Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.1160

AUTHOR: Igor Mel’čuk
TITLE: General Phraseology
SUBTITLE: Theory and Practice
SERIES TITLE: Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa 36
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Victoria Fendel

SUMMARY

The book consists of an introduction, eleven chapters, a conclusion, and extensive appendices on lexical functions. Chapters 2 to 8 consider lexemic phrasemes, Chapter 9 pragmatic phrasemes, Chapter 10 morphemic phrasemes, and Chapter 11 syntactic phrasemes. The book takes a lexicographic approach (p. 9) and the presentation is embedded in the Meaning-Text Framework (pp. 4–5).

The introduction informally introduces the reader to lexemic phrasemes, such as English ‘to pull [Y’s] leg’, including a quantification of how many phrasemes – as opposed to simplex items – exist in the lexicon of a language (p. 3 and n. 1). Mel’čuk hypothesises that phrasemes outnumber simplex items in the magnitude of 10 to 1. The book adopts the Meaning-to-Text orientation (pp. 4–5), i.e. the speaker ‘needs special knowledge to produce such expressions’ (p. 5). Finally, the reader is alerted to the ‘disproportionate place of Russian’. A research review is absent (p. 7).

Chapter 1 briefly recaps the Meaning-Text Framework (p. 11), exemplifies the pervasiveness of phrasemes by means of two short English sample passages (pp. 12–16), considers reasons for the existence of phrasemes in a language (pp. 16–18), and outlines the substantive and formal requirements of linguistic definitions (pp. 19–21).

Chapter 2 explains the notion of ‘phraseme’. On the paradigmatic axis, phrasemes impose constraints on the selection of components by the speaker (pp. 24–25), and the lexemes constituting a phraseme can have context-bound meanings (p. 26). Phrasemes are complex signs as the ‘signifier includes more than one component’ (p. 29). These complex signs can be compositional or non-compositional (pp. 29–32). Compositionality is categorical, because a complex sign AB is compositional when AB = A ⨁ B (pp. 29 and 32). Compositional phrases have semantic pivots (e.g. attention in to pay attention, which has its context-free meaning) which are different from their syntactic heads, ‘which as a rule, express the communicatively dominant component’ (pp. 34–35) (e.g. to pay in to pay attention). Phrasemes are subdivided into lexemic, morphemic, and syntactic phrasemes (p. 38) depending on the nature of their components.

Chapter 3 divides lexemic phrasemes into (i) semantic-lexemic phrasemes (idioms, collocations) and (ii) conceptual-lexemic phrasemes (nominemes, clichés) (p. 44), where only for the first type ‘the transition from a conceptual representation of a real-word situation to the corresponding semantic representations’ is free (p. 41). Lexemic phrasemes can contain ‘degenerate lexemes’, i.e. a lexeme ‘used only in a phraseme’ and with ‘properties [that] are not the same as those of all normal lexemes of the corresponding syntactic class’ (p. 45).

Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the notion of ‘idiom’, a non-compositional semantic-lexemic phraseme, with Chapter 4 providing the theory and Chapter 5 exemplifying the theory on three Russian idioms. Idioms are semantically non-compositional but can be more or less transparent: ‘[T]ransparency is a psychological property of idioms: it depends on the capacities and knowledge of the Addressee’ (p. 53). Idioms appear as one node in the deep syntactic structure, which is cross-linguistically universal (the five deep parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and clausative) (p. 57), but have a surface-syntactic subtree (p. 56). An example Mel’čuk provides is French dommage que which is a clausative in the deep syntactic structure but a noun plus conjunction in the surface syntactic structure (p. 90 n. 4). Idioms can have lexemic variables (p. 61) (e.g. throw in the towel vs throw in the sponge). Idioms fall into strong, semi-, and weak idioms depending on whether the signified of idiom AB contains the signifieds of A and/or B (pp. 64–68). The lexicographic description illustrates idioms by (i) number one, (ii) have Y’s back, (iii) cut and dried, (iv) in the world, and (v) all hell breaks loose (pp. 84–89).

