Compositionality

The first possibility is that the meanings of cut one’s foot, cut the grass, cut a cake, etc., result compositionally from the meaning of the verb cut and the meanings of its noun objects. The meaning of cut the grass just is the meaning of cut combined with the meaning of grass. This might work in one of two ways.

• The general meaning hypothesis: Cut might have the same vague or general meaning in all its different collocations: it refers to some act of accomplishing a material breach in a surface, with the particular details of each type of breach being inferred by the listener, rather than being built into the meaning of the verb itself.

Alternatively,

• The multiple meaning hypothesis: Cut might have a separate meaning in each collocation: the cut in cut one’s foot has its own entry in the mental lexicon (‘breach surface of, usually accidentally’), as does the cut of cut the grass (‘sever one part of surface from another, usually deliberately’).

Problems with the general meaning hypothesis The problem with the first option is that describing this common core of general meaning supposedly present in all cases of cut is not necessarily an easy matter (see section 2.6): the Concise Oxford 2004 edition gives ‘make an opening, incision, or wound with a sharp tool or object’ as its definition, but this is not involved when someone cuts butter, for example, nor when a whip cuts someone’s flesh: the cutting object in these situations need not be sharp. Perhaps, then, we need to dismiss these uses as in some way special or extended and therefore absolve them from the scope of the vague definition: perhaps ‘make an opening, incision, or wound with a sharp tool or object’ will work for all the others. Even if it does, though, we still have a problem: the definition does not adequately distinguish cut from chop, slit, stab or unpick: to chop a sausage, slit a letter, stab someone’s side or unpick a seam is equally to ‘make an opening, incision, or wound with a sharp tool or object’, but we could not also describe these actions as cutting. In our effort to formulate the most general definition possible, we have drawn the net too wide and failed to distinguish cut from various non-synonymous verbs in the same semantic field.

QUESTION Can you formulate a general definition of cut which avoids these problems? Consider other possible cutting objects, like cheese cutting wire.

QUESTION Another example of a similar problem would be the verb crush in contexts like crush petals in the hand, crush paper, crush sugar and crush a car under concrete: in spite of the presence of the same verb, the action involved, and the resulting state of the object, differ considerably with each collocation. Can you formulate an adequate general definition which distinguishes crush from related verbs like bend, crease, fold and squash?

The prototype-based models of meaning discussed in Chapter 7 constitute a possible response to problems of this sort.

 Problems with the multiple meaning hypothesis The second option is to propose multiple meanings for cut, a separate one for each collocation. In cut one’s foot, for example, cut could be described as meaning something like ‘partially breach a surface with a sharp instrument, typically accidentally’: when one cuts one’s foot, one typically does not detach one’s foot from the rest of the body (this would be cutting it off). In cut the grass, and cut someone’s hair, on the other hand, the verb conveys the meaning of more than just a partial breach in the surface of the object: the meaning of these collocations is that one part of the object is completely detached from the rest. Now consider cut a notch: here the object is brought into being by the action of the verb: if I cut a notch into a stick, the notch did not exist before I created it. As a result, the meaning of cut in cut a notch could be paraphrased as ‘create by breaching with a sharp instrument’, an entirely different meaning from that found in the other collocations, which all presuppose the prior existence of the object being cut. Again, when we talk of a whip cutting someone’s skin, we have the meaning of breach to a surface, as in cutting one’s foot, but without the usual element of ‘sharp object’: being made of leather, whips are not normally considered as sharp.

We have, then, a list of different meanings of cut:

 • ‘partially breach surface with a sharp instrument, typically acciden tally’,

• ‘create by partially breaching the surface with a sharp instrument’,

 • ‘detach one part of object from another with one’s hands’,

• ‘detach one part of object from another with a sharp instrument’, etc.

These will all have highly specific collocational restrictions: the meaning ‘partially breach surface with a sharp instrument, typically accidentally’, for example, will be a very likely sense of cut in collocation with foot, but not with cake: cutting a cake is usually an entirely deliberate action. And the meaning ‘create by partially breaching a surface with a sharp instrument’ is quasi-obligatory in cut a notch, but excluded in cut wood, which does not, as we have seen, involve any creation.

This second option has two problems. The first is the sheer number of the different senses to be attributed to cut. Since the action of cutting in each of the examples in question is slightly different, we seem to need a very large range of different senses. While it is clearly impossible to defi ne the meaning of cut in just a single paraphrase – extended meanings like cut text, cut a disc, etc., seem to demand a distinct set of definitions – the recognition of a different sense of cut in each of the collocations seems to fail to do justice to the fact that it is the same verb in all collocations: as a result, we have some reason to think that it is also the same meaning that is involved in all of them. Furthermore, given the assumptions about the organization of the ‘mental lexicon’ mentioned above (2.1.1), the attribution of a separate meaning to cut in each collocation has struck many linguists as inefficient and inelegant, given the explosion it entails in the number of separate verb entries: we no more want to propose separate ‘mental lexicon’ entries for the cut of cut a cake and cut one’s foot than we would expect to find separate entries in a dictionary.

The second problem is related: given this variety of different possible meanings of cut, how does the correct specific meaning get chosen in a given case? How does a hearer know that the appropriate interpretation of cut in cut a deck of cards is ‘detach one part of object from another with one’s hands’ and not ‘create by partially breaching the integrity of a sur face with a sharp instrument’? The second option would clearly be wrong, and our theory of the meaning of the expressions needs some way to exclude it. Yet the description of the process of word sense disambiguation is highly problematic, the best current computational models significantly failing to match human ability (see 8.2.2 for details).

We can now recap the discussion up to this point. We have been considering the possibility that the meaning of collocations like cut one’s foot, cut the grass etc. are derived compositionally from the meanings of their elements. We looked at two options for the details of this. The first is that the meaning of cut is general or vague in each collocation. This creates the problem of adequately defining this general or vague meaning in a way which distinguished cut from other non-synonymous verbs. The second option is that cut has a separate meaning in each collocation. But if we adopt this solution we find that the number of definitions of cut explodes. Confronted with this vast array of different meanings, how do speakers know which one to choose in any given case? The compositional solution therefore seems quite problematic. This is not to say that we should reject it, just that it involves us in complex questions. Let us now look at the non-compositional solution.

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المزيد

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هواية تعزز صحة ونشاط الدماغ بشكل ملحوظ

كيف يمكن للصيام أن يطيل العمر؟!

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

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كارثة بيئية في العراق.. نفوق 1000 طن من الأسماك ؟!

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

non-compositionality

Meanings above the word level: idioms

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