LINGUIST List 33.1150
Wed Mar 30 2022
Review: Applied Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Writing Systems: Sanchez-Stockhammer (2020)
Editor for this issue: Amalia Robinson <amalialinguistlist.org>
Date: 10-Jan-2022
From: Jesús Fernández-Domínguez <jesusferdom
gmail.com>
Subject: English Compounds and their Spelling
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AUTHOR: Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer
TITLE: English Compounds and their Spelling
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2020
REVIEWER: Jesús Fernández-Domínguez, Universidad de Granada
SUMMARY
This monograph studies the nature and variables that configure the spelling of compounding in contemporary English. The investigation considers compounds from all major word-classes in British English, with occasional allusions to the American variety. The book is made up of an introduction plus seven chapters, distributed among three parts, and it comes with lists of figures and tables, appendices, and a subject index.
Part I (“Theoretical background”) embraces Chapters 2 and 3, and is intended as the notional buttress for the empirical components in the remainder of the book. In Chapter 2 (“Delimitating the compound concept”) compounds are brought face to face with other competing linguistic entities, such as phrases, other lexemes, multi-word items, and names. Of these, the discussion of compound versus phrase is the lengthiest and deepest, as this dichotomy has been present in English language studies from as early as Jespersen (1914). The author considers formal, syntactic, structural, and semantic criteria in her condensed discussion of this century-long debate. The following three subsections contrast compounds with other lexemes, with multi-word items, and with names. A number of topics are dealt with succinctly, such as difficulties in distinguishing bound from free morphemes (i.e. forms like after-), the blurred distinction between blends and compounds, and the possible diachronic relevance of back-formations. Subsection 2.5 (“Compound types”) is a noteworthy contribution, largely because of its examination of both major and minor compound types, as presented through the discussion of their possible length, structure, part of speech, and spelling. The classification and discussion of English compound types is fine-grained, visually clear, and importantly contains constant reference to whether an open, hyphenated, or solid spelling is attested for each compound subtype (this feature is picked up later in the monograph). The chapter closes with a summary, which presents the author’s own views on compounding and paves the way for the experiments in Parts II and III. Chapter 3 (“The normative background”) turns to the topics of norm, prescriptivism, and standardization in relation to compound spelling. In 3.1, the author builds her argumentation from the assumption that “correct” spelling matters and that language users generally “[…] will try to comply with norms, even if these norms are only implicit” (62-63). This subsection brings in issues like power, control, sense of superiority, stability, tradition, and orthography as a marker of identity and as a marketable asset, all of which allegedly play a role in how language is perceived and used depending on the producer, receiver, context, aims of the message, etc. Compounds come into play more clearly in 3.2 (“The originators of spelling norms”), which goes through the entities that, in the absence of an official academy for the orthography and usage of the English language, have taken part in shaping its spelling. This section is a sociocultural assessment of factors that may have had an effect on the orthographic conventions of English, from the death of Queen Anne (a supporter of an academy of the English language) in 1714, to the educational policies of different governments in English-speaking countries and the role of publishers’ style guides. Relevant points in this section are the demystification of lexicographical resources, which often mean “a naïve trust in the truth of reference works” for the average language user, and the recognition of the prominent role of language users, who have very clear views about their language’s orthography as shaped historical events (spelling reforms of German, English, and Polish are discussed). Chapters 2 and 3 serve as self-contained reviews providing complementary perspectives: linguistic, with a focus on morphology and syntax, in Chapter 2, and normative in Chapter 3.
Part II (“Empirical study of English compound spelling”), composed of Chapters 4 and 5, is an experimental enquiry into compound spelling and involves dealing with data manipulated based on the theoretical assumptions of Part I. As its title indicates, Chapter 4 (“Material and method”) describes the procedures involved in the data collection and management. A common dilemma in compounding studies is the retrieval of compounds, for which a number of alternatives have been proposed elsewhere. In this case, the entries are retrieved from lexicographical resources, after which the irrelevant units are filtered out and the relevant ones are exploited by use of the tailormade program CompSpell. The collection of compounds from dictionaries is a complex process where the usual complexities arise, namely those related to language varieties, the inclusion of not only established but recent compounds, and the problem of how to give an equal treatment to solid, hyphenated, and open compounds. The alternative is a 10,000-unit list assembled based on the principles established in Chapter 2 and including lemmas from the following dictionaries: Longman, Cambridge, Macmillan, Taschenwörterbuch, Oxford, and Collins. This list is then rounded out with compounds extracted from the six Brown family corpora, three corpora focused on chatroom messages (NPS Chat Corpus), text messages (CorTxt) and blogs (Blog Authorship Corpus), and the ad hoc corpus CompText, all of which are diachronically and diatopically compatible with the study’s aims. Despite the manual filtering and complementation with corpus material, the data are inevitably influenced by the stance of the “lexicographical experts” (80): some compounds are included in dictionaries to the detriment of others, with the discriminating criteria necessarily related to the publisher’s interests (commercial, design, compilation, target audience, etc). Similar cautions concern the corpora’s compiling and coding systems for the use of hyphens and spelling variants, which the author tries to systematize as much as possible in the light of the guidelines of the corpus manuals. This effort to compensate for dictionary and corpus bias is complemented with the PHP program CompSpell, which automatically searches for orthographic variants of the corpus-based compound list (occurrence of hyphens, inflection in compounds, elliptical compounds, etc.). In Chapter 5 (“Potential determinants of English compound spelling”), the following eleven variables potentially affecting compound spelling are explored and statistically tested using more than sixty variables: spelling, length, frequency, phonology, morphology, grammar, semantics, diachronic aspects, discourse variables, systemic aspects, extralinguistic aspects, and other general issues. This is a dense but reader-friendly chapter which identifies and sets apart singularities often laid out in the literature but which scholars have less frequently delved into. For example, Subsection 5.2, on the variable “length”, targets eight related hypotheses which may affect a compound’s spelling: having three or more constituents, having four or more syllables, having eleven or more letters, having single-letter constituents, length difference between constituents, etc. Here the hypotheses in question are justified, then tested and amply exemplified, and references to other works are added whenever required. Once all variables have been worked through, they are coded for their subsequent study. Space limitations make it impossible to expand on the facts presented in Chapter 5 but, overall, it is one of the most valuable sections in the book, with its detail and empirical insight into compound spelling and its clear presentation of results.