Chapter 6 discusses the notion of ‘collocation’, a compositional semantic-lexemic phraseme. Collocations consist of a base/collocate, which is selected freely by the speaker, and a collocation, which is selected as a function of the base (p. 113). Collocations fall into (i) semantically motivated and (ii) syntactically motivated ones (pp. 117–118).

Chapter 7 deals with non-compositional conceptual-lexemic phrasemes, which are called nominemes and are in essence ‘multilexemic proper name[s]’ (p. 137).

Chapter 8 deals with compositional conceptual-lexemic phrasemes, and clichés. Clichés fall into four subclasses depending on the concreteness and specificity of the referent (nickname clichés, termemes, formulemes, sentencemes) (pp. 142–155). Clichés do not warrant separate lexical entries: nickname clichés are personal names and not part of the lexicon, termemes should be listed with their lexical anchor, formulemes and sentencemes ‘are compositional and all of their components carry their own inherent meannings’ (p. 157).

Chapter 9 introduces the notion of pragmateme which cuts across the other types of phrasemes, as pragmatemes are expressions that are constrained by the situation of use (p. 159). Mel’čuk distinguishes between ‘normal’ situations of use, i.e. ‘an oral or written monologue … or dialogue’ and ‘special’ situations of use including ‘written warnings’, ‘written messages’, ‘telecommunications’, ‘oral signs’, and ‘ritualized social situations’ (p. 162). Pragmatemes are triggered by special situational settings.

Chapter 10 turns to phrasemes made up of morphemes. Morphemic phrasemes fall into semantic-morphemic phrasemes and conceptual-morphemic phrasemes (p. 168). ‘Diachronic and synchronic derivation and compounding’ are called morphemic collocations (p. 175).

Chapter 11 introduces syntactic phrasemes, which unlike lexemic and morphemic phrasemes are non-segmental (p. 184). The signifier can contain ‘a special, meaning-carrying prosody and/or a bound lexemic variable … and/or any other non-segmental expressive means’ (p. 191). In order to describe the meaning of syntactic phrasemes, Mel’čuk draws on fictitious lexemes, which describe the signified of the non-segmental signifier (pp. 195–199). A list of 30 Russian syntactic idioms is provided for illustration, four of them with their lexical entries (pp. 199–205).

The conclusion lists briefly the terminology of the book and then re-evaluates Becker’s (1975) contentious phrases in light of the findings of the book (pp. 210–213).

EVALUATION

The book aims to provide a system ‘to store such a huge mass of data in the lexicon systematically and coherently’ by showing how to describe each phraseme ‘in all the details (relevant to its use in the text) according to a fixed, pre-arranged template’ (p. 3). The lexicographic descriptions follow the framework of the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary (p. 3). The book is successful for lexemic phrasemes; it is more questionable whether the approach extends well to morphemic and syntactic expressions and how pragmatemes fit in.

Overall, the book heavily relies on the reader being familiar with earlier work by Mel’čuk (p. 7). This approach clashes with the intent of making each chapter as independent as possible (p. 6). Instead of omitting the research review, a review might have helped the reader.

In several places throughout, quantifications based on dictionaries are provided, e.g. the number of signifieds in Mandarin (p. 22) or the number of idioms in a language (p. 51). While interesting as a thought experiment, the difficulty with any such quantification is the reliance on dictionaries, which are descriptive and often focussed on the standard language, and the assumption of a relatively even distribution of relevant phrasemes in the entries for each letter. I note in passing that throughout several English phrasemes cited are incorrect, e.g. ‘Downing Street 10’ should be ’10 Downing Street’ (p. 138) and ‘do you have time’ should be ‘do you have the time’ (p. 149) when asking someone for the time rather than whether they are free to meet up.

The introduction takes the stance that ‘a fine semantic analysis of phrasemes … is possible only when dealing with the mother tongue’ (p. 6). The concept of a ‘mother tongue’ is highly contentious not only from the perspective of language and identity but also from the perspective of perception and cognition. Perhaps, Matras’ (2009: 97–98) concept of a pragmatically dominant language, i.e. a language that is preferred in a specific context of communication, may be more appropriate.

