Cover not available
Article published In:
Explorations of morphological structure in distributional space
Edited by Melanie J. Bell, Juhani Järvikivi and Vito Pirrelli
[The Mental Lexicon 17:3] 2022
► pp. 458–479

Productivity and semantic transparency

An exploration of word formation in Mandarin Chinese

 | Northwest UniversityXi’an
ORCID logo | Eberhard-Karls UniversityTubingen
We used word embeddings to study the relation between productivity and semantic transparency. We compiled a dataset with around 2700 two-syllable compounds that shared position-specific constituents (henceforth pivots) and some 1100 suffixed words. For each pivot and suffix, we calculated measures of productivity as well as measures of semantic transparency. For compounds, productivity (P) was negatively correlated with the number of types (V) and with the semantic similarity between non-pivot constituents and their compounds. Conversely, the greater semantic similarity of the pivot with either the compound or the non-pivot constituent predicted higher degrees of productivity. Visualization with t-SNE revealed clustering of suffixed words’ embeddings, but no by-pivot clustering for compounds, except for a minority of pivots whose regions in semantic space did not contain intruding unrelated compounds. A subset of these pivots was found to realize a fixed shift in semantic space from the base word to the corresponding compound, a property that also emerged for several suffixes. For these pivots, no correlation between P and V was present. Thus, Mandarin compounds appear to realize, at one extreme, motivated but unsystematic concept formation (where other pivots could just as well have been used), and at the other extreme, systematic suffix-like semantics.
Keywords: morphological productivity, distributional semantics, Mandarin compounding and affixation, semantic transparency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Productivity and semantic transparency
    • 2.1Data
    • 2.2Productivity
    • 2.3Semantic transparency
  • 3.The semantic geometry of Mandarin compounds
  • 4.The semantic geometry of suffixation
  • 5.General discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 28 March 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.22009.she
References (20)
References
Aronoff, M. (1976). Word formation in generative grammar. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H. (2001). Word frequency distributions. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2009). Corpus linguistics in morphology: morphological productivity. In Kytö, M. and Lüdeling, A., editors, Corpus Linguistics. An international handbook, pages 900–919. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Janda, L. A., Nesset, T., Endresen, A., and Makarova, A. (2013). Making choices in Russian: Pros and cons of statistical methods for rival forms. Russian Linguistics, 371:253–291. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H. and Lieber, R. (1991). Productivity and English derivation: a corpus-based study. Linguistics, 291:801–843. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., and Gulikers, L. (1995). The CELEX lexical database (CD-ROM). Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.Google Scholar
Bauer, L. (1983). English word formation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2001). Morphological productivity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Booij, G. E. (1977). Dutch morphology. A study of word formation in generative grammar. Foris, Dordrecht. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ceccagno, A. and Basciano, B. (2007). Compound headedness in Chinese: An analysis of neologisms. Morphology, 17(2):207–231. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corbin, D. (1987). Morphologie derivationelle et structuration du lexique [Derivational morphology and lexical structure]. Niemeyer, Tubingen.Google Scholar
Gale, W. A. and Sampson, G. (1995). Good-Turing frequency estimation without tears. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 21:217–237. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Good, I. J. (1953). The population frequencies of species and the estimation of population parameters. Biometrika, 401:237–264. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levi-Strauss, C. (1962). Savage mind. University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Maaten, L. V. D. and Hinton, G. (2008). Visualizing data using t-sne. Journal of machine learning research, 91(Nov):2579–2605.Google Scholar
Marle, J. V. (1985). On the paradigmatic dimensions of morphological creativity. Foris, Dordrecht.Google Scholar
Riddle, E. (1985). A historical perspective on the productivity of the suffixes -ness and -ity . In Fisiak, J., editor, Historical Semantics, Historical Word-Formation, pages 435–461. Mouton, New York. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schultink, H. (1961). Produktiviteit als morfologisch fenomeen [Productivity as a morphological phenomenon]. Forum der Letteren, 21:110–125.Google Scholar
Shen, T. and Baayen, R. H. (2021). Adjective-noun compounds in mandarin: a study on productivity. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 18(3):543–572. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tarasova, E. (2013). Some new insights into the semantics of English N+ N compounds. PhD thesis, Open Access Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka.
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Ke, Sihui (Echo), Rui Jin & Keiko Koda
2023. Adult L2 learners’ morphological sensitivity in a morphosyllabic language. The Mental Lexicon 18:3 ► pp. 446 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.