The semantic transparency of English compound nouns Martin Schäfer language Morphological Investigations 3 science press Morphological Investigations Editors: Jim Blevins, Petar Milin, Michael Ramscar In this series: 1. Trips, Carola & Jaklin Kornfilt (eds.). Further investigations into the nature of phrasal compounding. 2. Baechler, Raffaela. Absolute Komplexität in der Nominalflexion. 3. Schäfer, Martin. The semantic transparency of English compound nouns. The semantic transparency of English compound nouns Martin Schäfer language science press Martin Schäfer. 2018. The semantic transparency of English compound nouns (Morphological Investigations 3). Berlin: Language Science Press. This book is the revised version of the author’s habilitation, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 2017 This title can be downloaded at: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/153 © 2018, Martin Schäfer Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ISBN: 978-3-96110-030-9 (Digital) 978-3-96110-031-6 (Hardcover) DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1134595 Source code available from www.github.com/langsci/153 Collaborative reading: paperhive.org/documents/remote?type=langsci&id=153 Cover and concept of design: Ulrike Harbort Typesetting: Martin Schäfer Proofreading: Plinio A. Barbosa, Jose Poblete Bravo, Merlijn Breunesse, Stefan Hartmann, Martin Hilpert, Gianina Iordachioaia, Timm Lichte, Ahmet Bilal Özdemir, Steve Pepper, Katja Politt, Valeria Quochi, Edalat Shekari, Andrew Spencer, Carola Trips, Jeroen van de Weijer, Amr Zawawy Fonts: Linux Libertine, Arimo, DejaVu Sans Mono Typesetting software:Ǝ X LATEX Language Science Press Unter den Linden 6 10099 Berlin, Germany langsci-press.org Storage and cataloguing done by FU Berlin Dedicated to the next generation (in order of appearance): Charlotte, Henriette, Anton, Magdalena, Moritz, Henrike, Emma, Lene, Mathilde, Marie, Simon, Anne, Theo, Ole, Jakob Contents Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 A first notion of semantic transparency .............. 1 1.2 Compounds and complex nominals ................ 3 1.3 Aims and Goals ........................... 5 1.4 Structure ............................... 5 2 Semantic transparency in psycholinguistics 7 2.1 Structure and lexical access ..................... 7 2.1.1 Morpheme-based models .................. 8 2.1.2 Models without morphemes ................ 16 2.1.3 Models of conceptual combination ............ 24 2.1.4 Conclusion: the different models ............. 29 2.2 Measuring semantic transparency ................. 29 2.2.1 Establishing semantic transparency ............ 30 2.2.2 Summary: measuring semantic transparency ...... 35 2.3 Psycholinguistic studies ....................... 37 2.3.1 Priming paradigms ..................... 37 2.3.2 Eye movement studies ................... 43 2.3.3 Experiments targeting conceptual combination ..... 46 2.3.4 Overview: experimental traces of semantic transparency 52 2.3.5 Conclusion: experimental traces of semantic transparency 52 2.4 Conclusion .............................. 57 3 Related phenomena and notions 59 3.1 Semantic transparency reflected in other linguistic phenomena . 59 3.1.1 Semantic transparency and outbound anaphora ..... 59 3.1.2 Semantic transparency and compound stress ...... 64 3.1.3 Conclusion: semantic transparency and other phenomena 65 Contents 3.2 Other measures and notions .................... 66 3.2.1 Quantitative measures ................... 66 3.2.2 Semantic overlap ...................... 66 3.2.3 Compositionality and literality .............. 66 3.2.4 Semantic transparency as one dimension of idiomaticity 71 3.2.5 Semantic transparency and productivity ......... 72 3.3 Transparency in other domains .................. 73 3.3.1 Phonological transparency ................. 73 3.3.2 Orthographic transparency ................ 74 3.4 Conclusion .............................. 74 4 The semantic analysis of compounds 77 4.1 Set-theoretic approaches ...................... 78 4.1.1 Intersective modification .................. 78 4.1.2 Subsective modification .................. 79 4.1.3 Non-subsective modification ................ 81 4.1.4 Problems for a set-theoretic classification of adjectives . 82 4.2 Relation-based approaches: the semantics of compounds .... 86 4.3 Levi (1978) .............................. 87 4.3.1 Levi’s complex nominals .................. 87 4.3.2 Levi’s recoverably deletable predicates .......... 89 4.3.3 Predicate nominalization .................. 93 4.3.4 Evaluating Levi’s approach ................ 97 4.3.5 Conclusion: the enduring appeal of Levi’s system .... 99 4.4 Fanselow (1981) ........................... 100 4.4.1 Compounds involving relational nouns .......... 