И. В. Арнольд
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§ 8.5 SUBSTANTIVATION The question now arises whether such cases when words with an adjective stem have the paradigm of a noun should also be classified as conversion, e. g. a private, the private*s uniform, a group of privates. Other examples of words that are completely substantivized (i.e. ma, have the plural form or be used in the Possessive case) are captive, conservative, criminal, female, fugitive, grown-up, intellectual, male, mild, native, neutral, radical, red, relative and many more. Completely substantivized adjectives may be associated with determinatives, e. g.: Swinton combed out all the undesirables (Lindsay). There is no universally accepted evaluation of this group. E. Kruis-inga2 speaks of conversion whenever a word receives a syntactic function which is not its basic one. The prevailing standpoint among Leningrad linguists is different. L.P. Vinokurova, I.P. Ivanova and some other scholars maintain that substantivation in which adjectives have the paradigm and syntactic features of nouns differs from conversion, as in substantivation a new word arises not spontaneously but gradually, so that a word already existing in the language by and by acquires a new syntactic function ana* changes its meaning as a result of a gradual process of isolation. There are other scholars, however, who think this reasoning open to doubt: the coining of a new word is at first nothing but a fact of contextual usage, be it a case of recognized conversion or substantivation. The process of conversion is impossible outside a context. No isolated word can ever be formed by conversion. L.P. Vinokurova distinguishes two main types of substantivation: (1) it may be the outcome of ellipsis in an attributive phrase, e. g. the elastic (cord), or (2) it may be due to an unusual syntactic functioning. E.g.: I am a contemplative, one of the impossibles. It may be argued, however, that there must be a moment of the first omission of the determined word or the first instance when the adjective is used in speech in a new function. There is one more point to be considered, namely a radical difference at the synchronic level: whereas words coined by conversion form regular pairs of homonyms with words from which they are derived, no such regular pattern of modelled homonymy is possible in substantivation of adjectives. It has already been emphasized that in nouns and verbs it is the morphologically simple words that form the bulk of material used in conversion. The predominance of derived adjectives prevents this class of words from entering modelled homonymy. 1  Much interesting research has been done in the dissertation by S.M. Kostenko (see p. 160); see also Quirk R. and Greenbaum S. A University Grammar ol English. London, 1973, p.p. 441-444.2 See: Kruisinga E. A Handbook of Present-Day English. Groningen, 1932. Pt. II, p.p. 99-161. 161 The degree of substantivation may be different. Alongside with complete substantivation of the type already mentioned (the private, the private’s, the privates), there exists partial substantivation. In this last case a substantivised adjective or participle denotes a group or a class of people: the blind, the dead, the English, the poor, the rich, the accused, the condemned, the living, the unemployed, the wounded, the lower-paid. We call these words partially substantivised, because they undergo no morphological changes, i.e. do not acquire a new paradigm and are only used with the definite article and a collective meaning. Besides they keep some properties of adjectives. They can, for instance, be modified by adverbs. E.g.: Success is the necessary misfortune of human life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early (Trollope). It was the suspicious and realistic, I thought, who were most easy to reassure. It was the same in love: the extravagantly jealous sometimes needed only a single word to be transported into absolute trust (Snow). Besides the substantivised adjectives denoting human beings there is a considerable group of abstract nouns, as is well illustrated by such grammatical terms as: the Singular, the Plural, the Present, the Past, the Future, and also: the evil, the good, the impossible. For instance: “One should never struggle against the inevitable,” he said (Christie)/ It is thus evident that substantivation has been the object of much controversy. Some of those, who do not accept substantivation of adjectives as a variant of conversion, consider conversion as a process limited to the formation of verbs from nouns and nouns from verbs. But this point of view is far from being universally accepted. § 8.6 CONVERSION IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF SPEECH In this paragraph we present the types of conversion according to parts of speech and secondary word classes involved. By secondary word classes we mean lexico-grammatical classes, that is subsets within parts of speech that differ in meaning and functions, as, for instance, transitive and intransitive verbs, countable and uncountable nouns, gradable and non-gradable adjectives, and so on. We know already that the most frequent types of conversion are those from noun to verb, from verb to noun and from adjective to noun and to verb. The first type seems especially important, conversion being the main process of verb-formation at present. Less frequent but also quite possible is conversion from form words to nouns. E. g. He liked to know the ins and outs. I shan’t go into the whys and wherefores. He was familiar with ups and downs of life. Use is even made of affixes. Thus, ism is a separate word nowadays meaning ‘a set of ideas or principles’, e. g. Freudism, existentialism and all the other isms. In all the above examples the change of paradigm is present and helpful for classifying the newly coined words as cases of conversion. But it is not absolutely necessary, because conversion is not limited to such parts of speech which possess a paradigm. That, for example, may be converted into an adverb in informal speech: I was that hungry I could have eaten a horse. 