Rochelle Lieber

Morphology and lexical semantics

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Features 2. Co-indexation 3. The semantics of verb formation 4. Extending the system - location 5. Extending the system - quantity 6. Combinability and the correspondence between form and meaning 7. Looking back, looking forward References Index.

Productivity and English derivation: a corpus-based study

The notion of productivity is one which is central to the study of morphology. It is a notion about which linguists frequently have intuitions. But it is a notion which still remains somewhat problematic in the literature on generative morphology some 15 years after Aronoff raised the issue in his (1976) monograph. In this paper we will review some of the definitions and measures of productivity discussed in the generative and pregenerative literature. We will adopt the definition of productivity suggested by Schultink (1961) and propose a number of statistical measures of productivity whose results, when applied to a fixed corpus, accord nicely with our intuitive estimates of productivity, and which shed light on the quantitative weight of linguistic restrictions on word-formation rules. Part of our purpose here is also a very simple one: to make available a substantial set of empirical data concerning the productivity of some of the major derivational affixes of English. In this paper we propose a measure of productivity in morphology which is based on the definition of productivity in Schultink (1961). We argue that a measure of productivity based on the token frequencies of types, specifically on the number of hapax legomena for a given affix in a corpus, comes very close to according with our intuitions about productivity. We illustrate this result by applying our measure to a substantial body of empirical data from English derivational morphology. Our aim is not merely to develop a quantitative measure and to see how it accords with the data, but also to provide a measure of productivity that would be of use in morphological theory. Specifically, having such a measure of productivity would be of use in delimiting the set of data which a theory of word formation should be accountable to. Presumably, morphological theory should account only for processes of word formation which are Linguistics 29 (1991), 801-843 0024-3949/91/0029-0801

Handbook of word-formation

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The morphological complexity of simplex nouns

Contributors Andrew Carstairs-McCarty: Basic Terminology Ellen M. Caisse: Word-Formation and Phonology Gregory Stump: Word-Formation and Inflectional Morphology Andrew Spencer: Word-Formation and Syntax Dieter Kastovsky: Hans Marchand and the Marchandeans Tom Roeper: Chomskys Remarks and the Transformationalist Hypothesis Sergio Scalise and Emiliano Guevara: The Lexicalist Approach to Word-Formation and the Notion of the Lexicon Robert Beard and Mark Volpe: Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology Pavol Stekauer: Onomasiological Approach to Word-Formation David Tuggy: Cognitive Approach to Word-Formation Wolfgang U. Dressler: Word-Formation in Natural Morphology Peter Ackema and Ad Neeleman: Word-Formation in Optimality Theory Laurie Bauer: Productivity: Theories Franz Rainer: Constraints on Productivity Peter Hohenhaus: Lexicalization and Institutionalization Rochelle Lieber: English Word-Formation Processes Bogdan Szymanek: The Latest Trends in English Word-Formation Subject Index Name Index Language Index

A semantic principle of auxiliary selection in Dutch

This paper reports experimental results concerning the processing of morphologically simplex nouns. It appears that the way in which these nouns are processed is influenced not only by their own frequency of use, but also by two other frequency measures. First, the token frequency of the corresponding plural inflection plays a role. Second, the type count of the number of compounds and derived words in which a given simplex noun appears as a constituent also affects our experimental measures. We offer an explanation of these results in terms of the semantic differences between noun pluralization as inherent inflection on the one hand, and derivation and compounding on the other

Verbal prefixes in Dutch: a study in lexical conceptual structure

We propose that the choice between the auxiliaries hebben ‘have’ and zijn ‘be’ in Dutch is determined by a particular semantic feature of verbs. In particular we propose a feature of meaning [IEPS] for ‘inferable eventual position or state’ that characterizes whether the action denoted by the verb allows us to determine the eventual position or state of the verbs highest argument. It is argued that only verbs which exhibit the feature [+IEPS] or which obtain the feature compositionally in the syntax select zijn as their auxiliary. Our analysis is then compared to a number of other analyses of auxiliary selection in Dutch.

Word frequency distributions and lexical semantics

The subject of our study is verbal prefixation in Dutch; specifically we will be concerned with the prefixes ver-, be- and ont- illustrated in (1)–(3):

Nominalizations in a calculus of lexical semantic representations

This paper addresses the relation between meaning, lexical productivity, and frequency of use. Using density estimation as a visualization tool, we show that differences in semantic structure can be reflected in probability density functions estimated for word frequency distributions. We call attention to an example of a bimodal density, and suggest that bimodality arises when distributions of well-entrenched lexical items, which appear to be lognormal, are mixed with distributions of productively created nonce formations.

Syntax of Words

The history of generative grammar has been such that exploration of the structure and meanings of words has long stayed on the back burner. With respect to the structure of words, this picture began to change in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s with the appearance of the first substantial works on the structure of word formation within the theory (e.g., Aronoff 1976; Lieber 1980; Williams 1981; Selkirk 1982). Following this there was a gradual increase in interest in the area of morphology that has led to a virtual explosion in recent years. A somewhat less direct trajectory has been followed in the history of lexical semantics within generative grammar. After an initial burst of activity as part of the Generative Semantics/Interpretive Semantics debate of the late 1960’s, interest in general issues of lexical semantics flagged within the generative tradition, with the notable exception of the lines of work pursued by Bierwisch (1989, 1997) or Jackendoff (1983, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1996).1

Deconstructing morphology : word formation in syntactic theory

Theoretical approaches to morphology within the generative tradition can often be characterized by the tendency to either reject syntax as a model or embrace it and evolve in tandem with it. This article traces this symbiotic development from the inception of generative grammar to the present.