Pie charts and bar graphs

Yesterday's Frazz:

Caulfield's joke illustrates several interesting linguistic points.

(1) First, his choice to compound "pie" with "chart"  and "bar" with "graph" is irrelevant to the joke, but it does align with the statistics of usage (and also probably reflects the cartoonist's idea about the assignment that Caulfield was given).  Since the opposite associations are also possible, this illustrates what we might call lexicographic crystallization. Here are some counts from Google Scholar:

"pie chart" 238,000   "pie graph" 11,400"bar chart" 274,000   "bar graph" 466,000

So on the pie-metaphor dimension, "chart" has more than 95%  of the head-noun total, while "graph" has less than 5%. In comparison, on the bar-metaphor dimension, "chart" has just 37%, and "graph" has 63%. Neither association is categorical, but both are biased in a way that might develop over time into a categorical distinction. It's possible that the current variation reflects different categorical choices by individual authors or editors.

(2) The basis of the joke is the semantics of the compounds. A "pie chart", in the conventional sense that Mrs. Olsen had in mind, is an image that looks like a pie, not an image that charts pies.  That semantic relation is not an intrinsic property of English noun compounds, whose second noun can perfectly well denote an action applied to the preceding one. A "haircut" cuts hair, "birth control" controls births, a "shoulder massage" massages shoulders, etc. But individual compound nouns become associated with a particular type of interpretation, so that a "car park" is a place to park cars, not a garden-like space where automobiles are on display. There's a large literature on this general topic — you could start with the survey in section 2.2 ("Semantic Relations in N° Compound Nouns") of this 1992 paper, or explore more recent works on Google Scholar.

(3) Like other Germanic languages, English generally uses complex nominals where Romance languages have prepositional post-modification (with variation in prepositions that's also worth exploring). Thus German Tortendiagramm and Dutch taartdiagram, compared to Spanish gráfico de torta, Portuguese gráfico de pizza, Italian grafico a torta, French graphique à secteurs (or camembert :-)…).

There's more, but that's enough for this morning.