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Compositionality in English Deverbal Compounds

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Compositionality in English Deverbal Compounds Chapter 3 Compositionality in English deverbal compounds: The role of the head Gianina Iordăchioaia University of Stuttgart Lonneke van der Plas University of Malta Glorianna Jagfeld Lancaster University This paper is concerned with the compositionality of deverbal compounds such as budget assessment in English. We present an interdisciplinary study on how the morphosyntactic properties of the deverbal noun head (e.g., assessment) can pre- dict the interpretation of the compound, as mediated by the syntactic-semantic relationship between the non-head (e.g., budget) and the head. We start with Grim- shaw’s (1990) observation that deverbal nouns are ambiguous between composi- tionally interpreted argument structure nominals, which inherit verbal structure and realize arguments (e.g., the assessment of the budget by the government), and more lexicalized result nominals, which preserve no verbal properties or arguments (e.g., The assessment is on the table.). Our hypothesis is that deverbal compounds with argument structure nominal heads are fully compositional and, in our system, more easily predictable than those headed by result nominals, since their composi- tional make-up triggers an (unambiguous) object interpretation of the non-heads. Linguistic evidence gathered from corpora and human annotations, and evaluated with machine learning techniques supports this hypothesis. At the same time, it raises interesting discussion points on how different properties of the head con- tribute to the interpretation of the deverbal compound. Gianina Iordăchioaia, Lonneke van der Plas & Glorianna Jagfeld. 2020. Compositionality in English deverbal compounds: The role of the head. In Sabine Schulte im Walde & Eva Smolka (eds.), The role of constituents in multiword expressions: An interdisciplinary, cross-lingual perspec- tive, 61–106. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.3598558 Gianina Iordăchioaia, Lonneke van der Plas & Glorianna Jagfeld 1 Introduction This paper contributes a study on how constituents influence the composition- ality of multiword expressions from the perspective of deverbal compounds in English with a focus on the role of their head nouns. 1.1 Deverbal compounds (DCs) DCs are noun-noun compounds with a deverbal head as illustrated in (1). In con- trast to root compounds (RCs) (see 2), whose head nouns are typically simple (non-derived), DCs usually receive an interpretation in which the non-head es- tablishes a syntactic-semantic relationship with the verb from which the deverbal noun is derived (i.e., as a direct object, subject or other argument/adjunct). RCs often receive a fixed interpretation (see 2a) or one depending on the immediate context (see 2b). Tomato bag in (2b) may refer to a bag of tomatoes, a bag hav- ing the shape or color of a tomato, or any other connection between a bag and tomatoes mentioned in previous context. The same holds for jelly bottle. (1) a. budget assessment – to assess (a) budget(s) (Object) b. police questioning – police questions sb. (Subject) c. college education – to educate sb. in college (Adjunct) (2) a. train station, bookstore b. tomato bag, jelly bottle Nominal DCs may be headed by deverbal nouns built with a variety of suffixes, including those that form participant-denoting nominals, as in (3a) for agents and in (3b) for patients (see Lieber 2016: 73). For reasons that will be given in Section 3.2, we concentrate here on DCs headed by eventive deverbal nominals as in (1), formed by means of the suffixes -al, -ance, -(at)ion, -ing, and -ment. (3) a. dog trainer, flight attendant b. bank employee, award nominee 1.2 Argument structure nominals and result nominals Grimshaw (1990) points out that the majority of deverbal nouns exhibit an ambi- guity between an argument structure nominal (ASN; her complex event nominal) reading, which perfectly mirrors the corresponding verb phrase with its argu- ment structure, and a result nominal (RN) reading, which is more lexicalized and 62 3 Compositionality in English deverbal compounds: The role of the head departs from the base verb at various degrees.1 The crucial difference between the two originates in the availability of verbal event structure, which enforces and constrains argument realization in ASNs (see (6) below), and its absence in RNs. The examples in (4) illustrate the two readings, building on Grimshaw (1990: 49). (4) a. The examination/exam was [on the table/in the bag]. (RN) b. The examination/*exam of the patients took a long time. (ASN) c. * The examination of the patients was [on the table/in the bag]. (ASN) In the absence of the object argument of the patients, the noun examination receives an RN reading, in which, similarly to exam, it denotes a concrete entity, which can lie on a table or be in a bag (see 4a). When the argument is realized, the synonymy with exam is lost, and the noun behaves like a nominalized verb, expressing an event, which can take a long time (see 4b), but cannot be on a