Re: linguistic terminology question

John, Fahad,

thanks for responding.

My first intuition about 'word family' is that this is more of a 
grouping (don't even want to call it a category) of words containing a 
specific root pattern. The semantic meaning is different between the 
members of the group.

Not sure about 'expression'. It's use seems to indicate there is a need 
to define a better, more indicating term.

I have been trying to associate relationships corresponding to the 
various prefixes/suffixes to facilitate a transformation from/to e.g. 
the root noun form to an adjective, adjective to a comparative, noun to 
verb, ... and with it generate/recognize synonymous phrases.

The term 'lexeme' is defined for the morphological derivations within a 
semantic role and language. The next layer (in direction of semantics) 
would be an 'interlingual lexeme', for lack of a better word, which 
represents the 'lexeme' translated into another language (if that 
exists). Comparatives and superlatives are different syntactic roles, 
but of the same syntactic type (IMHO). They would be different 'lexemes'.

On the 'interlingual' level we can now see a bit of 'semantic' shining 
through. The level certainly satisfies the 'actionable' criteria. The 
next step is to link the 'interlinguals' to the 'pattern', in their 
specific syntactic roles.

With a narrow definition of 'semantic', each 'interlingual' has it's own 
meaning.  One could argue the whole complex around a root word (within a 
language) is a 'family', but I am missing the 'semantic' aspect of it.

Maybe the pattern should be called a 'semantic complex', with an 
equivalent variant on the level within a language ('lexical (root) 
complex')?

Tom


On 11/01/2016 03:17 AM, Fahad Khan wrote:
> Hi Tom, John, all,
>
> This is actually quite a useful point to bring up; it becomes
> extremely important in discussing lexicons in languages with a root
> and pattern morphology like Arabic and Hebrew. Another term, aside
> from word family, that I have seen in the lexicographic literature is
> 'expression', used "to refer to a word cluster composed of a lexical
> root plus all its morphological derivations (such as prefixed verbs or
> suffixed adverbs), as well as their orthographical, declensional and
> inflectional variants" (Diaz-Vera 2014).
>
> I have used "expression" in my diachronic extension of lemon.
>
> Cheers
> Fahad
>
> Diaz-Vera 2014. From Cognitive Linguistics to Historical
> Sociolinguistics :The evolution of Old English expressions of shame
> and guilt
>
> On 1 November 2016 at 10:54, John McCrae <john@mccr.ae> wrote:
>> Hello Tom,
>>
>> I don't think it is overstepping the boundaries of the group.
>>
>> I would say that you are talking about word families.
>>
>> Regards,
>> John
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 6:00 PM, tknorr <tknorr@neurocollective.com> wrote:
>>> Apologies for potentially mis-using this list.
>>>
>>> What is the correct term for a pattern of related lexemes (of different
>>> syntactic roles, but same sematic root) e.g NN'building', VB'to build',
>>> JJ'built', JJ'building', .....Is it a 'sememe'? Entry in a thesaurus?
>>>
>>> I think the pattern can be exploited in computational linguistic to
>>> complete a dictionary by generating all words of the pattern,
>>> indiscriminately of their actual existence in a language and then using a
>>> Darwinist rule to eliminate any non-existing words from it.
>>>
>>> Again, apologies if this oversteps the group use, you can respond to my
>>> e-mail directly if you have an answer or a lead.
>>>
>>> Thank you,
>>>
>>> Tom
>>>
>>>
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 1 November 2016 14:50:19 UTC