The effect of morphological structure on semantic transparency ratings

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shichang Wang ◽  
Chu-Ren Huang ◽  
Yao Yao ◽  
Angel Chan
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Instrumental Method ◽  
Semantic Transparency ◽  
Language Resources ◽  
Language Studies ◽  
Lexical Structure ◽  
Lexical Processes ◽  
Linguistic Phenomenon

Abstract Semantic transparency deals with the interface between lexical semantics and morphology. It is an important linguistic phenomenon in Chinese in the context of prediction of meanings of compounds from their constituents. Given prominence of compounding in Chinese morpho-lexical processes, to date there is no semantic transparency dataset available to support verifiable and replicable quantitative analysis of semantic transparency in Mandarin Chinese. In addition, the relation between semantic transparency and morphological structure has not been systematically examined. This paper reports a crowdsourcing-based experiment designed for the construction of a large semantic transparency dataset of Chinese compounds which includes semantic transparency ratings of both the compound and each constituent root of the compound. We also present an analysis of the effects of morphological structure on semantic transparency using the constructed dataset. Our study found that in a transparent modifier-head compound, the head tends to get greater semantic transparency rating than the modifier. Interestingly, no such effect is observed in coordinative compounds. This result suggests that compounds of different morphological structures are processed differently and that the concept of head plays an important role in the word-formation process of compounding. We advocate that crowdsourcing can be a highly instrumental method to collect linguistic judgments and to construct language resources in Chinese language studies. In addition, the proposed methodology of comparing constituent transparency and word transparency sheds light on the relation between morpho-lexical structure and cognitive processing of lexical meanings.

Adjective–noun compounds in Mandarin: a study on productivity

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tian Shen ◽  
R. Harald Baayen
Keyword(s):  
Formation Process ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Distributional Semantics ◽  
Semantic Transparency ◽  
Noun Compounds ◽  
Hapax Legomena

Abstract In structuralist linguistics, compounds are argued not to constitute morphological categories, due to the absence of systematic form-meaning correspondences. This study investigates subsets of compounds for which systematic form-meaning correspondences are present: adjective–noun compounds in Mandarin. We show that there are substantial differences in the productivity of these compounds. One set of productivity measures (the count of types, the count of hapax legomena, and the estimated count of unseen types) reflect compounds’ profitability. By contrast, the category-conditioned degree of productivity is found to correlate with the internal semantic transparency of the words belonging to a morphological category. Greater semantic transparency, gauged by distributional semantics, predicts greater category-conditioned productivity. This dovetails well with the hypothesis that semantic transparency is a prerequisite for a word formation process to be productive.

scholarly journals Imaging Implicit Morphological Processing: Evidence from Hebrew

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (9) ◽  
pp. 1955-1969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atira S. Bick ◽  
Ram Frost ◽  
Gadi Goelman
Keyword(s):  
Masked Priming ◽  
Statistical Correlation ◽  
Morphological Processing ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Semantic Transparency ◽  
Lexical Structure ◽  
The Neural Networks ◽  
Distinct Aspect ◽  
The Brain

Is morphology a discrete and independent element of lexical structure or does it simply reflect a fine-tuning of the system to the statistical correlation that exists among orthographic and semantic properties of words? Hebrew provides a unique opportunity to examine morphological processing in the brain because of its rich morphological system. In an fMRI masked priming experiment, we investigated the neural networks involved in implicit morphological processing in Hebrew. In the lMFG and lIFG, activation was found to be significantly reduced when the primes were morphologically related to the targets. This effect was not influenced by the semantic transparency of the morphological prime, and was not found in the semantic or orthographic condition. Additional morphologically related decrease in activation was found in the lIPL, where activation was significantly modulated by semantic transparency. Our findings regarding implicit morphological processing suggest that morphology is an automatic and distinct aspect of visually processing words. These results also coincide with the behavioral data previously obtained demonstrating the central role of morphological processing in reading Hebrew.

Word formation in the earliest stages of L2 Polish

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-267
Author(s):  
Jacopo Saturno
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Implicit Processing ◽  
Intended Meaning ◽  
Oral Production ◽  
Distributional Properties ◽  
Target Words

Abstract This paper examines word formation strategies in initial SLA, with particular regard to the implicit processing of the distributional properties of the input. Learners with various L1s and no experience of the target language (n=163) took a 14-hour L2 Polish course under controlled input conditions. In an oral production task, these learners were asked to describe properties of human referents who had never appeared in the input by stating their nationality or profession. In their output, the learners most often referred to the target referents by attaching a -k(-) sound cluster to a lexical morpheme borrowed from a known language. Quantitative analysis shows that indeed, within the input considered, the same -k(-) cluster is characteristic of most words referring to human entities. The study concludes that learners can analyse the morphological structure of target words even after minimal exposure to the input, identifying at first the derivational formants characterised by the strongest association to the intended meaning.