table or in a bag (see 4c). In combination with exam, the phrase of the patients in (4b) could receive a possessive interpretation, i.e., the exam that belongs to the patients, but not that of an object argument of an examining event, since exam lacks such a reading. A similar interpretation would be possible in (4c) with examination on its RN reading.2 1.3 Compositionality and transparency in deverbal compounds Compositionality has long been a prominent issue in theoretical linguistics with a first formalization offered in Montague’s (1970) Universal Grammar. A simple formulation of the principle of compositionality in this tradition is given in (5). (5) The principle of compositionality (PoC, Partee 1984: 281) The meaning of an expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and of the way they are syntactically combined. According to the PoC in (5), the interpretation of a complex expression relies on the individual meanings of its parts and their syntactic combination. Leaving technical details aside, an expression like to kick the bucket will be interpreted compositionally from the meanings of the verb to kick and of the noun phrase the bucket, via a verb–direct object syntactic relationship and the corresponding 1For the sake of simplicity, we leave aside Grimshaw’s third possible reading of deverbal nouns as simple event nominals, since, from the perspective of the properties we consider here, they pattern with RNs and contrast with ASNs in similar ways. 2In her examples, Grimshaw strictly uses of the patients on its argument interpretation. 63 Gianina Iordăchioaia, Lonneke van der Plas & Glorianna Jagfeld semantic relation. On this compositional reading, this expression is semantically transparent both with respect to the meanings of the parts and the syntactic- semantic relationship: the object the bucket is semantically interpreted as a pa- tient of the kicking. However, to kick the bucket also has the idiomatic reading to die, on which neither the meanings of the two parts, nor any syntactic relation- ship between them can be compositionally retrieved. There is nothing particular about kicking or buckets or the verb–direct object relationship between them to be found in the meaning of to die. This reading is non-compositional and opaque. Some idiomatic expressions, however, may be partially compositional. For in- stance, in to spill the beans ‘to divulge a secret’, the verb–object relationship is preserved in the idiom meaning and, while the object beans is lexico-semantically unrelated to secret, the verb to spill shares lexical semantic properties with to di- vulge (i.e., ‘to let out’), which can be viewed as its figurative meaning. In this expression, the non-head is opaque, the head is partially transparent, and the relationship is compositional and transparent. The head is only partially trans- parent because it is ambiguous and the meaning divulge is not its basic meaning. Deverbal compounds offer another pattern of expressions that are not fully compositional – yet, one different from the idioms above. The interpretation of DCs usually relies on a syntactic-semantic relationship between the base verb of their head noun and their non-heads, as shown in (1). Unlike in the correspond- ing verbal phrases, however, the syntactic relationship is not overt in DCs: e.g., budget in the DC budget assessment is not marked with accusative case as in the corresponding verb phrase in (1a), and police in police questioning is not marked by nominative case in (1b).3 In the absence of overt marking, it is often unclear how to interpret the non-head of a DC, as, for instance, in police killing, where police could be either the object or the subject of kill. The indeterminacy of the syntactic relationship leads to ambiguity, which reduces the transparency of DCs from the perspective of syntactic compositionality, even though the meanings of the parts are transparent (by contrast with beans in to spill the beans or kick and bucket in the idiom to kick the bucket). Yet, following the PoC and the compositional make-up of a sentence, if a partic- ular DC is built up compositionally in parallel to the corresponding verbal phrase, then an object interpretation of the non-head is expected. This is the thesis we will follow and support here. But why does an object non-head indicate compo- sitionality and, e.g., a subject does not? The reason follows from simple sentence structure. Transitive verbs form immediate constituents with their direct objects 3In a morphologically poor language like English, case marking comes from the syntactic posi- tion of the noun phrase, which is also missing in DCs, given their fixed word order. 64 3 Compositionality in English deverbal compounds: The role of the head but not with their subjects, which is why in sentence structure we first form a VP from the verb and its object, and the subject attaches afterwards, usually under a different projection such as VoiceP (or little vP), asin(6) (see Chomsky 1995 and Kratzer 1996 for a discussion on the differences between objects and subjects with respect to the event structure of verbs).
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