Lexical Semantics and Distribution of Suffixes - A Visual Analysis
Christian Rohrdantz, Andreas Niekler, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Miriam Butt, Daniel A. Keim · 2012
We present a quantitative investigation of the cross-linguistic usage of some (rel-atively) newly minted derivational mor-phemes. In particular, we examine the lexi-cal semantic content expressed by three suf-fixes originating in English:-gate,-geddon and-athon. Using data from newspa-pers, we look at the distribution and lex-ical semantic usage of these morphemes not only within English, but across sev-eral languages and also across time, with a time-depth of 20 years. The occurrence of these suffixes in available corpora are comparatively rare, however, by investigat-ing huge amounts of data, we are able to arrive at interesting insights into the dis-tribution, meaning and spread of the suf-fixes. Processing and understanding the huge amounts of data is accomplished via visualization methods that allow the pre-sentation of an overall distributional pic-ture, with further details and different types of perspectives available on demand. 1