This is the second part of my discussion of What is Morphology?, and follows on from the previous post. In that post, I looked at some of the problems with their teaching style: I suggested that they present claims from authority rather than providing convincing evidence, and particularly that their use of examples is unhelpful and often fails (on closer examination) to demonstrate their points.
The second problem I mentioned was their approach to problems. Like the first post, this is a non-expert analysis and I'm willing to be corrected on any claims I make. Broadly speaking, I got the impression that Aronoff and Fudeman had got hold of a morphological hammer and every linguistic problem looked like a nail to them.
I'll stick with an example from chapter 4, which I mentioned in the first post.
(4) She’s a high voltage electricity grid systems supervisor
There is evidence that high voltage electricity grid systems supervisor is a single noun.
This is not an immediately intuitive statement, so I'm glad to see a bit of analysis follows.
First, its distribution matches that of any other noun, so we can insert it into phrases like [a good N] or [N for hire].
Second, high voltage electricity grid systems supervisor behaves as a single unit for the purposes of wh-movement. Question-answer pairs that break it up are at the very least awkward. In chapter 2 we related this characteristic of words to the notion of lexical integrity.
(5) a. Q: Which electricity grid systems supervisor did you see?
A: ?The high voltage one.
b. Q: Which systems supervisor did you see?
A: *The high voltage electricity grid one.
c. Q: Which supervisor did you see?
A: *The high voltage electricity grid systems one.
Contrast these with syntactic strings of modifier plus noun which are easily broken up, as shown in (6):
(6) Q: Which supervisor did you see?
A: The tall one.
Continuing with the notion of lexical integrity, we can ask whether it is possible to describe part of the string high voltage electricity grid systems supervisor with a modifier. When we try, the result is very awkward (7):
(7) ?A very high voltage electricity grid systems supervisor.
The most natural interpretation of (7) is the figurative one whereby very high voltage is used as an adjectival phrase modifying a smaller compound [electricity grid] giving the intermediate form very high voltage electricity grid, which in turn modifies [systems supervisor], giving the entire form in (7).
Finally we can point to the structure of high voltage electricity grid systems supervisor as evidence that it is a single noun formed by compounding. Words in English are generally head-final... a dogsled is a kind of sled, not a kind of dog... and affixed word like pollution take on the lexical category of the suffix (in this case, noun) rather than that of the stem (pollute, a verb). As speakers of English we know this, and without ever having heard high voltage electricity grid systems supervisor before, we know that it designates a type of supervisor. Phrases, in contrast to words, are less likely to be head-final. The head of [NP John’s walking into work without a tie] is walking, not tie.
Having established that high voltage electricity grid systems supervisor is a single word of the category N...
Hey, hang on a minute! Exactly when do you imagine you established that?
Just to be clear, I don’t necessarily disagree with them. There’s no particular reason to think that high voltage electricity grid systems supervisor isn’t a single noun when houseboat or penknife or bookworm all seem to be (spacing conventions aside).
However, their analysis suffers from similar problems to those I noted last time. They make a few claims about things that demonstrate noun status, without ever explaining why they think those are good tests for nounhood. At some point in the book they might eventually explain what they think it means for something to be a single noun, and whether their definition is necessarily distinguishable from a noun phrase, but I didn’t get that far.
Anyway, let’s examine their first claim.
Distribution tests for nounhood
First, its distribution matches that of any other noun, so we can insert it into phrases like [a good N] or [N for hire].
Really? Okay, let’s try it along with some similar sentences and see how they pan out.
- high voltage electricity grid systems supervisor for hire
- short-wave radio repair company manager for hire
- low-quality pulp fiction magazine publishing company for hire
- local hedgehog preservation society president for hire
Well yes, you can insert them into those structures. The resulting sentences have something in common: they all sound strange. They sound faux-portentous and self-parodying, like taglines from upcoming films. It's perhaps related to the fact that the common versions (gun for hire and so on) are short and punchy, and generally far removed in tone from these examples too. However, there are contexts where some variations of these could work; an engineering magazine with adverts for high-voltage electricity grid systems maintenance equipment for hire wouldn’t raise many eyebrows.
Let’s try the other test.
- a good low-quality pulp fiction magazine publishing company
- a good national hedgehog preservation society president
- a good mass-market lacquered hardwood violin polish
To me, these imply that good is being carefully limited by the string of adjectives; damning with faint praise, in fact (consider “a good first-year undergraduate answer”). These sentences, appearing in a business article or CV, would not be read as endorsements. Only the third seems arguable as actual praise, because deciding what violin polish to use may involve complex weighing-up decisions: only a lacquered hardwood polish is suitable for my lacquered hardwood violin, but is it worth getting the specialist stuff, or is there a decent mass-market brand available?
If we really want to convey the literal meaning of those sorts of sentences, without creating other implications, what we do is tend towards the minimum necessary information when we really want to give the literal meaning of the words. Further information can be divulged later.
- a good company
- a good president
- systems supervisor for hire
I’ll come back to this issue next time. That's plenty of post for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment