(Comments on Activities)
1. Disagreements and objections.
Notice that dictionary definitions are supposed to give a description of how the word is used, not how you would prefer it to be used. If you disagree or object, you must be careful to distinguish between objecting to the truth of what is being asserted by the definition, and objecting to the fact that the word is used in that way.
2. Open-ended - for discussion.
3. Compare your version with several dictionaries. Some mention of informality and, for lass, region, would seem to be essential.
Note that 'marked' and restricted' here do not mean that the words never occur outside these social contexts. Anybody might talk about gules, language students for example, but we are usually well aware when a word is extracted from its normal context. The marking or restriction on some words is much clearer than on others. Gules is very tightly restricted. Although it means 'red', it is only used of heraldic elements such as a stripe on a shield. One does not talk about *gules hair, *a room painted gules etc. Words like bathroom and cool also have perfectly neutral meanings which are not marked.
Speakers who are asked to state restrictions on the use of words do not usually have immediate access to large numbers of examples. They obviously have to rely on their intuition about the language and may not find it easy to articulate their response. Some grammatical restrictions are pretty obvious. Other restrictions are much less obvious, but can be revealed by looking at a large number of examples. Note that the existence of a very dominant pattern of use for a word does not necessarily exclude other possibilities. The comments in this Unit, and throughout the course, frequently make reference to a large computer-held corpus of examples. The importance of this will be commented on in detail later.
drunk: a predicative adjective, i.e. it is used after the verb to be (and a few similar verbs), but not in front of a noun. We say: He is often drunk, or I got drunk last night, but not: *He is a drunk lout. Some very rare exceptions do occur, e.g. drunk drivers.
drunken: an attributive adjective, i.e. it is used in front of a noun, e.g. He is a drunken lout, but not on its own after the verb to be: *He is often drunken. Virtually no exceptions. Most adjectives can be used either way.
These are clearly grammatical restrictions.
blithering: attributive (*The idiot was blithering) but also highly restricted to idiot, and one or two other nouns such as fool..
rancid: normally restricted to a set of nouns which refer to fatty substances, e.g. oil and butter. Out of 152 corpus examples, more than 140 show the word used in this way. Amongst these there are a few cases of rancid liquids, e.g. milk, sweat, and a few examples of the meaning being transferred to another item, but where a fairly concrete connection with the usual use is still traceable, e.g.: a rancid odour, a rancid old bed. Metaphorical extension is also possible, e.g. the rancid rhetoric of class warfare, rancid right-wing views. It is odd that both these examples are from the discourse of politics. The restriction here appears to be semantic. Part of the meaning of rancid is its restriction to fatty substances. If a metaphorical extension is involved, that element of meaning is transferred in some way.
torrential: almost exclusively restricted to rain, which is also the immediately following word in the great majority of cases. There are a few related words such as rainfall, downpour, storm, stream etc. Out of 404 examples there are three metaphorical uses: torrential speeches, torrential inventiveness, torrential emotion. Is this a similar case to rancid? Do speakers feel that the meaning of torrential is dependent upon rain in the same way that the meaning of rancid is dependent on fatty substances? Is part of the meaning of torrential the fact that it is only used of rain? This seems not very likely. The related noun torrent has wider reference, more usually referring to flowing water, e.g. streams etc., and it also has well-used metaphorical meaning, e.g. torrents of abuse. So, although torrential is in fact almost exclusively used with rain, speakers' knowledge of the related word torrent probably makes the meaning of torrential less dependent on rain. Compare this with rancid, which has no related noun.
taciturn: seems to be applied almost exclusively to men. A wide range of words referring to men can occur, e.g. chap, individual. Some more general words such as family, people, etc. are also possible. Out of 130 examples there is one clear example of a female referent: Lester Piggot's wife is described as taciturn by the journalist Jean Rook. Why are only men taciturn? Are speakers consciously aware of this restriction?
