Quantifying semantic relatedness across base verbs and derivatives: English out-prefixation
Sven Kotowski, Martin K.-H. Schäfer · 2023
Most authors on derivational semantics agree that the meaning of complex words builds on components contributed by the base, components contributed by the word formation process, as well as contextual knowledge components. There is far less agreement on how these components interact or on their relative contributions. In this paper, we approach the question of relative contributions by looking at relatedness between bases, between derivatives, as well as between bases and derivatives. We use the English scalar-comparative verb prefix out- as a test case. We show that classes of bases serve as predictors for the resolution of systematically underspecified parts of the semantics of outderivatives. By means of distributional similarity measures, we also show that the word formation process’s derivatives exhibit a high degree of uniformity relative to the similarities between other components of the process. Finally, distributional measures for four further prefixes suggest that this rich contribution of the affix is peculiar to scalar-comparative out- rather than a characteristic of prefixation in general.