A Synergetic Linguistic Study on Compounding Propensity in technical English
Yaochen Deng · Glottotheory · 2009
Abstract This paper investigates the compounding propensity in technical English by the Theory of Synergetic Linguistics. It focuses on the dependence of compound number on the properties of length, frequency and polylexy of word stems. A technical English corpus JDEST was used and a set of Visual Foxpro programs were specifically written for processing the corpus and obtaining the data automatically. The results confirm the respective hypotheses of dependence and show that the more frequent and polysemous a word stem, the more compounds it produces, but the shorter a word stem, the more frequently it occurs in compounds. Köhler’s model y = ax b captures this propensity.