162 R. Quirk and his colleagues extend the notion of conversion to re-classification of secondary word classes within one part of speech, a phenomenon also called transposition. Thus, mass nouns and abstract nouns are converted into countable nouns with the meanings ‘a unit of N’, ‘a kind of N’, ‘an instance of N’. E. g. two coffees, different oils (esp. in technical literature), peaceful initiatives. The next commonest change is changing of intransitive verbs into transitive: to run a horse in a race, to march the prisoners, to dive a plane. Other secondary verb-classes can be changed likewise. Non-gradable adjectives become gradable with a certain change of meaning: He is more English than the English. We share a more traditional approach and treat transposition within one part of speech as resulting in lexico-semantic variation of one and the same word, not as coining a new one (see § 3.4). § 8.7 CONVERSION AND OTHER TYPES OF WORD-FORMATION The flexibility of the English vocabulary system makes a word formed by conversion capable of further derivation, so that it enters into combinations not only with functional but also with derivational affixes characteristic of a verbal stem, and becomes distributionally equivalent to it. For example, view ‘to watch television’ gives viewable, viewer, viewing. Conversion may be combined with other word-building processes, such as composition. Attributive phrases like black ball, black list, pin point, stone wall form the basis of such firmly established verbs as blackball, blacklist, pinpoint, stonewall. The same pattern is much used in nonce-words such as to my-dear, to my-love, to blue-pencil. This type should be distinguished from cases when composition and conversion are not simultaneous, that is when, for instance, a compound noun gives rise to a verb: corkscrew n : : corkscrew v; streamline n : : streamline v. A special pattern deserving attention because of its ever increasing productivity results as a combined effect of composition and conversion forming nouns out of verb-adverb combinations. This type is different from conversion proper as the basic forms are not homonymous due to the difference in the stress pattern, although they consist of identical morphemes. Thanks to solid or hyphenated spelling and single stress the noun stem obtains phonetical and graphical integrity and indivisibility absent in the verb-group, сf. to ‘draw ‘back : : a ‘drawback. Further examples are: blackout n : : black out v; breakdown n : : break down v; come-back, drawback, fall-out, hand-out, hangover, knockout, link-up, lookout, lockout, makeup, pull-over, runaway, run-off, set-back, take-off, takeover, teach-in. The type is specifically English, its intense and growing development is due to the profusion of verbal collocations (see p. 120 ff) and con- 11* 163 version. So it is one more manifestation of the systematic character of the vocabulary. A noun ot the same type may also be due to a more complicated process, i.e. composition, conversion and ellipsis, e. g. drive in : : a drive-in theatre : : a drive-in. R.S. Rosenberg points out that semantically these nouns keep a certain connection with the prototype verbal phrase. They always reflect some verbal notion in their meaning and are clearly motivated. In case of polysemy their various meanings are often derived from different meanings of the verb-adverb combination and enter its semantic structure so that the resulting relationship is similar to what has been described for the word bank (see p. 160). There is a kind of double process when first a noun is formed by conversion from a verbal stem, and next this noun is combined with such verbs as give, make, have, take and a few others to form a verbal phrase with a special aspect characteristic, e. g. have a wash/a chat/a smtnl a smoke/a look; give a laugh/a cry la whistle; give the go by. A noun of this type can also denote intermittent motion: give a jerk/a jump/a stagger, a start; take a ride/a walk/the lead; make a move la dive. There is a great number of idiomatic prepositional phrases as well: be in the know, in the long run, of English make, get into a scrape. Sometimes the elements of these expressions have a fixed grammatical form, as for instance in the following, where the noun is always plural: It gives me the creeps (or the jumps), You can have it for keeps {for good). In other cases the grammar forms are free to change. Phrases or even sentences are sometimes turned into nouns and adjectives by a combination of conversion and composition. E.g.: Old man what-do-you-call-huns book is on sale. Chapter 9 SET EXPRESSIONS § 9.1 INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. DEFINITIONS The present chapter deals with word-groups consisting of two or more words whose combination is integrated as a unit with a specialized meaning of the whole, such as not for the world, with half a heart* tips and downs, for love or money, off and on, up to the mark, ships that pass in the night, close at hand, give a green light to, red-letter day, sleep like a log, that's a horse of another colour, can the leopard change his spots? it goes without saying, and so on. Stability of such word-groups viewed in terms of statistical probability of co-occurrence for the member words has been offered as a reliable criterion helping to distinguish set expressions from free phrases with variable context. The chapter has received its heading because of the great ambiguity of the terms phraseology and idioms which are also widely accepted. Opinions differ as to how this part of the vocabulary should be defined, classified, described and analysed. To make matters worse no two authors agree upon the terminology they use. The word "phraseology", for instance, has ver\ different meanings in this country and in Great Britain or the United States. In Soviet linguistic