Adjective–noun compounds in Mandarin: a study on productivity

Abstract

Abstract In structuralist linguistics, compounds are argued not to constitute morphological categories, due to the absence of systematic form-meaning correspondences. This study investigates subsets of compounds for which systematic form-meaning correspondences are present: adjective–noun compounds in Mandarin. We show that there are substantial differences in the productivity of these compounds. One set of productivity measures (the count of types, the count of hapax legomena, and the estimated count of unseen types) reflect compounds’ profitability. By contrast, the category-conditioned degree of productivity is found to correlate with the internal semantic transparency of the words belonging to a morphological category. Greater semantic transparency, gauged by distributional semantics, predicts greater category-conditioned productivity. This dovetails well with the hypothesis that semantic transparency is a prerequisite for a word formation process to be productive.