Syntactic productivity under the microscope: the lexical and semantic openness of Dutch minimizing constructions

Abstract This paper investigates different aspects of syntactic productivity and its relation to semantics. Based on a case study of 43 Dutch minimizing constructions, the correlations between nine different variables are examined: metrics of lexical openness (TypeTokenRatio, HapaxTokenRatio, HapaxTypeRatio), measures of conventionalization (FrTop1, MeanFrTop3, SDTop3), characteristics of the frequency distribution (Alpha parameter of the Zipf curve) and two semantic variables based on distributional semantics (SemanticRange, SemanticSparsity). The analysis shows very strong correlations between most variables, but it also detects second-order extensibility based on HapaxTypeRatio and the way it interacts with semantic openness as measured by SemanticSparsity.