hotdogs galore
This is another linguistics-related post I'm afraid, but it's what's sloshing around in my head at the moment so I might as well put it somewhere.
It's to do with compounds. In the world of real science, a compound is something that's made of two or more elements joined together - for example, you can join the reactive metal sodium with the poisonous gas chlorine, and the compound is sodium chloride, or salt, neither a metal nor a gas but something with properties all of its own.
In the world of linguistics (no comment as to its scientific credentials), you have roughly the same idea. If you combine "hot" and "dog" you get "hotdog," which is usually not a dog and might not always be particularly hot. You can't just add the words together and get a transparent meaning from the sum of the parts: the meaning of the compound word belongs all to itself.
But I keep reading books and journal articles which talk about "hotdogs" as compounds in one sentence, and in the next sentence they're trying to analyse it as if it consisted of two independent words, "dog" and "hot". This means they tie themselves up in all sorts of knots ... there's even an analysis that ends up with Word as a sub-category of Compound, which makes about as much sense as saying that Britain is a subcategory of Scotland, or Animal is a subcategory of Horse. If that's the kind of thing that gets published ... I wonder how many other gruesome fallacies are out there that nobody's noticed yet.
Anyway, just thought I'd get that wee grumble out into the open. Normal service should resume soon.
It's to do with compounds. In the world of real science, a compound is something that's made of two or more elements joined together - for example, you can join the reactive metal sodium with the poisonous gas chlorine, and the compound is sodium chloride, or salt, neither a metal nor a gas but something with properties all of its own.
In the world of linguistics (no comment as to its scientific credentials), you have roughly the same idea. If you combine "hot" and "dog" you get "hotdog," which is usually not a dog and might not always be particularly hot. You can't just add the words together and get a transparent meaning from the sum of the parts: the meaning of the compound word belongs all to itself.
But I keep reading books and journal articles which talk about "hotdogs" as compounds in one sentence, and in the next sentence they're trying to analyse it as if it consisted of two independent words, "dog" and "hot". This means they tie themselves up in all sorts of knots ... there's even an analysis that ends up with Word as a sub-category of Compound, which makes about as much sense as saying that Britain is a subcategory of Scotland, or Animal is a subcategory of Horse. If that's the kind of thing that gets published ... I wonder how many other gruesome fallacies are out there that nobody's noticed yet.
Anyway, just thought I'd get that wee grumble out into the open. Normal service should resume soon.
posted by cath at
9:20 pm
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