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Article published In:
Semantics and Psychology of Complex Words
Edited by Christina L. Gagné and Thomas L. Spalding
[The Mental Lexicon 15:1] 2020
► pp. 62–78

A (distributional) semantic perspective on the processing of morphologically complex words

| University of Trento | Ghent University
| University of Tübingen
| University of Milano-Bicocca | Milan Center for Neuroscience (NeuroMi)

While morphemes are theoretically defined as linguistic units linking form and meaning, semantic effects in morphological processing are not reported consistently in the literature on derived and compound words. The lack of consistency in this line of research has often been attributed to methodological differences between studies or contextual effects. In this paper, we advance a different proposal where semantic effects emerge quite consistently if semantics is defined in a dynamic and flexible way, relying on distributional semantics approaches. In this light, we revisit morphological processing, taking a markedly cognitive perspective, as allowed by models that focus on morphology as systematic meaning transformation or that focus on the mapping between the orthographic form of words and their meanings.

Keywords: derivation, compounding, morphological processing, semantic transparency, distributional semantic models, form-meaning mapping
Article outline
  • Semantic transparency in morphological processing of derived and compound words
    • Distributional semantics
    • Morphology as a systematic meaning transformation
    • Morphology as form-meaning mapping
  • Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 30 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.00014.ame
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