Morphological Units: A Theoretical and Psycholinguistic Perspective

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominiek Sandra
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Semantic Relations ◽  
Semantic Transparency ◽  
Relational Information ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Processing Level ◽  
Communicative Efficiency ◽  
Complex Words

Speakers can transfer meanings to each other because they represent them in a perceptible form. Phonology and syntactic structure are two levels of linguistic form. Morphemes are situated in-between them. Like phonemes they have a phonological component, and like syntactic structures they carry relational information. A distinction can be made between inflectional and lexical morphology. Both are devices in the service of communicative efficiency, by highlighting grammatical and semantic relations, respectively. Morphological structure has also been studied in psycholinguistics, especially by researchers who are interested in the process of visual word recognition. They found that a word is recognized more easily when it belongs to a large morphological family, which suggests that the mental lexicon is structured along morphological lines. The semantic transparency of a word’s morphological structure plays an important role. Several findings also suggest that morphology plays an important role at a pre-lexical processing level as well. It seems that morphologically complex words are subjected to a process of blind morphological decomposition before lexical access is attempted.

The acquisition of polysynthesis

1989 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Mithun
Keyword(s):  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Semantic Transparency ◽  
Children's Strategies

ABSTRACTPolysynthetic languages can present special extraction puzzles to children, due to the length of their words. A number of hypotheses concerning children's strategies for acquiring morphology, originally proposed on the basis of their approaches to somewhat simpler systems, are confirmed by observations of five children acquiring Mohawk. Among the Mohawk children, the earliest segmentation of words was phonological rather than morphological: stressed syllables, usually penultimate or antepenultimate, were extracted first. Ultimate syllables were then added, confirming the salience of the ends of words. During this time, distinctions expressed by adults in affixes were either omitted or expressed analytically. Acquisition then moved leftward by syllables. When most utterances were long enough to include pronominal prefixes as well as roots, morphological structure was apparently discovered. It is not surprising that the pronouns should trigger this awareness, since they are frequent, appearing with every verb and most nouns, they are functional, and they are semantically transparent. From this point on, the children acquired affixes primarily according to their utility and semantic transparency rather than their phonological shape or position.

An Outline of English Lexicology: Lexical Structure, Word Semantics, and Word-Formation

Language ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zdenek Salzmann ◽  
Leonhard Lipka
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Lexical Structure

scholarly journals Unpacking contemporary English blends: Morphological structure, meaning, processing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Natalia Beliaeva
Keyword(s):  
Online Survey ◽  
English Language ◽  
Digital Camera ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Structural Type ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Morphological Description ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Morphological Theory ◽  
Experimental Findings

<p>It is not coincidental that blend words (e. g. nutriceutical ← nutricious + pharmaceutical, blizzaster ← blizzard + disaster) are more and more often used in media sources. In a blend, two (or sometimes more) words become one compact and attention-catching form, which is at the same time relatively transparent, so that the reader or listener can still recognise several constituents in it. These features make blends one of the most intriguing types of word formation. At the same time, blends are extremely challenging to study. A classical morpheme-based morphological description is not suitable for blends because their formation does not involve morphemes as such. This implies two possible approaches: either to deny blends a place in regular morphology (as suggested in Dressler (2000), for example), or to find grounds for including them into general morphological descriptions and theories (as was done, using different frameworks, in López Rúa (2004b), Gries (2012), Arndt-Lappe and Plag (2013) and other studies). The growing number of blends observed in various media sources indicates that this phenomenon is an important characteristic of the living contemporary language, and therefore, blends cannot be ignored in a morphological description of the English language (and many other typologically different languages). Moreover, I believe that the general morphological theory has to embrace blends because of the vast amount of regularity observed in their formation, despite their incredible diversity.  The formation of blends involves both addition and subtraction, which relates them both to compounds and to clippings. This research aims to clarify the morphological status of blends in relation to the neighbouring word formation categories, in particular, to the so-called clipping compounds (e.g. digicam ← digital + camera). To approach this problem, I compiled a collection of English neologisms formed by merging two (in some cases, more) words into one, and analysed their formal and semantic properties. The results of this analysis were used to distinguish between blends and clipping compounds, and also to justify the classification of blends according to different degrees of formal transparency (using the principles of Lehrer’s (1996, 2007) classification). The strength of the association between blends (or clipping compounds) and their source words was then assessed in two experiments: an online survey involving evaluating definitions of blends and clipping compounds, and a psycholinguistic experiment involving a production and a lexical decision task. The experimental findings show that recognisability of the source words of blends and clipping compounds has significant influence both on the evaluation of their definitions and on their processing. The main implication of the experimental results is that blends, unlike clipping compounds, are closer to compounds than to clippings. In addition to this, significant differences are revealed between blends containing full source words and blends containing only parts of them. Therefore, the structural type of blend, as defined in this study, is a factor which has strong influence on the processing of blends and their source words.</p>

