Phonological properties of word classes and directionality in conversion

Abstract

In the study of the word-formation process of conversion, one particularly difficult task is to determine the directionality of the process, that is, to decide which word represents the base and which the derived word. One possibility to inform this decision that has received only limited attention is to capitalize on word-class-specific phonological properties. This paper empirically investigates this option for English noun-verb conversion by building on recent findings on phonological differences between these two word classes. A large-scale study of phonological properties is carried out on CELEX data, employing the quantitative techniques of conditional inference trees and random forests. An important result of this analysis is that the accuracy of phonological cues varies widely across different subsamples in the data. Essentially this means that phonological cues can be used as a criterion to determine the directionality of words that are at least two syllables in length. When restricted to this part of the lexicon, phonological properties represent a fairly accurate indicator of source word class and are therefore a useful addition to the linguist's toolkit for determining directionality in conversion. Based on this result, the paper also discusses the relations of phonological properties to other criteria commonly employed to determine directionality.

The ‘nouniness’ of attributive adjectives and ‘verbiness’ of predicative adjectives: evidence from phonology

“…There are in fact further parameters that psycholinguists have looked at, conveniently summarised by Lohmann (2017), which I come back to in section 3.2, below, where I discuss the phonological analysis conducted in the present paper.…”

“…(2) Syllabic complexity: Verbs in child-directed speech have been found to contain more complex syllables than nouns by Monaghan et al (2007), who define this as 'the proportion of phonemes in the word that were consonants' (268). Lohmann (2017) operationalises this parameter differently, as 'the average number of phonemes per syllable for each word'. I treat that as a separate parameter (see 3, below), and follow Nasals (parameter 9) are said to be more common in nouns; velars (10), in verbs; coronals (11), in nouns in Monaghan et al's (2005) (19) Initial stress: A number of studies, including Kelly (1996), have reported that disyllabic nouns tend to have initial stress more often than verbs.…”

A Computational Theory for the Emergence of Grammatical Categories in Cortical Dynamics

“…Each structural frame consists of the combination of Distributional Semantic (DS) (Harris, 1954) and coarse-grained syntactical word category information-specifically function word category, content word category, and from the last one we segregate verb word category. The coarse-grained word category information used in this work has been shown to emerge from phonological constraints in early language acquisition (Shi et al, 2006;Lohmann, 2017). A structural frame used in this approach constitutes the environment for a particular lexical item.…”

“…In regards to the emergence of coarse-grained syntactical constraints, phonologically-based implicit-learning mechanisms have been shown to serve as a precursor to later grammar learning in 4-month-old infants (Friederici et al, 2011), in such sense phonology serves the recognition and representation of function words in English-Learning infants (Shi et al, 2006), and in the derivation process between nouns and verbs in English (Lohmann, 2017). Lateral dendrites, on the other hand, receive information from the previous activations in the same cortical patch making the network aware of the sequence of lexical constituents along each sentence (Figure 1).…”

“…In the present work, we advance an improved version of the neurocomputational model previously developed in Dematties et al (2019). In its present form, afferent dendrites drive Distributional Semantic (DS) Text Embedding information, while lateral dendrites receive sequential syntactic restrictions but, more importantly, we incorporate apical dendrites which simulate backward connectivity from distant cortical patches carrying coarse-grained word category information which has been shown to be phonologically informed (Shi et al, 2006;Lohmann, 2017). Backward connectivity has been seen to be prevalent in brain cortex, usually related to modulatory functions, driving effects produced by forward connections, and transcending more than one cortical level (Chen et al, 2009;Marques et al, 2018;News, 2018).…”