literature the term has come to be used for the whole ensemble of expressions where the meaning of one element is dependent on the other, irrespective of the structure and properties of the unit (V.V. Vinogradov); with other authors it denotes only such set expressions which, as distinguished from idioms, do not possess expressiveness or emotional colouring (A.I. Smirnitsky), and also vice versa: only those that are imaginative, expressive and emotional (the author of the present book in a previous work). N.N. Amosova overcomes the subjectiveness of the two last mentioned approaches when she insists on the term being applicable only to what she calls fixed context units, i.e. units in which it is impossible to substitute any of the components without changing the meaning not only of the whole unit but also of the elements that remain intact. O.S. Ahmanova has repeatedly insisted on the semantic integrity of such phrases prevailing over the structural separateness of their elements. A.V. Koonin lays stress on the structural separateness of the elements in a phraseological unit, on the change of meaning in the whole as compared with its elements taken separately and on a certain minimum stability. All these authors use the same word "phraseology" to denote the branch of linguistics studying the word-groups they have in mind. 165 Continued intelligent devotion to the problems of phraseology of such scholars as N.N. Amosova, A.V. Koonin and many many others has turned phraseology into a full-fledged linguistic discipline; we include it into this course of lexicology only because so far this is where it belongs according to the curriculum.1 In English and American linguistics the situation is very different. No special branch of study exists, and the term "phraseology" is a stylistic one meaning, according to Webster's dictionary, 'mode of expression, peculiarities of diction, i.e. choice and arrangement of words and phrases characteristic of some author or some literary work*. The word "idiom" is even more polysemantic. The English use it to denote a mode of expression peculiar to a language, without differentiating between the grammatical and lexical levels. It may also mean a group of words whose meaning it is difficult or impossible to understand from the knowledge of the words considered separately. Moreover, "idiom" may be synonymous to the words "language" or "dialect", denoting a form of expression peculiar to a people, a country, a district, or to one individual. There seems to be no point in enumerating further possibilities. The word "phrase" is no less polysemantic. The term set expression is on the contrary more definite and self-explanatory, because the first element points out the most important characteristic of these units, namely, their stability, their fixed and ready-made nature. The word "expression" suits our purpose, because it is a general term including words, groups of words and sentences, so that both ups and downs and that's a horse of another colour are expressions. That is why in the present chapter we shall use this term in preference to all the others. § 9.2 SET EXPRESSIONS, SEMI-FIXED COMBINATIONS AND FREE PHRASES Changeable and Unchangeable Set Expressions Every utterance is a patterned, rhythmed and segmented sequence of signals. On the lexical level these signals building up the utterance arc not exclusively words. Alongside with separate words speakers use larger blocks consisting of more than one word yet functioning as a whole. These set expressions are extremely variegated structurally, functionally, semantically and stylistically. Not only expressive colloquialisms, whether motivated like a sight for sore eyes and to know the ropes, or demotivated like tit for fat, but also terms like blank verse, the great vouel shift, direct object, political cliches: cold war, round-table conference, summit meeting, and emotionally and stylistically neutral combinations: in front of, as well as, a great deal, give up, etc. ma} be referred to this type. Even this short list is sufficient to show 1 For a concise summary formulation of all the moot points in this new branch of linguistics and a comprehensive bibliography the reader is referred to the works of A.V. Koonin.166 that the number of component elements, both notional and formal, varies, and that the resulting units may have the distribution of different parts of speech. Set expressions have sometimes been called "word equivalents", and it has been postulated by A.I. Smirnitsky that the vocabulary of a language consists of words and word equivalents (word-groups), similar to words in so far as they are not created in speech but introduced into the act of communication ready-made. It is most important to keep in mind that here equivalence means only this and nothing more. Much confusion ensues from taking equivalence too literally. It does not concern us at thisstagewhether word equivalents have other features similar to those of words although we naturally hope that being guided by the most important primary feature we shall obtain in its wake important secondary characteristics. That is, we have reason to expect that at least some of the units will show indivisibility, express one action, and function as one member of the sentence, but in selecting the units we shall not take these secondary characteristics into consideration. Go off 'to explode' and similar constructions form a boundary set of phrasal verbs described in the chapter of compounds. The above approach is not the only one possible, but it meets the demands of applied linguistics, especially foreign language teaching and information retrieval. In both fields set expressions form a section of the vocabulary which has to be set apart and learned or introduced to pupils and into the "memory" of machines as whole stereotype groups of words. The integration of two or more words into a unit functioning as a whole with a characteristic unity of nomination (bread and butter =j= butter