A small taste of the complexity of language

THIS WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN JANUARY OF 2006.

Many people might think of language more or less like this: Sentences have words, and if you look up the words in your dictionary one by one and know the basic grammar of English, you know what the sentence means.

One aspect of English that is seldom understood is how much of our vocabulary is contained in chunks of two or more words, where knowing what they mean individually is no help in figuring out what they mean as a unit.

In the service of a product that translates text from English to Japanese, the company where I work has developed a pretty detailed dictionary of English. About one third of the entries (excluding proper names) are composed of two or more words.

I'll offer a sample of one small corner of this dictionary for your amusement.

"They ran up a big hill." and "They ran up a big bill."have different structures. Consider that the shortened forms "They ran up it." and"They ran it up." tell you which one you started with. This second form"run up" is known in our system as a VT07, meaning transitive verb of the 7th type (there are at least 22 types of transitive verbs in all).

Here are some other examples of that one form:
We ran it down (and then let it go)
We ran the points off.
We ran him out. (with tar and feathers)
We ran it over. (to the church office)
We ran it through. (I hate blood).
We ran it up. (the bill, again)
They took it away.
They took it back.
They took it down.
They took it in.
They took it off.
They took it on.
They took it out.
They took it over.
They took it up.
Why not make it out?
Why not make it over?
Why not make it up?
Why not make it over into a stew? ("make over into" -- a different subtype of VT07)
Why not make it over to the bank?
Why not make it up to him?
Why not make him up with paint?

For "They took it in", how many VT07 meanings can you think of?

There are details aplenty to quibble about or expand upon, but it's a pretty cool language, don't you think?