100 4.4.2 Determinative compounds ................. 103 4.4.3 Evaluating Fanselow’s approach .............. 116 4.5 Mixed approaches .......................... 117 4.5.1 Pustejovsky (1995) ..................... 117 4.5.2 Extending the analysis to compounds 1: Jackendoff (2010) 121 4.5.3 Extending the analysis to compounds 2: Asher (2011) .. 122 4.5.4 Approaches using underspecification ........... 124 4.6 Conclusion .............................. 125 5 Previous models 127 5.1 Distributional semantics and word space models ......... 127 5.1.1 The basics of distributional semantics: a toy example .. 128 5.1.2 Design decisions ...................... 131 vi Contents 5.1.3 Two implementations: LSA and HAL ........... 132 5.1.4 Conclusion ......................... 133 5.2 Reddy, McCarthy & Manandhar (2011) ............... 133 5.2.1 Selection procedure ..................... 134 5.2.2 Reddy et al.’s human judgment data ............ 136 5.2.3 Reddy et al.’s distributional semantics models ...... 138 5.3 Pham and Baayen (2013) ...................... 142 5.3.1 Informativity based measures ............... 143 5.3.2 Pham and Baayen: compound selection and variable coding 149 5.3.3 Study 3: transparency rating experiment ......... 152 5.4 Marelli et al. (2015) ......................... 154 5.4.1 Experiment 1: connotations ................ 156 5.4.2 Experiment 2: semantic processing ............ 157 5.5 Conclusion .............................. 159 6 Piloting semantic factors 161 6.1 Introduction ............................. 161 6.2 The Reddy et al. data: a descriptive overview ........... 162 6.2.1 Linguistic characterization of the selected compounds . 162 6.2.2 Descriptive overview of the rating data .......... 166 6.3 Bell & Schäfer (2013) ........................ 170 6.3.1 Subsetting the Reddy et al. dataset ............ 170 6.3.2 Semantic annotation of the compounds .......... 171 6.3.3 Annotation results ..................... 173 6.3.4 Bell and Schäfer (2013): the models ............ 178 6.4 Bell & Schäfer (2013) revisited ................... 186 6.4.1 Classic model criticism ................... 187 6.4.2 Linear mixed effects modeling ............... 193 6.4.3 The role of the meaning shifts ............... 206 6.5 Conclusion and consequences ................... 213 7 Compound family based models 215 7.1 Semantic relations relative to constituent families ........ 216 7.1.1 Gagné and Shoben ..................... 217 7.1.2 Criticism and a corpus-based re-implementation .... 218 7.1.3 Relational distributions in other studies ......... 222 7.1.4 Conclusion: relations relative to families ......... 222 7.2 Assessing the role of constituent meanings ............ 223 vii Contents 7.3 A database of compound families ................. 226 7.3.1 Initial families from the BNC ............... 226 7.3.2 Adding items from CELEX ................. 227 7.3.3 Usenet frequencies ..................... 228 7.3.4 Further post-processing .................. 229 7.4 Semantic coding ........................... 229 7.4.1 Coding the semantic relations ............... 230 7.4.2 Coding the constituent senses ............... 231 7.5 Variables and predictions ...................... 233 7.5.1 Variables derived from the semantic coding ....... 233 7.5.2 Further explanatory variables ............... 235 7.5.3 Tabular overview of the explanatory variables ...... 236 7.5.4 Restricting the target dataset ............... 236 7.5.5 Predicting semantic transparency ............. 237 7.6 The models from Bell & Schäfer 2016 ............... 240 7.6.1 N1 transparency ....................... 241 7.6.2 N2 transparency ...................... 244 7.6.3 Whole compound transparency .............. 246 7.6.4 The 2016 models: discussion and conclusion ....... 251 7.7 Re-modeling Bell & Schäfer (2016) ................. 252 7.7.1 New models for constituent transparency ........ 258 7.7.2 New models for compound transparency ......... 261 7.7.3 Conclusion: re-modeling Bell & Schäfer (2016) ...... 262 7.8 Conclusion .............................. 263 8 Summary and outlook 265 8.1 Summary ............................... 265 8.2 Outlook ................................ 266 Appendix A: Semantic coding for Bell & Schäfer (2013) 269 1 Relations ............................... 269 2 Shifts ................................. 271 Appendix B: Semantic coding for Bell & Schäfer (2016) 273 1 N1 families .............................. 274 2 N2 families .............................. 314 Appendix C: Multiple readings and the 2016 coding 363 viii Contents Appendix D: Corpus and dictionary sources 369 1 Corpus identifiers .......................... 369 2 Online dictionaries ......................... 374 References 375 Index 391 Name index ................................. 391 Language index .............................