sinclair's idiom principle

A Q for Colin | Pinkie | May 16th, 2002

Colin: Have you ever come across a detailed definition of the "traditional-grammar" of-phrase categories "possessive", "appositive", "partitive" etc.? I'm onto Huddleston "Intro to G of E", the big Longman grammar eds. Biber et al., and Sinclair's "Corpus, Concordance, Collocation" (which offers a radically different "lexical" classification). D'you know of anything else?

Best again

Pinkie

Re: A Q for Colin | Mary Lynn Hughes | May 21st, 2002

I'm not sure what your Q to Colin is about and I don't want to butt in (says she, butting in), but what is the 'radically different' lexical classification in Sinclair you're referring to? I ask because I got rather deeply into the theory he outlines in 'CCC', esp what he calls the 'Idiom Principle' and of course, I'd be happy to give you my point of view on all that!!

Cheers and hope you had a good weekend,

Mary Lynn

Re: A Q for Colin | Colin Graham | May 21st, 2002

I'm not sure what your Q to Colin is about and I don't want to butt in (says she, butting in), but what is the 'radically different' lexical classification in Sinclair you're referring to?

If you've got CCC, then you could do the kind of thing Sinclair does with 'of' in terms of looking for grouping of patterns and saying how they operate at a discourse level, rather than a sentence level.

The 'radical difference' is, I think, the fact that Sinclair suggests 'of' should be in a category of its own (i.e. not a preposition) based on the lexical evidence that he put forward.

Anyway, that's more than enough ramble from me for just now. Hope this helps rather than confuses!

Have phun!

Colin
:-)

GE/TDA: of-phrases, mostly | Pinkie | May 21st, 2002

Hi C, J, ML and anybody else who enjoys the linguisticky bits...

Mary Lynn: I was referring to Sinclair's lexical classification of N1+of+N2 phrases in CCC (chapter 6), which I've just discovered, and which I'm finding very interesting. I have rather a love-hate relationship with Sinclair and his "radically lexical" approach. I don't know what his Idiom Principle is: please enlighten us! As regards his classification of of-phrases: I find his categories to be rather fluffy (and I mean fluffy, not fuzzy), and his approach in many ways highly subjective. Some of his insights I think are helpful, others not- I certainly think classifications of this type are more useful for dictionaries than for reference grammars, and I find his suggestion that he's doing "grammar" to be unhelpful. As I say, I'm chewing through him at the moment. He's certainly made me ditch my current corpus analysis and adopt his maxim of not rejecting anything: i.e. in my case randomly select 100 N1+of+N2 phrases and try to classify ALL of them.

Pinkie
Spain

Re: Defined text | Mary Lynn Hughes | May 21st, 2002

Sorry, I don't have time to go into Sinclair in detail, but his 'Idiom Principle' attempts to account for language that doesn't fit what he calls the 'Open Choice Principle' (this is all in Ch 8 'Collocation'). The Idiom Principle allows that there are 'semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments' (p 110). He then goes on to analyse them- not the 'segments', but the kinds of phrases, their structure, semantic prosody, etc... Basically, we're talking multi-word lexical items or 'chunks' (this was my LEX assignment topic) and I broadly agree with his Idiom P. However, I have a problem with his overall approach and, since I don't have time to re-read and re-think it, will just paste part of something I wrote about that when I was doing LEX:

It seems to me that he largely disregards the essential role of (communicative) context, i.e. that the meaning is not 'in' the words or text. Although he makes passing reference to shared meaning in discourse communities, his approach seems to be at heart a formal, systems one. For example, he particularly emphasises the connection between sense and 'structure' (defined as lexical-syntactic) (p.104f), and sees the task as identifying ' "citation forms" for each distinct sense', for which 'distinguishing features' would then be given (p.105). (The latter made me think of Katz & Fodor, and indeed, they later show up as semantic features, e.g. 'definiteness' or 'indefiniteness', p.107.) [...] What I find most worrying, however, is that throughout he refers to the 'distinct meanings (or senses) of a word', with the apparent implication that words have meanings. At times it seems to me that he wants to have it both ways. While he asserts the primacy of actual language data (though stating the necessity for a 'generalisation' from examples, p.99-101) and argues strongly for multi-word segments as wholes (even proposing an 'idiom principle' for language creation, in tandem, but distinct from an 'open-choice principle'*, p.110), at the same time he wants to apply analytic processes to extract the meaning from actual texts (e.g. '...in order to explain the way in which meaning arises from language text, we have to advance two different principles of interpretation', p.109).

In his, to me, rather narrow view of the 'open-choice principle', as elsewhere, he leaves out the essential element of context in influencing or constraining language choice- especially how pre-existing shared meanings influence lexical choices, e.g. via intertextuality, allusion, etc.

Don't know if this makes any sense to you. Remember that I wrote it several years ago, when I was green and innocent! Actually, I think you will strongly agree with Sinclair on this and disagree with me!

Mary Lynn

Re: Defining text | Pinkie | May 21st, 2002

Hi Mary Lynn:

Many thanks for the Sinclair stuff, which I'm still chewing away at: it's getting quite soggy.