Corpora: other relevant works about prefabs
bill_mann@sil.org
Fri, 06 Aug 1999 09:42:35 -0400
There are a few other relevant lines of work on prefabs.
1. Without using the manufacturing or fabrication
metaphors, a lot of linguistics has been done on something
called "collocations." It is a good search term into the
literature.
2. I don't think anyone in this discussion has mentioned
the work of Igor Melcuk. He is a Russian linguist now
working in Canada (Montreal?) Anyway, he has a systematic
classification of formation principles for collocations.
He can tell us why (or at least how) we have "bus driver"
and "airplane pilot" but not "bus pilot." He has about 60
of these principles. Sorry, I don't have references, but
his work is worth reading and has been followed up by
others.
3. There is a Longman's dictionary of word combinations in
English. As I recall, it is several hundred pages long and
has about 40 to 50 entries per page, and it skips the most
routine constructions.
Happy trails.
Bill Mann