Morphology and word-formation

Fundamentals

Word-formation processes

Overview

Morphemic word-formation

Non-morphemic word-formation

  • overview
  • characteristics

Practice: Word-formation analysis

Analyze the word-formation processes involved in the following complex words:

  • childhood
  • paperback
  • study-bedroom
  • foreigner
  • paleface
  • Oxbridge
  • CGEL
  • fridge

Example: morphological stemma of disclaimers

A corpuslinguistic study of clipping (Hilpert 2023)

Theoretical framework

  • Alternative view in previous work: no difference in meaning between source words and clipped forms.
  • Authors’ framework (Hilpert 2023):
    • Principle of No Synonymy: differences in form imply differences in meaning or use.
    • Usage-based approach: meaning is derived from usage.
    • Distributional hypothesis: words that occur in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings.

Data and method

  • Dataset of clippings:
  • Corpus data from large web corpora.
  • Method:
    • Analysing meaning based on:
      • Collocations
      • Word embeddings
    • Investigating variation across text types and semantic differences.

Practice: Corpus-based analysis of clippings

Using Sketch Engine

In the enTenTen21 corpus:

  • determine frequency for source words and clipped forms
  • example: [lemma="brother" & tag="N.*"]
  • record absolute and relative frequency

Data analysis and visualisation in Excel

  • Collect results in our collaborative spreadsheet
  • Make a local copy of the sheet.
  • Analyse results:
    • Insert Table for range of data.
    • Insert Pivot Table for Table.
    • Set Rows, Values, and Columns.
      • Remove Grand Total by right-click → remove.
    • Insert Pivot Chart.

Potential further analyses for clippings

  • In the English Trends (2014–today) corpus:
    • analyze frequency over time
    • identify patterns of usage
  • Are there differences in usage across text types? (e.g. using COCA or enTenTen)
  • Studying long-term diachronic trends using english-corpora.org:
    • NOW corpus (News on the Web)
    • COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English)

Further Study: Semantic Analysis of Clippings with Sketch Engine

Studying semantics using collocations

Retrieving occurrences

  • Run a query to retrieve all occurrences and get a concordance view (e.g., [word="brother"]).
  • Click on the collocation analysis icon.

Running collocation analysis

  • Configure the analysis:
      • Specify context window range (words to the left/right).
      • Select statistical measures.
  • Results:
      • Examine statistical measures for collocates.

Studying semantics using word sketches

Word sketch for single forms

  • Generate a word sketch (e.g., for bro).
      • Specify word class if necessary.
  • Results provide syntactic contexts:
      • Visualise results using the built-in tool.

Word sketch comparison

  • Compare the source word (e.g., brother) with the clipped form (e.g., bro).
    • Run comparison:
        • Specify word class.
    • Results show shared and unique collocates/contexts:
    • Inspect collocations in detail:
      • Results might reveal specific semantic nuances or homonymy (e.g., BrO for Hypobromite).

Guiding questions for analysis

  • What is the general semantic signature of the source word?
  • What is the general semantic signature of the clipped form?
  • In what ways do they differ semantically (e.g., stylistic or social characteristics, formality)?
  • Do they tend to be used in different contexts (syntagmatic profile) even if their core denotational meaning is similar?
  • Does the clipped form have a more narrow or specific scope of meaning?

Further reading

  • Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2016. English Morphology and Word-formation: An Introduction. Berlin: Schmidt.
  • Hilpert, Martin. 2023. “Meaning and Usage of Clipped Words in English.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.