Barli Bram, Ajeng Pradhipta and Voni Novita English Language Education Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Noun Phrase Patterns and Definition Consistencies

of Flower Names in Advanced Learners’

Dictionaries

Barli Bram, Ajeng Pradhipta and Voni NovitaEnglish Language EducationSanata Dharma University

Yogyakarta, Indonesia

hibiscus: bush, flower or plant?

2Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta Indonesia 2015 Pic credit: Barli Bram

Presentation Structure

Introduction, ObjectiveReviewData, MethodsResultsConcluding RemarksReferences

3Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta Indonesia 2015

Why NP Patterns and Flower Name Definitions?

NP patterns: highly productive as subjects and objects and … might be complex (for English learners)

Flower name definitions in dictionaries: how consistent (in using flower as headword)?(hyponymy-hyper(o)nymy/superordinate relations)


Objectiveto examine noun phrase patterns and definition

consistencies of flower names in English provided by two online advanced learners’ dictionaries.

(consistent = flower as headword)

In the context of language learning, complex noun phrases might be problematic for English learners and the uses of hyponymy and hypernymy/superordinate in dictionary definitions may prove to be inconsistent.


Review: Hyponym and Hypernym (1)

In semantics, the term hyponym refers to “a word of more specific meaning than a hyper(o)nym or a superordinate term applicable to it” (OALD); the noun eagle is a hyponym of bird, for example.

The term hyper(o)nym or superordinate refers to “a word with broad meaning constituting a category into which words with more specific meanings fall” (OALD). For instance, flower is a hyper(o)nym of tulip.


Hyponym and Hypernym (2)

7

Poole (1999: 25) “Such a relationship between words whereby more specific terms are arranged under their more general superordinate terms is known as hyponymy”. See the figure below:

animal

mammal

cat dog wolf

poodle terrier spaniel

(Poole, 1999: 25)

Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta Indonesia 2015

Hyponym and Hypernym (3)diagram of flower name hyponym-hypernym (suggestion) living being plant

flower

bluebell carnation rose tulip


Hyponym and Hypernym (4)“One of the most important structuring relations in the

vocabulary of a language is hyponymy. This is the relation between apple and fruit, car and vehicle, slap and hit, and so on. We say that apple is a hyponym of fruit, and conversely, that fruit is a superordinate (occasionally hypernym) of apple” (Cruse, 2000: 150).

De Swart (1998: 18): “… hyponymy (often creating a taxonomy, also called an isa-hierarchy … a German shepherd is a dog, is a mammal, is a living being; a dandelion is a flower, is a plant, is a living being”.


Noun Phrase (1) “In syntax, phrases consist of minimally a head, and it

is the syntactic category of the head that determines the category of the phrase. … a phrase with a noun as head is a Noun Phrase (NP) … For instance … hard work is an NP with the noun work as its head” (Booij, 2005: 53).

A noun phrase: “a phrase whose head is a noun. Thus, the expression lovers of opera is a noun phrase, since its head is the noun lovers” (Radford, 1998: 518).


Noun Phrase (2) A head: a “word which acts as the core of a phrase

and gives it its grammatical character. In the noun phrase ‘these big books about phonetics’, the noun ‘books’ is the head” (Swan, 2007: 111).

“It is customary to describe the English nominal as consisting of a sequence of constituents: predeterminers, determiners, adjectives, the noun head, and finally certain postnominal modifiers, such as relative clauses” (Lees, 1961: 2).


Data and Methods Forty-five (45) lexical items – flower names and their

definitions rom two online English-English dictionaries, namely the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD) and Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (CALD).Why these two? Authoritative, reliable and accessible

Collected lexical items: 45 flower definitions were examined to identify noun phrase patterns or structures used in the definitions and to discover whether or not the definitions (hyponym-hyper(o)nym relations) in the two dictionaries were consistent.


Sample Screenshot from OALD (daffodil)

Pic ture credit: online source


Table 1: Flower Definitions from OALD (Five Examples)


No Flower Definition Pre-mod Head Post-mod

1 amaryllis a tall white, pink or red flower shaped like a trumpet

det+adjP flower clause

2 bluebell a garden or wild flower with a short stem and small blue or white flowers shaped like bells

det+adjP flower PP

3 bougainvillea a tropical climbing plant with red, purple, white or pink flowers

det+adjP plant PP

4 camellia a bush with shiny leaves and white, red or pink flowers that look like roses and are also called camellias

det bush PP

5 carnation a white, pink, red or yellow flower, often worn as a decoration on formal occasions

det+adjP flower clause (often)

Table 2: Flower Definitions from CALD (Five Examples)