Chapter 2 introduces Mel’čuk’s categorical approach to compositionality (p. 32). However, Chapter 4 subsequently distinguishes between strong idioms (the signified of idiom AB contains the signified of neither A nor B), semi-idioms (the signified of idiom AB contains the signified of either A or B and an additional semantic component), and weak idioms (the signified of idiom AB contains the signifieds of A and B and an additional semantic component) (pp. 64–69). The difficulty of considering compositionality a categorical notion is discussed further below.

Chapter 5 discusses the Russian čto za idiom (p. 105), which seems to resemble German colloquial was für, in that it forms a lexical unit in which für acts as a unilexeme in Mel’čuk’s terms (i.e. it does not govern the otherwise usual accusative case). For Mel’čuk, za is a particle ‘which does not appear anywhere outside this expression and is semantically empty’ (p. 105). If this is the only expression in which za functions in this way and if prepositions otherwise are never used as particles and/or adverbs when the complement is deleted, the analysis may hold. Yet, lexemes that can have prepositional value but can also be used as adverbs or particles without a complement are not too uncommon in languages (cf. Luraghi 2003 on Greek).

Chapter 6 discusses the Italian syntactically motivated collocation tutti e libri (p. 126), for which Cirillo (2009: 160 and 263) from a generative grammar perspective (Stranding Analysis) interestingly comes to the same conclusion as Mel’čuk. In both cases, I am wondering whether the expressions are best dealt with in the lexicon or in the syntax given that at least one component is a function word. I would be tempted to accept the Russian idiom more than the syntactically motivated collocation.

Chapter 8 considers clichés which ‘should not have a separate lexical entry’ (p. 156) because they do not form lexical units. Given the aim of the book to provide a template for lexicographic description, this chapter comes as a surprise. It is a useful chapter in the sense that it shows what not to include in a lexicon though. (As a minor remark, I am wondering whether tea in tea rose is really a unilexeme when assuming the meaning ‘whose scent reminds [of] that of tea’ (p. 147). Think of Tea Soap, etc.; perhaps a better example would be tea towel or tea candle in neither of which there is an association with the scent of tea.)

Chapter 9 introduces the notion of pragmateme: ‘a linguistic expression [that] … is constrained pragmatically, that is, iff a special communication situation requires its use’ (p. 160). Naturally defining what ‘special’ means is complicated. Mel’čuk states that ‘a normal situation of linguistic communication is either an oral or written monologue (a narration, a journalistic or technical paper, a literary text), or a dialogue’ (p. 162). By contrast, written warnings, written messages, telecommunications, oral signals, and ritualized social situations, etc. count as ‘special’ (see also p. 155 on break a leg as a ‘sort of magical formula’). This division is unmotivated.

Perhaps, Biber and Conrad’s (2009) notion of ‘register’ may be useful for which they offer a range of criteria to check (p. 40) including the participants, the relations among participants, the channel, the processing circumstances, the setting, the communicative purposes, and the topic. However, Biber and Conrad’s approach would be sociolinguistic. Depending on what is ‘special’, this approach may identify German colloquial was für as ‘special’. Co-incidentally, in Biber and Conrad’s framework, Mel’čuk’s pragmateme Dear X (at the start of letters) (p. 159) would be a genre marker. One could equally wonder whether a more functional grammar approach would help, e.g. in the sense of an expression referring to the interpersonal level rather the morphosyntactic level (cf. Hengeveld 2008; D’Hertefelt & Verstraete 2014; Kaltenböck 2019). This approach would call dommage que a pragmateme (cf. p. 90). As the definition of a class of expressions depends on it, we need a clear definition of ‘special’ and criteria to reproduce it. This may also clarify the relationship between clichés with a specific abstract referent (routine formulas, formulemes) (pp. 148–155) and pragmatemes.

