Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 31, Issue 2, 2008

This paper examines the co-text of use of the singular and plural variants of 40 nouns used as modifiers in compounds with two lexical bases on the basis of over 6,000 compounds collected from a general corpus of English. The data shows that, for the lexemes considered, plural premodification contributes significantly to compound formation, although singular premodification is favoured, and that both groups of compounds occur in similar lexical, semantic and syntactic environments (e.g. the same types of semantic categories are represented in the heads of both groups; the same combinations of typographic, semantic and syntactic features signal the presence of micro semantic-syntactic units within larger nominal units). However, it appears that features marking the distinctiveness of the non-head material in the compounds occur more frequently, especially in combinations, when plural premodification is instantiated. This suggests that plural premodification may be favoured by the co-presence of multiple co-textual conditions, but also that the occurrence of unithood features — which mark the distinctiveness of the non-head material or of the larger phrases containing the compounds — may also be favoured by specific lexemes.

The advances in computing technology which made possible the study of electronic text in large quantities opened the door to the study of lexis, and crucially of significant word collocation. The type and strength of preference or ‘attraction’ which obtains between two or more words has been the raw material out of which we have long been extracting secondary language resources by means of automated systems (e.g. A. Renouf, 1996; M. Pacey et al, 1998). Now, we turn to our vast data repositories once again, this time to try to find evidence for the existence of another ‘force’ in textual organisation, one which operates contrary to word ‘attraction’, and which we refer to as ‘repulsion’. Like attraction, repulsion is a universal phenomenon and we have an expectation that it will be discovered to be alive and well in language. By ‘repulsion’, we mean the rare or non co-occurrence of two words as neighbours. Since this is the case for the majority of words in the vocabulary, we begin with a focus on synonymous word pairs which, by virtue of their shared meanings, can be expected to provide more surprising, focussed and easily interpretable results. In this paper, we tentatively interpret from our results some of the ways in which repulsion seems to operate in text and to what extent it is proving to be amenable to objective measurement.