Livio Gaeta

Productivity in Italian word formation : a variable-corpus approach

Abstract The quantitative approach to morphological productivity first proposed by Baayen crucially refers to the relation between the number of hapax legomena formed with a given affix occurring in a sufficiently large corpus and the total number of tokens of that affix sampled in the corpus. Most criticism against this measure focuses on its neglecting the role played by frequency in the evaluation of productivity. As an improvement of Baayen’s procedure, a variable-corpus approach is proposed. Accordingly, the productivity values should be calculated at equal token numbers for different affixes instead of taking the different token numbers which result from sampling the whole corpus for all affixes, as in Baayens works. This implies that variably-sized subcorpora must be sampled to compare affixes displaying different frequencies. On the basis of a 75-million-token newspaper corpus, the productivity values for several Italian affixes in the deverbal and deadjectival domain are calculated. The resulting rank proves linguistically plausible, avoiding the overestimation of productivity for low-frequency affixes typically occurring in fixed-corpus calculations. As a further advantage, the procedure proposed here makes it possible to deal satisfactorily with two problematic aspects usually neglected in previous investigations, namely, the quantitative impact of (i) allomorphies and lexicalizations and (ii) inner-cycle derivations on productivity measures.

On the interaction between morphology and semantics: the Italian suffix - ATA

Action nouns are often claimed to be sensitive to the actional propertiesof verbs. In this paper, an attempt will be made to consider the possibleinteractions between the morphological rules that form action nouns and theactional content of verbs. In this respect, a notion of internal and of externalactionality of an affix will be distinguished, which are respectively responsiblefor the affixs selection properties and for its global semantics. The accurateanalysis of the Italian sufix-ATA will reveal that both internal and externalactionality play a crucial role in delimiting the input and in defining thesemantics of the output.

Deutsche Komposita zwischen Syntax und Morphologie: Ein korpusbasierter Ansatz

Die Komposition ist ein hochproduktiver Wortbildungsprozess des Deutschen, zumindest im Bereich der nominalen Komposition. Weit weniger deutlich ist jedoch, wo die Grenzen zu anderen Wortbildungsmustern zu ziehen sind. Unklar ist auserdem, welche Auswirkungen diese Kompositionsfreudigkeit fur das gesamte (etwa prosodisch-phonologische, morphologische, syntaktische, informationsstrukturelle) Sprachsystem hat. Dabei ist beispielsweise an die Entstehung von Affixoiden oder an die Konkurrenz zwischen Nominalkomposita und formal korrespondierenden, bedeutungsgleichen Nominalphrasen (Gruntee / gruner Tee) zu denken. Thema der Arbeitsgruppe sind daher sowohl Probleme der strukturellen Analyse und Abgrenzung von Komposita als auch die Komposition als typologisches Merkmal des Deutschen. Im Mittelpunkt stehen daher u.a. Fragen zu den folgenden Aspekten:

Lexeme Formation in a Conscious Approach to the Lexicon

N + N compounds in Italian as well as in other Romance languages are differently judged in the current literature. Most scholars agree that only a subset should be treated as true compounds, while the rest is mostly rejected. However, it is not clear what the right criteria are for assessing their status as compounds or as syntactic units. In this paper, an entirely morphological approach will be advocated, which benefits from a careful distinction of two different senses of the term lexicon: the Bloomfieldian sense of the lexicon intended as a repository, the Lexicon1 and the morphological lexicon intended as the set of potential (regularly derived or compounded) lexemes of a language, the Lexicon2. The consistently morphological approach will help us shed light on the intricate issue of Romance compounding invoking general principles for keeping what results from a syntactic pattern and is likely to be a more or less entrenched unit, i.e. a Lex1-lexeme, and what is likely to be produced by an abstract morphological pattern, i.e. a Lex2-lexeme.

Stripping paradigmatic relations out of the syntax

This contribution aims at showing how paradigms and associative relations can be integrated into word-formation, with special attention paid to compounding. In this regard, we will take into account a phenomenon at the border between derivation and compounding, namely formations like süßherzig ‘sweet-hearted’, in which -ig is an adjective-forming suffix and AN a possible compound. To do so, we will explore data available from a large web corpus, on whose basis we will show how syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations developed in syntax find their way into word formation. We will show that the most productive compounding schemas as they are currently assumed in Construction Morphology give rise to processes of semi-affixation which are a first step toward derivation proper.

Die deutsche Pluralbildung zwischen deskriptiver Angemessenheit und Sprachtheorie

Abstract How many inflectional classes displays the German substantive? As basic as this question may be, a satisfactory answer is still lacking. In this paper, the question will be tackled again, taking into consideration the contribution provided by several recent theoretical approaches to an adequate description and comprehension of the German inflectional system. On the other hand, the intricacies of the German plural constitute an optimal test bed to verify the empirical adequacy of recent theoretical thinking on language.