Chapters 10 and 11 apply the lexicographic approach to morphological and syntactic signifieds. In Chapter 10, I am not clear why synchronically ‘a morphemic phraseme can only be a phraseologized complex wordform, that is a phraseologized combination of a stem with inflectional affixes’ (p. 167). Compounding is productive in many languages, even ad hoc compounding. Secondly, while discontinuous morphemic phrasemes are described (p. 171), it is not clear to me how the framework deals with vowel grade changes and similar morphological phenomena, e.g. Brief-träg-er ‘letter carrier’ (p. 174). For pairs such as have/has, Mel’čuk resorts to considering has a strong megamorph suppletive (p. 174). The comparison between crack-er (p. 169) as a morphemic idiom as opposed to writ-er as a semi-morphemic idiom with -er being the semantic pivot (p. 172) seems to reflect a synchronically focussed approach in Chapter 10 which however seems to work better for more analytic languages. Thirdly, the morphemic formuleme ‘Ents[c]huldig-ung’ ‘sorry’ is compositional at the morphological level (cf. Shin 2001), what makes it ‘denote a particular situation’ (p. 180) is the specific syntax (exclamative) and the specific situational context (register), a pragmateme in Mel’čuk’s terms.

Chapter 11, in the context of syntactic phrasemes, brings up the example politics, schmolitics (p. 198). While the copy operation is syntactic, the prefix schm- replacing the first consonant of the base item politics seems morphological rather than syntactic. The very interesting Russian idiom [X,] xot’ L(INTENS(X)(V)IMPERF,IMPER,2,SG ‘extremely’ (literally: ‘X is so Y that you might even …’) which allows ‘its lexical filling L(INTENS(X))’ to be ‘relatively free’ such that speakers can create their own hapax legomena (p. 208), seems to hinge upon a function word rather than being entirely non-segmental. For both Chapters 10 and 11, I wonder whether extending a lexical approach to morphemic and syntactic expressions is possible and appropriate. I have fewer concerns about syntactic phrasemes, although the role of function words would need further investigation (cf. Corver & van Riemsdijk 2001: 1).
A pattern that seems to cut across chapters is support-verb constructions. Support-verb constructions are combinations of a verb and a noun that fill the predicate slot of a sentence, such as to pay a visit in I paid him a visit yesterday. For Mel’čuk, pay would here be a quasi-unilexeme – ‘a degenerate lexeme … [which] appears only in a particular collocation (or in a handful of collocations) and has at least one non-degenerate lexeme in its vocable, that is, it co-exists in the language with normal lexemes which have the same signifier and the same syntactics and from which it differs only by its strictly context-bound signified’ (p. 46) – and visit the semantic pivot (p. 35). Only compositional expressions have semantic pivots (p. 35).

Mel’čuk discusses the idioms ‘to kick the bucket’ and ‘to spill the beans’ as opposed to the collocations ‘to break X’s heart’ – where the meaning can be deduced by common metonymy (p. 74) – and ‘to pull strings’ – with a quasi-unilexeme ‘string’ (p. 75). The two idioms differ as to whether they contain a semantic component ‘which could be picked out for passivization, relativization, etc.’ (pp. 73 and 75). If over time, these operations become permissible, the idiom would become a collocation (p. 76). However, agentless passivisation is permissible for the idioms ‘to spill the beans’ (p. 76) and ‘to pull X’s leg’ (pp. 76–77). In the latter case, Mel’čuk explains this in the following way for ‘Mary’s leg was pulled’: ‘the fronting and extraction of MARY are meaningful, this syntactic manipulation of LEG is by no means a meaningful operation’ (p. 77). Idioms such as ‘to kick the bucket’ do not allow for nominalisation by means of event nouns but can only be nominalised by means of a gerund (John’s kicking the bucket appalled me) (p. 91 n. 14). For Mel’čuk, all support-verb constructions and their more semantically heavy counterparts, constructions with realization verbs, fall under collocations, i.e. a compositional semantic- or conceptual-lexemic phraseme (p. 119). As to be expected, as pragmatemes cut across categories of phrasemes, support-verb constructions also appear as pragmatic collocations, e.g. take aim! (p. 164).