beige: colour term with a wide range of possible nouns, but falling into some clearly defined groups, e.g. vehicles, items of clothing, cosmetics, buildings and parts of buildings. Out of 591 examples, beige car (3), plus various examples such as beige Toyota, beige carpet (5) beige walls (5) beige sweater (7) and so on. Not a single instance of beige hair. Why not? Is beige hair impossible, or is it just an accident of the corpus? If it is impossible, why is it?
lovely: Return to main text.
pot-bellied: 72 examples, of which about 24 refer to Vietnamese pigs and most of the remainder to people, all male. Notice how an individual who is described as both taciturn and pot-bellied seems almost inconceivable as female - well, almost. There are a few examples of things like pot-bellied stoves (4). Pot-bellied pig is not only frequent but unitary. Similar examples are greater spotted woodpecker or hump-hacked whale. A pot-bellied stove is a type of stove. Notice the relationship between the frequency of a combination, the frequency of its constituent parts, and its unitary status. The combination pot-bellied man is just as common as pot-bellied stove, yet we are not tempted to assign it unitary status - it does not refer to a type of man. This is partly because the noun man is much more frequent than the noun stove, and partly because the use of pot-bellied with stove is less literal.
arrant: 32 examples, of which 18 are arrant nonsense. The remainder are mainly negative qualities such as hypocrisy, greed, stupidity etc. There are one or two nouns referring to people, e.g. arrant cowards, communists. These restrictions are linguistic. Semantically, the word is obviously negative; there is no *arrant wisdom, *arrant beauty etc. However, the huge preference for nonsense is less easily explicable in ordinary semantic terms. This kind of patterning is known as collocation, similar to torrential rain. Notice that arrant is also attributive. We do not say: *This nonsense is arrant. - a grammatical restriction on the word. Presumably arrant is also marked for social class, level of education etc.?
saut-ed: Exclusive to food items, as one would expect, and most of the examples are from recipe books etc. Within the category of food, the matter is trickier. The restrictions on the word seem to be partly explicable in semantic (i.e. linguistic) terms. The cooking technique involved is performed on solid, edible, usually previously uncooked, items, usually (but not necessarily) cut up into small pieces, usually in butter or wine, using moderate heat and stirring, in a particular kind of pan, and so on. The corpus contains the following interesting example: He'd eat metal bolts if they were saut-ed in butter. The author has conferred edibility on the inedible by using a word which is known to be exclusively used for food, and chosen a technique which suits bolts from the point of view of solidity, stirability etc. But there are items which would probably be ruled out completely. *Saut-ed yoghurt (too liquid?), * saut-ed icing-sugar (too powdery?), *saut-ed whole haunch of venison (too large, but possible in a giant's kitchen?). In social terms, the word may be somewhat restricted to certain types of cooking (its French origin suggests that). What does one get for breakfast in a transport cafe - saut-ed or fried mushrooms?
vacuum cleaner: No obvious restrictions.
almighty: The most common use of the word is as a noun referring to God, i.e. The Almighty. (about 200 examples out of 617). Easily the most common noun to go with almighty used as an adjective is also God, 177 out of 617 examples, but many of these examples are profane exclamations. Almighty is one of a small group of adjectives which can follow the noun they modify. Only a few nouns behave like this with almighty. We have Almighty God and God Almighty (but not *row almighty). Both occur in ordinary religious contexts and as exclamations. The latter is more common than the former in the corpus (Almighty God: 75. God Almighty: 102), doubtless a reflection of the relative amounts of fiction and religious text in the corpus. The placing of almighty after God is more frequent in exclamations than in religious texts. The much rarer Christ Almighty (29 examples) occurs exclusively as a profane exclamation, not in religious texts, and *Almighty Christ does not occur at all. Other regular combinations include: almighty row (26), almighty dollar (12), almighty explosion (4). There are no *almighty mountains, trees, cakes, armies, ministers etc. There is a clear predominance of a religious (i.e. social) context for almighty, as would be expected, but there is also a curious relationship between the postpositioning of the word (i.e. a linguistic marking) and its exclamatory function. Used in non-religious contexts to mean very great or powerful, the word selects from a relatively narrow range of collocating nouns. It is hard to pin down any obvious semantic explanation for this.
