{"title":"Constituent polysemy and interpretational diversity in attested English novel compounds","authors":"Martin Schäfer, M. Bell","doi":"10.1075/ml.00013.sch","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We explore variation in the interpretation of attested novel compound nouns in English, especially the contribution of constituent polysemy to this diversity. Our results show that effects of polysemy are pervasive in compound interpretation, contributing both to interpretational diversity and to perceived difficulty of interpretation. The higher the uncertainty about the concept represented by the head noun, based on existing compounds with that head, the greater the diversity of interpretations across speakers and the more difficult, on average, they find it to come up with a meaning.","PeriodicalId":45215,"journal":{"name":"Mental Lexicon","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2020-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"6","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Mental Lexicon","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.00013.sch","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 6
Abstract
Abstract We explore variation in the interpretation of attested novel compound nouns in English, especially the contribution of constituent polysemy to this diversity. Our results show that effects of polysemy are pervasive in compound interpretation, contributing both to interpretational diversity and to perceived difficulty of interpretation. The higher the uncertainty about the concept represented by the head noun, based on existing compounds with that head, the greater the diversity of interpretations across speakers and the more difficult, on average, they find it to come up with a meaning.
期刊介绍:
The Mental Lexicon is an interdisciplinary journal that provides an international forum for research that bears on the issues of the representation and processing of words in the mind and brain. We encourage both the submission of original research and reviews of significant new developments in the understanding of the mental lexicon. The journal publishes work that includes, but is not limited to the following: Models of the representation of words in the mind Computational models of lexical access and production Experimental investigations of lexical processing Neurolinguistic studies of lexical impairment. Functional neuroimaging and lexical representation in the brain Lexical development across the lifespan Lexical processing in second language acquisition The bilingual mental lexicon Lexical and morphological structure across languages Formal models of lexical structure Corpus research on the lexicon New experimental paradigms and statistical techniques for mental lexicon research.