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.
Funding source: China Scholarship Council
Award Identifier / Grant number: 201906230064
Acknowledgment
The authors are indebted to Chuang Yu Ying and Karlina Denistia for their comments of an earlier version of this paper. We also thank our reviewers for their constructive feedback which helped us strengthen the paper.
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Research funding: This research was funded by the China Scholarship Council (Grant No. 201906230064).
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2020-0059).
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