and bread) is chosen for the fundamental property, because it seems to permit checking by a rigorous enough linguistic procedure, namely, by the substitution test. Set expressions are contrasted to free phrases and semifixed combinations. All these are but different stages of restrictions imposed upon co-occurrence of words, upon the lexical filling of structural patterns which are specific for even' language. The restrictions may be independent of the ties existing in extra-linguistic reality between the objects spoken of and be conditioned by purely linguistic factors, or have extra-linguistic causes in the history of the people. In free combinations the linguistic factors are chiefly connected with grammatical properties of words. A free phrase such as to go early permits substitution of any of its elements without semantic change in the other element or elements. The verb go in free phrases may be preceded by any noun or followed by any adverbial. Such substitution is, however, never unlimited. In semi-fixed combinations we are not only able to say that such substitutes exist, but fix their boundaries by stating the semantic properties of words that can be used for substitution, or even listing them. That is to say, in semi-fixed combinations these lexico-semantic limits are manifest in restrictions imposed upon types of words which can be used in a given pattern. For example, the pattern consisting of the verb go followed by a preposition and a noun with no article before 167 it (go to school, go to market, go to courts, etc.) is used only with nouns of places where definite actions or functions are performed. If substitution is only pronominal, or restricted to a few synonyms for one of the members only, or impossible, i.e. if the elements of the phrase are always the same and make a fixed context for each other, the word-group is a set expression. No substitution of any elements whatever is possible in the following stereotyped (unchangeable) set expressions, which differ in many other respects: all the world and his wife, the man in the street, red tape, calf love, heads or tails, first night, to gild the pill, to hope for the best, busy as a bee, fair and square, stuff and nonsense, time and again, to and fro. These examples represent the extreme of restrictions defined by probabilities of co-occurrence of words in the English language. Here _no_yari-ztion and no substitution is possible, because it would destroy the meaning or the euphonic and expressive qualities of the whole. Many of these expressions are also interesting from the viewpoint of their informational characteristics, i.e. the sum total of information contained in the word-group including expressiveness and stylistic and emotional colouring is created by mutual interaction of elements. The expression red tape, for instance, as a derogatory name for trivial bureaucratic formalities originates in the old custom of Government officials and lawyers tying up their papers with red tape. Heads or tails comes from the old custom of deciding a dispute or settling which of two possible alternatives shall be followed by tossing a coin. In a free phrase the semantic correlative ties are fundamentally different. The information is additive and each element has a much greater semantic independence. Each component may be substituted without affecting the meaning of the other: cut bread, cut cheese, eat bread. Information is additive in the sense that the amount of information we had on receiving the first signal, i.e. having heard or read the word cut, is increased, the listener obtains further details and learns what is cut. The reference of cut is unchanged. Every notional word can form additional syntactic ties with other words outside the expression. In a set expression information furnished by each element is not additive: actually it does not exist before we get the whole. No substitution for either cut or figure can be made without completely ruining the following: / had an uneasy fear that he might cut a poor figure beside all these clever Russian officers (Shaw). He was not managing to cut much of a figure [ (Murdoch). The only substitution admissible for the expression cut a poor figure concerns the adjective. Poor may be substituted by ridiculous, grand, much of a and a few other adjectives characterizing the way in which a person's behaviour may appear to others. The very limited character of this substitution seems to justify referring cut a poor figure to semifixed set expressions. In the stereotyped set expression cut no ice 'to have no influence' no substitution is possible. Pronominal substitution of constant elements is also possible. N.N. Amosova shows that it needs context to stand explained. E. g. A sullen December morning. Black 168 frost. Such frost reminded me of my last days in Stanton (Mitford). Black frost means 'frost without ice or snow*. In a free combination the adjective would denote colour. It receives this different meaning only in correlation with the word frost. The pronoun such when replacing it also signals this new meaning. But pronominal replacement of this kind, according to N.N. Amosova, is possible onh under certain very definite circumstances, which shows how close are the semantic ties between the parts of a set expression. Numerous intermediate types existing between free combinations r the one hand, and set expressions on the other, cause many discussions. These are the hoary problems of the units described as stone &allt give up and take a walk types. We discussed them together with compounds. The so-called typical phrases or phrasal verbs: get a talk with, give c laugh, give a look, force a smile, make a blush, 'ji-ear a grin, etc. are se-mantically almost equivalent to the corresponding simple verbs talkt laugh, look, smile and so on, yet they are more expressive, allowing syntactic expansion and inversion. E. g.: She only gave him one of her deep-gleaming smiles; And there was that glance she had- given him. |