scholarly journals WORD BUILDING PATTERNS OF NUMERALS IN TUNGUS-MANCHU LANGUAGES

2021 ◽  
pp. 52-68
Author(s):  
ALEXIS A. BURYKIN ◽  
◽  
SARDANA I. SHARINA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Cardinal Numbers ◽  
Changing Patterns

The article discusses the reconstruction of the archetype of cardinal numbers, word formation of the categories of numbers in the Tungus-Manchu languages. Based on the available data on languages, 15 categories are analyzed: cardinal, ordinal, multiples, dividing, distributive, restrictive, collective, numerals for counting days, numerals for counting animals, numerals for counting households, numerals for counting fingers, numerals for counting pairs of objects, numerals for counting places and directions, numerals for counting various objects, numerals for counting the years of an animal. It turns out that certain forms are ancient, but most of them were formed later and were characteristic only for a certain group, subgroup or one language. Word-building patterns of numerals are connected with form-changing patterns, although in a number of cases syntactic functions of derivatives change, and sometimes we can observe forms with complex morphological structure, derived not only from cardinal numerals but also from numerals of other categories.

scholarly journals Dephrasal adjectives in Polish – A case of syntax-inside-morphology

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
Joanna Kolbusz-Buda
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Models ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Compound Words ◽  
Synthetic Compound ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Formation Type ◽  
Lexical Integrity ◽  
Formation System ◽  
Linguistic Material

The present paper is part of a larger project which investigates the issue of “syntax-inside-morphology” in the domain of Polish word-formation. In what follows, we explore the thus far unstudied territory of dephrasal adjectives, such as tużpopołudniowy ‘right-after-noon’ and ponadstustronicowy ‘over-one-hundred-page’ built on phrasal bases subjected to suffixation. It is generally acknowledged that the Polish word-formation system is not designed to comprise phrasal compounding – a word-formation type which has come to be considered a flagship representative of the morphology-syntax interface (see Szymanek 2017 and Pafel 2017). Nevertheless, one may come across a number of Polish word-formation patterns, such as the class of nouns derived from PPs (e.g. nausznik ‘earmuff’ [[naP uszyN]PP -nik]N) or synthetic compound words (e.g. bydłobójnia ‘abattoir’ [[bydłN-o-bójV]VP -nia]N) which should clearly be considered legitimate members of the global “syntax-inside-morphology” community (see Kolbusz-Buda 2019a). In what follows, we want to argue that Polish dephrasal adjectives should be recognised as a case of morphology-syntax interplay on a par with the already attested cross-linguistic material. The phrasal character of the Polish data to be discussed in this study is so strong that researching this sui generis type of derivation seems not only a valid linguistic undertaking but also one with important implications. The study may have far-reaching consequences for the descriptive adequacy of the Polish word-formation system and point to new directions in the discussion on the morphology-syntax interface. The morphological structure of the adjectives to be discussed will be juxtaposed with the class of Polish compounds proper, in particular, synthetic compounds – a word-formation type which can be considered the closest in its morphological make-up to the presented material. Offering such a comparative perspective seems necessary as the adjectives to which we choose to refer as products of dephrasal suffixation are casually classified as compounds. Moreover, although Polish does not note any cases of phrasal compounding, the morphological structure of the adjectives in question will be additionally examined to discover potential parallels between the two word-formation types. The reason behind this undertaking is two-fold. Firstly, as has already been mentioned, dephrasal adjectives are classified as compounds; secondly, they contain a phrasal unit. In our analysis, we draw on a revised version of the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis, i.e. Lieber and Scalise’s (2007) Firewall Theory, which belongs to the current of the so-called mixed models of word-formation advanced in the recent years by, for instance, Ackema and Neeleman 2004 and Pafel 2017, allowing for a limited intermodular interaction between morphological and syntactic domains.

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