No Flower Definition Pre-mod Head Post-mod

1 amaryllis Not found N/A N/A N/A

2 bluebell a small European plant that usually grows in woods and has blue flowers shaped like bells

det+adjP plant clause (usually)

3 bougainvillea a climbing plant, common in hot countries, that has red or purple flowers

det+adjP plant clause (appositive)

4 camellia a bush with dark, shiny leaves and large white, pink, or red flowers that are similar to roses

det bush PP

5 carnation (a plant with) a small flower with a sweet smell, usually white, pink, or red in colour

det plant/flower PP

Results: Headwords in OALD and CALD


bush bush/plant bush/tree flower flower/plant plant N/A0

5

10

15

20

25

30

OALD & CALD Headwords

OALD CALD

Headword Percentages (OALD)


bush7% bush/plant

4%bush/tree

4%

flower24%

flower/plant2%

plant58%

OALD Headwords

bush bush/plant bush/tree flower flower/plant plant

Headword Percentages (CALD)


bush7%

bush/plant2% bush/tree

4%

flower13%

flower/plant2%

plant62%

N/A9%

CALD Headwords

bush bush/plant bush/tree flower flower/plant plant N/A

Pre-modifiers in OALD and CALD


det det+adjP det+PP N/A0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

OALD & CALD Pre-modifiers

OALD CALD

Pre-modifier Percentages (OALD)


det20%

det+adjP80%

OALD Pre-modifiers

det det+adjP

Pre-modifier Percentages (CALD)


det27%

det+adjP60%

det+PP4%

N/A9%

CALD Post-modifiers

det det+adjP det+PP N/A

Post-modifiers in OALD and CALD


adj clause adj phrase PP no post-mod N/A0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

OALD & CALD Post-modifiers

OALD CALD

Post-modifier Percentages (OALD)


adj clause20%

PP78%

no post-mod2%

OALD Post-modifiers

adj clause PP no post-mod

Post-modifier Percentages (CALD)


adj clause29%

adj phrase2%

PP58%

no post-mod2%

N/A9%

CALD Post-modifiers

adj clause adj phrase PP no post-mod N/A

Concluding Remarks 1) the basic noun phrase pattern:

premodifier+headword+(postmodifier) and 2) inconsistencies in the definitions (flower not as head)

Study results: would assist learners of the English language to understand better the patterns and definitions of flower names which will then improve the learners’ noun phrase mastery and semantic knowledge, particularly hyponymy and hypernymy/superordinate.


References (partial list)Aitchison, Jean. 1999. Teach Yourself: Linguistics. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Bauer, Laurie. 2007. The Linguistics Student's Handbook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Booij, Geert. 2005. The Grammar of Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Caraballo, Sharon. (1999, June). Automatic construction of a hypernym-labeled noun hierarchy from text. In Proceedings of the 37th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Computational Linguistics (pp. 120-126). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Culo, Oliver, Katrin Erk, Sebastian Pado and Sabine Schulte. 2008. “Comparing and Combining Semantic Verb Classifications.” In Language Resources and Evaluation (vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 265-291). http://www.jstor.org/stable/41217880. Accessed: 05-07-2015 05:09 UTC.

Goddard, Cliff. 1998. Semantic Analysis: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gregory, Howard. 2000. Semantics: Language Workbooks. New York: Routledge.

Guthrie, Louise, Brian M. Slator, Yorick Wilks, and Rebecca Bruce. "Is there content in empty heads?.“ In Proceedings of the 13th conference on Computational linguistics-Volume 3, pp. 138-143. Association for Computational Linguistics, 1990. Retrieved 12 July 2015. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.34.946&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Huang, Zhiheng, Thint, Marcus and Qin Zengchang. 2008. Question Classification Using Head Words and Their Hypernyms. In Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing , pp 927–936, Honolulu. Retrieved 12 July 2015. http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1620000/1613835/p927-huang.pdf

Hurford, James, Brendan Heasley and Michael Smith. 2007. Semantics: A Coursebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leech, Geoffrey. 1974. Semantics. Middlesex: Pelican Books.

Lees, R.B. 1961. “The Constituent Structure of Noun Phrases.” In American Speech (vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 159-168). http://www.jstor.org/stable/453514. Accessed: 05-07-2015.

Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics: 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lyons, John. 1995. Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Matthews, Peter.1997. Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Poole, Stuart. 1999. An Introduction to Lingustics. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik. 1986. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.

Radford, Andrew. 1997. Syntax: A Minimalist Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Radford, Andrew. 2001. English Words: History and Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Barli Bram, Ajeng Pradhipta and Voni Novita English Language Education Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta, Indonesia