Lexical analysis : norms and exploitations

479 Pages·2013·8.435 MB·English

by  Patrick Hanks

Lexical Analysis

Lexical Analysis
Norms and Exploitations
Patrick Hanks

The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2013 Patrick Hanks
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hanks, Patrick.
Lexical analysis : norms and exploitations / Patrick Hanks.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-01857-9 (alk. paper)
1. Lexicology. 2. English language—Word formation. 3. English language—New
words. I. Title
P326.H37 2013
401'.4—dc23
2012020868
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can use words to mean so many different
things.”
—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
We must separate from the mush of general goings-on those features of repeated events
which appear to be part of a patterned process.
—J. R. Firth, “Personality and Language in Society”

Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
Chapter 1
Words and Meanings: The Need for a New Approach 1
1.1 Using Words to Make Meanings 1
1.2 Competence in Rule-Governed Behavior 8
1.3 Making Comparisons to Make Meanings 9
1.4 Exploiting Normal Usage 10
1.5 Open Choice and Idiomatic Constraints 15
1.6 A Lexically Based Approach to Linguistic Theory 17
1.7 Ontologies 18
1.8 Evidence and Intuition 20
1.9 What This Book Is About 22
1.10 Summary 23
Chapter 2
What Is a Word? 25

2.1 Competing Concepts of ‘Word’ 25
2.2 Is the Lexicon of a Language a Finite Set? 29
2.3 Zipf’s Law 31
2.4 The Dynamic Lexicon 32
2.5 Proper Names 33
2.6 How New Terminology Is Created 42
2.7 The Words Scientists Use 45
viii Contents
2.8 Contextual Anchoring 49
2.9 Multiword Expressions 50
2.10 Implications 62
2.11 Summary 63
Chapter 3
Do Word Meanings Exist? 65
3.1 A Serious Question 65
3.2 Common Sense 66
3.3 Ockham’s Razor 69
3.4 Peaceful Coexistence of Incompatible Components 71
3.5 Meaning Events and Meaning Potentials 73
3.6 Clause Structure and Wider Context 75
3.7 Where Corpus Analysis Runs Out 80
3.8 Implications 81
3.9 Summary 82
Chapter 4
Prototypes and Norms 85
4.1 Problems with Received Wisdom 85
4.2 Meanings as Events and Meanings as Beliefs: Gricean Implicatures 87
4.3 How to Identify a Norm 91
4.4 Meaning Potentials and Phraseology 96
4.5 Meaning, Preference Semantics, and Prototype Theory 99
4.6 Climb: Empirical Analysis 101
4.7 Implications 104

4.8 Summary 105
Appendix 4.1: Uses of Climb, a Verb of Motion [[Process]] 107
Appendix 4.2: Contextually Generated Implicatures of Climb (Verb) 111
Chapter 5
Contextual Dependency and Lexical Sets 113
5.1 Recognizing Patterns 113
5.2 Norms of Usage and Belief: Verbs 115
Contents ix
5.3 Norms of Usage and Belief: Nouns 134
5.4 Projecting Meaning Potentials onto Syntax 136
5.5 Domain-Specifi c Norms 139
5.6 A Dictionary without Defi nitions 140
5.7 Creativity and Cliché 141
5.8 Implications 141
5.9 Summary 143
Chapter 6
Norms Change over Time 145
6.1 A Monumental Inscription 145
6.2 Associating Norms of Meaning and Use: The Case of Enthusiasm 147
6.3 Exploiting and Alternating Norms: Enthusiasm 151
6.4 The Problem of Negatives and Questions 153
6.5 What Did Jane Austen Mean by Enthusiasm? 154
6.6 What Did Jane Austen Mean by Condescension? 160
6.7 Norms, Mutual Beliefs, and Social Status 165
6.8 More Mundane Examples of Meaning Change 166
6.9 When New Senses Drive Out Established Senses 167
6.10 Words with Two or More Literal Meanings 170
6.11 Summary 171
Chapter 7
Three Types of Alternation 173
7.1 Semantic Epicenters 173
7.2 Lexical Alternations 174

7.3 Semantic-Type Alternations 176
7.4 Syntactic Alternations 186
7.5 Implications 207
7.6 Summary 209
Chapter 8
Exploitations 211
8.1 What Is an Exploitation? 211