The Semantic Transparency Of English Compound Nouns

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families. All semantic annotations used in the book are freely available.

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

This controversial new book addresses the linguistic problems around compounds: words which sit on the borderline of syntax and morphology.

Presents three frameworks for studying morphology, offering different insights into the meaning of compounds.

Metaphorical and metonymical compounds – novel and lexicalised ones alike – are remarkably abundant in language. Yet how can we be sure that when using an expression such as land fishing in order to speak about metal detecting, the referent will be immediately understood even if the hearer had not been previously familiar with the compound? Accordingly, this book sets out to explore whether the semantics of metaphorical and metonymical noun–noun combinations can be systematically analysed within a theoretical framework, where systematicity pertains to regularities in both the cognitive processes and the products of these processes, that is, the compounds themselves. Backed up by recent psycholinguistic evidence, the book convincingly demonstrates that such compounds are not semantically opaque as it has been formerly claimed: they can in fact be analysed and accounted for within a cognitive linguistic framework, by the combined application of metaphor, metonymy, blending, profile determinacy and schema theory; and represent the creative and associative word formation processes that we regularly apply in everyday language.

This book presents new work on the psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics of compound words. It shows the insights this work offers on natural language processing and the relation between language, mind, and memory. Compounding is an easy and effective way to create and transfer meanings. By building new lexical items based on the meanings of existing items, compounds can usually be understood on first presentation, though - as, say, breadboard, cardboard, cupboard, and sandwich-board show - the rules governing the relations between the components' meanings are not always straightforward. Compound words are segmentable into their constituent morphemes in much the same way as sentences can be divided into their constituent words: children and adults would not otherwise find them interpretable. But compound sequences may also be independent lexical items that can be retrieved for production as single entities and whose idiosyncratic meanings are stored in the mind. Compound words reflect the properties both of linguistic representation in the mind and of grammatical processing. They thus offer opportunities for investigating key aspects of the mental operations involved in language: for example, the interplay between storage and computation; the manner in which morphological and semantic factors impact on the nature of storage; and the way the mind's computational processes serve on-line language comprehension and production. This book explores the nature of these opportunities, assesses what is known, and considers what may yet be discovered and how.

In the study of word formation, the focus has often been on generating the form. In this book, the semantic aspect of the formation of new words is central. It is viewed from the perspectives of word formation rules and of lexicalization. An extensive introduction gives a historical overview of the study of the semantics of word formation and lexicalization, explaining how the different theoretical frameworks used in the contributions relate to each other. Each chapter then concentrates on a specific question about a theoretical concept or a word formation process in a particular language and adopts a theoretical framework that is appropriate to the study of this question. From general theoretical concepts of productivity and lexicalization, the focus moves to terminology, compounding, and derivation. Theoretical frameworks discussed include Jackendoff's Conceptual Structure, Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, Lieber's lexical semantic approach to word formation, Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon, Beard's Lexeme-Morpheme-Base Morphology, The onomasiological approach to terminology and word formation.

A state-of-the-art survey of complex words, this volume brings together a team of leading international morphologists to demonstrate the wealth and breadth of the study of word-formation. Encompassing methodological, empirical and theoretical approaches, each chapter presents the results of cutting-edge research into linguistic complexity, including lexico-semantic aspects of complex words, the structure of complex words, and corpus-based case studies. Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages, it covers both general aspects of word-formation, and aspects specific to particular languages, such as English, French, Greek, Basque, Spanish, German and Slovak. Theoretical considerations are supported by a number of in-depth case studies focusing on the role of affixes, as well as word-formation processes such as compounding, affixation and conversion. Attention is also devoted to typological issues in word-formation. The book will be an invaluable resource for academic researchers and graduate students interested in morphology, linguistic typology and corpus linguistics.

Fills a gap in cross-linguistic research by being the first systematic survey of the word-formation of the world's languages. Data from fifty-five world languages reveals associations between word-formation processes in genetically and geographically distinct languages.

This text presents new work on the psycholinguistics & neurolinguistics of compound words & shows the insights offered on natural language processing & the relation between language, mind & memory.