Abstract In structuralist linguistics, compounds are argued not to constitute morphological categories, due to the absence of systematic form-meaning correspondences. This study investigates subsets of compounds for which systematic form-meaning correspondences are present: adjective–noun compounds in Mandarin. We show that there are substantial differences in the productivity of these compounds. One set of productivity measures (the count of types, the count of hapax legomena, and the estimated count of unseen types) reflect compounds’ profitability. By contrast, the category-conditioned degree of productivity is found to correlate with the internal semantic transparency of the words belonging to a morphological category. Greater semantic transparency, gauged by distributional semantics, predicts greater category-conditioned productivity. This dovetails well with the hypothesis that semantic transparency is a prerequisite for a word formation process to be productive.

中文翻译：

---

普通话中的形容词-名词复合词：生产力研究

摘要 在结构主义语言学中，由于缺乏系统的形式意义对应，复合词被认为不构成形态类别。本研究调查了存在系统形式-意义对应的复合词的子集：普通话中的形容词-名词复合词。我们表明这些化合物的生产率存在显着差异。一组生产力指标（类型数、hapax legomena 数和未见过类型的估计数）反映了化合物的盈利能力。相比之下，类别条件的生产力程度被发现与属于形态类别的单词的内部语义透明度相关。更大的语义透明度，由分布语义衡量，预测更大的类别条件生产力。这与语义透明性是单词形成过程高效的先决条件的假设非常吻合。