1887
Volume 15, Issue 1
  • ISSN 1871-1340
  • E-ISSN: 1871-1375

Abstract

Abstract

We explore variation in the interpretation of attested novel compound nouns in English, especially the contribution of constituent polysemy to this diversity. Our results show that effects of polysemy are pervasive in compound interpretation, contributing both to interpretational diversity and to perceived difficulty of interpretation. The higher the uncertainty about the concept represented by the head noun, based on existing compounds with that head, the greater the diversity of interpretations across speakers and the more difficult, on average, they find it to come up with a meaning.

Available under the CC BY 4.0 license.
Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/ml.00013.sch
2020-10-30
2024-12-05
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/deliver/fulltext/ml.00013.sch.html?itemId=/content/journals/10.1075/ml.00013.sch&mimeType=html&fmt=ahah

References

  1. Baroni, M., Bernardini, S., Ferraresi, A. & Zanchetta, E.
    (2009) The wacky wide web: a collection of very large linguistically processed web-crawled corpora. Language Resources and Evaluation43(3), 209–226. 10.1007/s10579‑009‑9081‑4
    https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-009-9081-4 [Google Scholar]
  2. Bell, M. J.
    (2011) At the boundary of morphology and syntax. Noun noun constructions in English. InA. Galani, G. Hicks, & G. Tsoulas (Eds.) Morphology and its Interfaces (pp.137–168). Amsterdam: Benjamins. 10.1075/la.178.08bel
    https://doi.org/10.1075/la.178.08bel [Google Scholar]
  3. Bell, M. J. & Schäfer, M.
    (2013) Semantic transparency: challenges for distributional semantics. InProceedings of IWCS 2013 Workshop Towards a Formal Distributional Semantics, (pp.1–10). Association for Computational Linguistics.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. (2016) Modelling semantic transparency. Morphology26(2), 157–199. 10.1007/s11525‑016‑9286‑3
    https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-016-9286-3 [Google Scholar]
  5. Coolen, R., Van Jaarsveld, H. J. & Schreuder, R.
    (1991) The interpretation of isolated novel nominal compounds. Memory & Cognition19(4), 341–352. 10.3758/BF03197138
    https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197138 [Google Scholar]
  6. (1993) Processing novel compounds: Evidence for interactive meaning activation of ambiguous nouns. Memory & Cognition21(2), 235–246. 10.3758/BF03202736
    https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03202736 [Google Scholar]
  7. Gagné, C. L., & Spalding, T. L.
    (2014) Conceptual composition: The role of relational competition in the comprehension of modifier-noun phrases and noun-noun compounds. InB. H. Ross (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Vol.59pp.97–130). Elsevier Inc.: Academic Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Libben, G.
    (2014) The nature of compounds: A psychocentric perspective. Cognitive Neuropsychology31(1–2), 8–25. 10.1080/02643294.2013.874994
    https://doi.org/10.1080/02643294.2013.874994 [Google Scholar]
  9. Maguire, P., E. Wisniewski, & G. Storms
    (2010) A corpus study of semantic patterns in compounding. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory6(1), 49–73. 10.1515/cllt.2010.003
    https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt.2010.003 [Google Scholar]
  10. Mullaly, A., Gagné, C., Spalding, T. L. & Marchak, K.
    (2010) Examining ambiguous adjectives in adjective-noun phrases: Evidence for representation as a shared core-meaning with sense specialization. The Mental Lexicon5. 87–114. 10.1075/ml.5.1.04mul
    https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.5.1.04mul [Google Scholar]
  11. Nelson, D. L., McEvoy, C. L., & Schreiber, T. A.
    (1998) The University of South Florida word association, rhyme, and word fragment norms. www.usf.edu/FreeAssociation/
  12. Ryder, M. E.
    (1994) Ordered chaos: The interpretation of English noun-noun compounds. University of California Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Spalding, T. L., Gagné, C. L., Mullaly, A. & Ji, H.
    (2010) Relation-based interpretation of noun-noun phrases: A new theoretical approach. InS. Olsen (Ed.), New Impulses in Word-Formation, (pp.283–315). Hamburg: Buske.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Wisniewski, E. J.
    (1996) Construal and similarity in conceptual combination. Journal of Memory and Language35(3), 434–453. 10.1006/jmla.1996.0024
    https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1996.0024 [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1075/ml.00013.sch
Loading
/content/journals/10.1075/ml.00013.sch
Loading

Data & Media loading...

This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error