The concluding section of the book is Part III (“Modelling English compound spelling”), which consists of Chapters 6, 7, and 8; it aims to reach a thorough understanding of compound spelling by relating the theoretical foundations of Part I to the empirical study of Part II. Chapter 6 (“Compound spelling heuristics”) postulates several heuristics in order to ensure accuracy in the prediction of compound spelling, for which decision trees are employed given their computer-generated output and availability through the statistical software R. The resulting algorithms also target a pedagogical application for learners of English, one of the aims of the investigation. Chapter 7 (“Modelling English compound spelling”) recapitulates the title of Part III, since it combines the notional postulations with the findings from the experimental side of the work, thereby achieving a holistic interpretation of the orthography of compounds. After considering the relationship between each of the three spelling variants, the chapter deals with compound spelling in the light of prototype theory, analogy, other cognitive perspectives, and language change. The survey on prototypicality is an adaptation of Rosch (1973) and Aitchison (1994), intended for more flexibility given the nature of the category “compound spelling”, and as such is very different from Aitchinson’s original discussion of the class “bird”. The result is a three-dimensional model where the coordinates of the open, hyphenated, and solid spellings of a compound are reflected based on their frequency in reference works. This makes it possible to observe to what degree a given spelling is more or less archetypal depending on the variables of compounding tackled in Part II. From this it emerges that an open spelling is likely to act as a prototype, being more frequent in the dictionaries and corpora considered. The conclusions drawn from the study of analogy, next, indicate that spelling variant selection is more in relation to the compound as a whole than to one of the constituents separately. This is probably why prediction accuracy is low for the analogical variables, as the data focus on one part of the compound and not on the full lexeme. Section 7.4 is an amalgam of perspectives on compound spelling insofar as it brings together views from valency grammar, construction grammar, and cognitive grammar, while also incorporating the results obtained earlier in the book from the algorithms and native speakers. The last section of Chapter 7 pays attention to factors like the importance of diachrony in compound studies, which features of compound spelling are more likely to be affected by language change, and how change can be detected and accounted for. Part of speech, word length, and constituent length are three variables regarded as influential by the CompSpell algorithm, but are, according to the author, unlikely to undergo diachronic modifications easily. Among the predictions set forth for diachronic change are that compound spelling will become more regular due to a higher number of learned language users and that more noun compounds will use an open spelling due to the role of the media and new communication technologies. Chapter 8 (“Summary and conclusions”) is a recapitulation not only of Part III but of the book overall, and is useful for its abbreviated outline of the aims and main findings of the research.
EVALUATION
The monograph stands as a far-reaching approach to the apparently negligible issue of compound spelling, which is shown to hide more intricacies than would at first glance seem. The investigation successfully explains why and how English compounds are orthographically represented, and incorporates a statistical-probabilistic approach which, to the best of my knowledge, pioneers studies in compound spelling. This statistical component necessarily makes some sections of the book less accessible for those not initiated in the mathematical treatment of language. Such is the case for Chapter 5 but especially for Chapters 6 and 7, where the hypotheses, research questions and variables previously formulated are jointly discussed for a holistic approach to the orthography of compounds. The rest of the chapters offer a more theoretical and coherent picture of relevant aspects of English compounding and, despite the space limitations of a 393-page work, are an effective description of the intricacies of this complex phenomenon.
The book will therefore prove convenient mainly for researchers (both pre- and postdoctoral) with an interest in morphology and the lexicon who appreciate an empirical corpus-based approach to language. These readers will readily recognise the vast majority of concepts and models discussed, and at the same time they will easily become familiarized with the new ones thanks to the clear distribution of contents, evolving from simpler to more complex. The monograph also targets language instructors given the relevance of compound spelling for language teaching, although in this case at least a general knowledge of English word-formation and statistics would be desirable in order to fully exploit the work’s potential. All in all, this publication is a valuable resource for anyone who wishes to understand the variables affecting compound spelling and has previous experience in corpus analysis and research.
REFERENCES
Aitchison, J. 1994. Words in the mind: An introduction to the mental lexicon (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Bauer, L. 1998. When is a sequence of two nouns a compound in English? English Language and Linguistics 2(1): 65-86.
Berg, K. & M. Aronoff (eds.). 2021. Morphology 31(3) Special Issue: Morphological spelling. Available at:
https://link.springer.com/journal/11525/volumes-and-issues/31-3 (accessed 29 Dec 2021).
Jespersen, O. 1914. A modern English grammar on historical principles, part II: Syntax, vol. 1. Copenhagen: Munskgaard; London: Allen & Unwin.
Rosch, E. 1973. ON the internal structure of perceptual and semantic categories. In T. E. Moore (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press, 111-144.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Jesús Fernández-Domínguez is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Granada (Spain). He specializes in English synchronic lexical morphology, especially morphological productivity, compounding and the cognitive-semantic component of word-formation.
Page Updated: 30-Mar-2022