Compounding in Context Melanie J. Bell Anglia Ruskin University - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Compounding in Context Melanie J. Bell Anglia Ruskin University - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Compounding in Context Melanie J. Bell Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge UK Compounding and lexical innovation Compounding is the most frequent word formation process in English (Huddleston and Pullum 2002) Within compounding,

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Melanie J. Bell Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge UK

Compounding in Context

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  • Compounding is the most frequent word

formation process in English (Huddleston and Pullum 2002)

  • Within compounding, compounds

formed from two nouns are the most productive group (Bauer, Lieber and Plag 2013, p. 451)

Compounding and lexical innovation

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trout pout: unnaturally swollen lips resulting from the injection of excessive collagen into the lips in a cosmetic procedure intended to enhance their appearance (June 2016)

Recent additions to the OED

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trout pout: unnaturally swollen lips resulting from the injection of excessive collagen into the lips in a cosmetic procedure intended to enhance their appearance (June 2016) bucket list: a list of things that a person hopes to experience or achieve during his

  • r her lifetime (September 2013)

Recent additions to the OED

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A model of compound semantics

context/world knowledge specifies R A B initiates shifts initiates shifts B’ A’ (AB)’

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Bell and Schäfer 2013, 2016

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trout pout

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trout pout

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trout pout

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trout pout

context/world knowledge specifies

  • A

B initiates shifts initiates shifts B’ A’ (AB)’

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bucket list

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bucket list

context/world knowledge specifies

  • A

B initiates shifts initiates shifts B’ A’ (AB)’

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word formation pattern neologism coined institutionalisation idiomatisation

Historical development of words

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The moment a word is used any vagueness that there may be in its linguistic structure is removed

Bauer, Lieber and Plag 2013 p.30

Historical development of words

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Lexical semantics e.g. polo umpire Situation of use e.g. john man Encyclopaedic knowledge e.g. transition team Linguistic context: the focus of this study

How are compounds disambiguated?

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  • All noun-noun strings occurring within a

sentence extracted from the prose fiction section of the British National Corpus

  • Sample reduced to items that occurred
  • nly once in the whole corpus, and not at

all in ukWaC, a much larger corpus of more than 2 billion words

  • Random selection of 80 novel compounds

examined in their sentential context

Finding novel compounds

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Compounds can often be disambiguated on the basis of the immediate sentence, usually through disambiguation of the head noun. Hypothesis

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  • It fires an explosive acid cap
  • It fires an explosive acid cap
  • cap = detonator, detonating device
  • Head is disambiguated

acid cap

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  • Here was Gabriel's chance to leave his wooden

perch and to stand stage-centre with a huge property sword as tall as himself.

  • Here was Gabriel's chance to leave his wooden

perch and to stand stage-centre with a huge property sword as tall as himself.

  • property = props
  • Modifier is disambiguated

property sword

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  • He'd stopped in front of the side door, a flimsy

hardboard affair with a Yale lock, distinguished by a fist-sized hole to the side of the metal keyhole.

  • He'd stopped in front of the side door, a flimsy

hardboard affair with a Yale lock, distinguished by a fist-sized hole to the side of the metal keyhole.

  • affair = door
  • Head is disambiguated

hardboard affair

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  • It was one of those old photographs whose

dark chocolate shadows are balanced by the creamy richness of the light surfaces.

  • It was one of those old photographs whose

dark chocolate shadows are balanced by the creamy richness of the light surfaces.

  • chocolate = sepia
  • Modifier is disambiguated

chocolate shadows

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  • Prediction 1: Novel English compounds do not

have a clear default interpretation out of context, so people will vary widely in the meanings they assign to them.

  • Prediction 2: In written English, the immediate

sentence containing a novel compound often contains enough contextual information for the intended meaning of the compound to become clear.

Testing the hypothesis

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  • From sample, selected compounds for

which both constituents occurred at least 500 times in BNC

  • Asked participants to give free

paraphrases for the compound context free and in the context of the immediate sentence

  • Excluded paraphrases if the participant

didn’t ‘know’ either of the nouns

Testing the hypothesis

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  • Six teams of 4-6 students coded the

paraphrases for ‘dream fleet’ using a constant comparative method

  • I looked at sets of paraphrases where at least 4
  • f the teams agreed they should be grouped

together

  • I noticed that these readings could be defined

in terms of the senses of the constituents

  • I refined the categories using this criterion

Coding the data

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  • Fleet
  • vehicles
  • people
  • group
  • brief
  • Dream
  • dream (during sleep)
  • mental state
  • goal
  • ideal

dream fleet

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  • Fleet
  • vehicles
  • people
  • group
  • brief
  • Dream
  • dream (during sleep)
  • mental state
  • goal
  • ideal

dream fleet

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Group of dreams A series of dreams that follow on from each other

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  • Fleet
  • vehicles
  • people
  • group
  • brief
  • Dream
  • dream (during sleep)
  • mental state
  • goal
  • ideal

dream fleet

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Group of goals A sensation of which one person's goals and dreams all come rushing into perspective

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  • Fleet
  • vehicles
  • people
  • group
  • brief
  • Dream
  • dream (during sleep)
  • mental state
  • goal
  • ideal

dream fleet

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Ideal things someone's desirable or dreamt about fleet or group of things

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  • Fleet
  • vehicles
  • people
  • group
  • brief
  • Dream
  • dream (during sleep)
  • mental state
  • goal
  • ideal

dream fleet

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Ideal vehicles top parade of cars

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  • Fleet
  • vehicles
  • people
  • group
  • brief
  • Dream
  • dream (during sleep)
  • mental state
  • goal
  • ideal

dream fleet

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Ideal people another word for dream team

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  • Fleet
  • vehicles
  • people
  • group
  • brief
  • Dream
  • dream (during sleep)
  • mental state
  • goal
  • ideal

dream fleet

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Brief mental state imagination gone quickly

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  • Does the sentential context help to

narrow down the options?

dream fleet

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dream fleet: modifier (dream)

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dream fleet: head (fleet)

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  • In the sickroom or with Diniz, Nicholas

never threw doubt on the arrival of Katelina's dream fleet .

dream fleet

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dream fleet

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  • What happens with other compounds?
  • Are there statistically significant patterns in

the interpretation of novel compounds in and out of context?

  • Is world knowledge more important than

linguistic context?

  • To what extent do language users

accommodate vagueness in compound formation?

Questions

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  • Bauer, Laurie, Rochelle Lieber, and Ingo Plag. 2013. The Oxford

reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Bell, Melanie J. and Martin Schäfer. 2013. Semantic transparency:

challenges for distributional semantics. Proceedings of the IWCS 2013 workshop: Towards a formal distributional semantics.

  • Bell, Melanie J. and Martin Schäfer. 2016. Modelling semantic
  • transparency. Morphology 26.2: 157-199.
  • Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge

grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

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Thank you!