, giving the overall structure [N[N[Vprint]-

er] [Ncable]]. We clearly don’t first form a (non-existent) compound of the verb print and the noun cable (*print cable) and then add -er to the print component.