Syntactic productivity under the microscope: the lexical and semantic openness of Dutch minimizing constructions
Margot Van den Heede, Peter M. Lauwers · Folia Linguistica · 2023
Abstract This paper investigates different aspects of syntactic productivity and its relation to semantics. Based on a case study of 43 Dutch minimizing constructions, the correlations between nine different variables are examined: metrics of lexical openness (TypeTokenRatio,HapaxTokenRatio,HapaxTypeRatio), measures of conventionalization (FrTop1,MeanFrTop3,SDTop3), characteristics of the frequency distribution (Alphaparameter of the Zipf curve) and two semantic variables based on distributional semantics (SemanticRange,SemanticSparsity). The analysis shows very strong correlations between most variables, but it also detects second-order extensibility based onHapaxTypeRatioand the way it interacts with semantic openness as measured bySemanticSparsity.