Rivalry in lexeme formation refers to a situation where multiple, rival lexeme formation processes may be used to fill a gap in a morphological family. In this paper we study one such situation, the rivalry between the suffixes -iser and -ifier in French to derive verbs from nouns and/or adjectives. We propose a statistical approach to the problem, and use multivariate logistic regression applied to a large dataset derived from existing ressources to establish that phonological, morphological, and semantic properties of the morphological family all contribute independently to predicting preference for one or the other suffix. One main result of this study is that rivalry can not be studied in terms of the relationship of a single base and a derived lexeme, as multiple members of the morphological family play a role in jointly predicting the choice of a suffix.
{"title":"A statistical approach to rivalry in lexeme formation: French -iser and -ifier","authors":"Olivier Bonami, Juliette Thuilier","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2018.0130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2018.0130","url":null,"abstract":"Rivalry in lexeme formation refers to a situation where multiple, rival lexeme formation processes may be used to fill a gap in a morphological family. In this paper we study one such situation, the rivalry between the suffixes -iser and -ifier in French to derive verbs from nouns and/or adjectives. We propose a statistical approach to the problem, and use multivariate logistic regression applied to a large dataset derived from existing ressources to establish that phonological, morphological, and semantic properties of the morphological family all contribute independently to predicting preference for one or the other suffix. One main result of this study is that rivalry can not be studied in terms of the relationship of a single base and a derived lexeme, as multiple members of the morphological family play a role in jointly predicting the choice of a suffix.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42654972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Old Spanish and in Portuguese the name of a female agent is sometimes expressed with a suffix that coincides with one of the suffixes used in these languages in the formation of instrument nouns, as in Portuguese tecedor ‘weaver’ vs. tecedeira ‘female weaver’. The etymology of this female suffix has long been a puzzle for Hispanists and Lusitanists. Although it has been known since Meyer-Lübke that there are parallels in other Romance varieties, the problem has never been tackled from a pan-Romance perspective in a systematic way. The purpose of the present paper is to do just that. It is argued that these suffixes denoting female agents arose as a consequence of the ellipsis of the head noun in Latin noun phrases containing a noun referring to a female and an adjective in -toria. The alternative of viewing the modern suffixes as the result of the coalescence of the Latin agentive suffix -tor and the female suffix -ia of words like avia ‘granny’ is also explored.
{"title":"The benefit of the pan-Romance perspective: A new attempt to solve the tecedor/tecedeira puzzle","authors":"F. Rainer","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2019.0141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2019.0141","url":null,"abstract":"In Old Spanish and in Portuguese the name of a female agent is sometimes expressed with a suffix that coincides with one of the suffixes used in these languages in the formation of instrument nouns, as in Portuguese tecedor ‘weaver’ vs. tecedeira ‘female weaver’. The etymology of this female suffix has long been a puzzle for Hispanists and Lusitanists. Although it has been known since Meyer-Lübke that there are parallels in other Romance varieties, the problem has never been tackled from a pan-Romance perspective in a systematic way. The purpose of the present paper is to do just that. It is argued that these suffixes denoting female agents arose as a consequence of the ellipsis of the head noun in Latin noun phrases containing a noun referring to a female and an adjective in -toria. The alternative of viewing the modern suffixes as the result of the coalescence of the Latin agentive suffix -tor and the female suffix -ia of words like avia ‘granny’ is also explored.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47996168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, we trace the origin and development of the French abstract-forming suffix -aison and its collateral forms. Based on derivational inventories for Latin and French, we analyse formal and historical aspects of this suffix group as well as its semantics and its productivity throughout the centuries. Special attention will be devoted to methodological questions concerning the investigation of suffix transmission from Latin to Romance.
{"title":"On the importance of leader words in word formation: The popular transmission of the Latin abstract-forming suffix -io in French","authors":"Philipp Burdy","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2019.0138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2019.0138","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we trace the origin and development of the French abstract-forming suffix -aison and its collateral forms. Based on derivational inventories for Latin and French, we analyse formal and historical aspects of this suffix group as well as its semantics and its productivity throughout the centuries. Special attention will be devoted to methodological questions concerning the investigation of suffix transmission from Latin to Romance.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48235149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article investigates French nouns and adjectives in -aire related to numerals. The original series was borrowed from Latin distributive numerals and its elements exhibited various meanings. Some of them still exist with their original meaning but have a vestigial use. Grammars and linguistic studies barely mention these forms and completely overlook the fact that new series of forms with a meaning referring to age or an anniversary have recently developed. The present article documents this development and the reasons behind it. It also addresses the issues tied to the variations of form and meaning that the patterns in question exhibit.
