Thursday 30 September 2010

double idioms (3)

The name of the treasure box is OALD - Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Both the printed eighth edition and the CD-ROM provided indicate the stress mark; the online version, however, does not give it.
What about previous editions? As I wrote in my last blog OALD editions 1 to 3 do not indicate the stress of non-headword entries. In the unpaginated acknowledgements section of the introduction to the 3rd edition the then editor A. S. Hornby wrote:

"Mr. J Windsor Lewis, of the Department of Phonetics [University of Leeds], undertook the task of providing new phonetic transcriptions for all entries and the stress patterns added to all compounds and collocations."

Are they really added to ALL compounds and collocations? The phonetics adviser/editor Jack Windsor Lewis qualifies this statement (the reader is referred to pages xiii to xv of the introduction to OALD3). As a result we find stress marks with compounds such as `hockeystick, `English-woman, we have to apply a rule to throw doubt upon or to stew in one's own juice saying that the principal stress usually falls on the last non-grammatical word (resulting in throw `doubt upon and stew in one's own `juice). In the case of make a person's `flesh creep the stress on flesh is indicated because flesh is not the last non-grammatical word of this idiom. So, the stress pattern is not added to ALL compounds and combinations if 'add' is intended to mean 'add visible stress marks'.

Our thanks go to Jack Windsor Lewis for adding this lexicographic feature.

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