For support-verb constructions in particular, Mel’čuk’s (p. 32) categorical approach to compositionality is complicated, e.g. he needs to allow for metonymy (and possibly also other semantic shifts such as metaphorical extension) in order to classify ‘to break X’s heart’ as a collocation. Furthermore, ‘to spill the beans’ with its agentless passive seems to break the rule that idioms do not allow for operations such as passivisation, relativisation, etc. (see also Schafroth 2020: 195).

Sheinfux et al. (2019: 42) approach the issue differently by drawing on the notions of figuration – ‘figuration reflects the degree to which the idiom can be assigned a literal meaning’ – and transparency ‘transparency (or opacity) relates to how easy it is to recover the motivation for an idiom’s use’. Mel’čuk (p. 53) dismisses transparency as a ‘psychological property of idioms’. However, support-verb constructions hover at the syntax-lexicon interface (Heine 2020: 15; Croft 2022: 423) such that neither a purely lexical nor a purely syntactic approach can capture them. They are furthermore synchronically and diachronically highly variable, which Mel’čuk (p. 76) acknowledges when hypothesising a transition from idiom to collocation – the other direction is also entirely possible. Sheinfux et al. (2019: 66) conclude that the larger the corpus the higher the likelihood that variation will be attested. Mel’čuk (p. 71) considers such rare variation an artistic deformation of an idiom (wordplay, puns, jocular, or poetic). The key question is how to decide what is ‘artistic’ and what is a development in progress. It is entirely possible for a variation to start out as artistic but to become accepted by the community of language users (e.g. Haugen 1966; Milroy & Milroy 2012). Mel’čuk’s (p. 119) division between support verbs and realization verbs in fact reflects the fact that the verbal component of a support-verb construction (i) can be varied for syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic reasons (cf. Mel’čuk 2004; Gavriilidou 2004), (ii) can have varying degrees of semantic weight (cf. Rosén 2020; Gross 1998), and (iii) can be adjusted in a highly context-specific way which is not necessarily artistic (e.g. legal texts).

REFERENCES

Becker, Joseph. 1975. The Phrasal Lexicon. Theoretical issue in natural language processing 1. 60–63.

Biber, Douglas & Susan Conrad. 2009. Register, genre, and style (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cirillo, Robert. 2009. The syntax of floating quantifiers: stranding revisited. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam PhD thesis.

Corver, Norbert & Henk van Riemsdijk. 2001. Semi-lexical categories. In Norbert Corver & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), Semi-lexical categories: the function of content words and the content of function words (Studies in Generative Grammar), vol. 41, 1–19. Berlin ; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Croft, William. 2022. Morphosyntax: constructions of the world’s languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

D’Hertefelt, Sarah & Jean-Christophe Verstraete. 2014. Independent complement constructions in Swedish and Danish: Insubordination or dependency shift? Journal of Pragmatics 60. 89–102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.11.002.

Gavriilidou, Zoé. 2004. Verbes supports et intensité en grec moderne. In Gaston Gross & Sophie de Pontonx (eds.), Verbes supports: nouvel état des lieux (Lingvisticæ Investigationes), vol. 27.2, 295–308. Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Haugen, Einar. 1966. Dialect, Language, Nation. American Anthropologist 68(4). 922–935. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1966.68.4.02a00040.

Heine, Antje. 2020. Zwischen Grammatik und Lexikon. Ein forschungsgeschichtlicher Blick auf Funktionsverbgefüge. In Sabine De Knop & Manon Hermann (eds.), Funktionsverbgefüge im Fokus, 15–38. Berlin ; Boston: Mouton De Gruyter.

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Sheinfux, Livnat, Tali Greshler, Nurit Melnik & Shuly Winter. 2019. Verbal multiword expressions: Idiomaticity and flexibility. In Yannick Parmentier & Jakub Waszczuk (eds.), Representing and parsing of multiword expressions (Phraseology and Multiword Expressions), vol. 3, 35–68. Berlin: Language Science Press.

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ABOUT THE REVIEWER

The present reviewer has a background in historical and contact linguistics. Current research interests lie with periphrastic structures and communicative strategies in corpus languages. The present reviewer is currently holding a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford, which focuses on support-verb constructions in literary classical Attic.