{"title":"French denumerals in -aire","authors":"B. Fradin","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2019.0139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2019.0139","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates French nouns and adjectives in -aire related to numerals. The original series was borrowed from Latin distributive numerals and its elements exhibited various meanings. Some of them still exist with their original meaning but have a vestigial use. Grammars and linguistic studies barely mention these forms and completely overlook the fact that new series of forms with a meaning referring to age or an anniversary have recently developed. The present article documents this development and the reasons behind it. It also addresses the issues tied to the variations of form and meaning that the patterns in question exhibit.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45065471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper investigates a case of overabundance in the plural cell of an open subclass of Italian VN compounds. The empirical basis includes: (i) a 163-item list of relevant compounds, for which the relative frequency of cell mates has been estimated by means of Web data; (ii) a naming questionnaire based on visual input, with 30 images submitted to about 200 informants, including those of several objects whose names are scarcely established in the lexicon; (iii) a further questionnaire, adapted to each informant, asking for acceptability judgements to detect overabundance at the single speaker's level. Results show that the given subclass of VN compounds provides an instance of systematic and productive overabundance in the Italian morphological system, differently from the examples usually discussed for this language.
{"title":"An instance of productive overabundance: The plural of some Italian VN compounds","authors":"Matteo Pellegrini, D. Ricca","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2019.0140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2019.0140","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates a case of overabundance in the plural cell of an open subclass of Italian VN compounds. The empirical basis includes: (i) a 163-item list of relevant compounds, for which the relative frequency of cell mates has been estimated by means of Web data; (ii) a naming questionnaire based on visual input, with 30 images submitted to about 200 informants, including those of several objects whose names are scarcely established in the lexicon; (iii) a further questionnaire, adapted to each informant, asking for acceptability judgements to detect overabundance at the single speaker's level. Results show that the given subclass of VN compounds provides an instance of systematic and productive overabundance in the Italian morphological system, differently from the examples usually discussed for this language.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2019-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49202990","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gabriella Lapesa, Lea Kawaletz, I. Plag, M. Andreou, M. Kisselew, Sebastian Padó
One of the central problems in the semantics of derived words is polysemy (see, for example, the recent contributions by Lieber 2016 and Plag et al. 2018 ). In this paper, we tackle the problem of disambiguating newly derived words in context by applying Distributional Semantics ( Firth 1957 ) to deverbal -ment nominalizations (e.g. bedragglement, emplacement). We collected a dataset containing contexts of low frequency deverbal -ment nominalizations (55 types, 406 tokens, see Appendix B) extracted from large corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English. We chose low frequency derivatives because high frequency formations are often lexicalized and thus tend to not exhibit the kind of polysemous readings we are interested in. Furthermore, disambiguating low-frequency words presents an especially difficult task because there is little to no prior knowledge about these words from which their semantic properties can be extrapolated. The data was manually annotated according to eventive vs. non-eventive interpretations, allowing also an ambiguous label in those cases where the context did not disambiguate. Our question then was to what extent, and under which conditions, context-derived representations such as those of Distributional Semantics can be successfully employed in the disambiguation of low-frequency derivatives. Our results show that, first, our models are able to distinguish between eventive and non-eventive readings with some success. Second, very small context windows are sufficient to find the intended interpretation in the majority of cases. Third, ambiguous instances tend to be classified as events. Fourth, the performance of the classifier differed for different subcategories of nouns, with non-eventive derivatives being harder to classify correctly. We present indirect evidence that this is due to the semantic similarity of abstract non-eventive nouns to eventive nouns. Overall, this paper demonstrates that distributional semantic models can be fruitfully employed for the disambiguation of low frequency words in spite of the scarcity of available contextual information. 1
{"title":"Disambiguation of newly derived nominalizations in context: A Distributional Semantics approach","authors":"Gabriella Lapesa, Lea Kawaletz, I. Plag, M. Andreou, M. Kisselew, Sebastian Padó","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2018.0131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2018.0131","url":null,"abstract":"One of the central problems in the semantics of derived words is polysemy (see, for example, the recent contributions by Lieber 2016 and Plag et al. 2018 ). In this paper, we tackle the problem of disambiguating newly derived words in context by applying Distributional Semantics ( Firth 1957 ) to deverbal -ment nominalizations (e.g. bedragglement, emplacement). We collected a dataset containing contexts of low frequency deverbal -ment nominalizations (55 types, 406 tokens, see Appendix B) extracted from large corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English. We chose low frequency derivatives because high frequency formations are often lexicalized and thus tend to not exhibit the kind of polysemous readings we are interested in. Furthermore, disambiguating low-frequency words presents an especially difficult task because there is little to no prior knowledge about these words from which their semantic properties can be extrapolated. The data was manually annotated according to eventive vs. non-eventive interpretations, allowing also an ambiguous label in those cases where the context did not disambiguate. Our question then was to what extent, and under which conditions, context-derived representations such as those of Distributional Semantics can be successfully employed in the disambiguation of low-frequency derivatives. Our results show that, first, our models are able to distinguish between eventive and non-eventive readings with some success. Second, very small context windows are sufficient to find the intended interpretation in the majority of cases. Third, ambiguous instances tend to be classified as events. Fourth, the performance of the classifier differed for different subcategories of nouns, with non-eventive derivatives being harder to classify correctly. We present indirect evidence that this is due to the semantic similarity of abstract non-eventive nouns to eventive nouns. Overall, this paper demonstrates that distributional semantic models can be fruitfully employed for the disambiguation of low frequency words in spite of the scarcity of available contextual information. 1","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2018-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42307213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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