The linguistic factors of semantic transparency: Evidence from verb-to-noun derivation in French
Rossella Varvara, Richard Huyghe · Journal of Linguistics · 2025
Abstract Semantic transparency is usually defined as the extent to which the lexical meaning of a morphologically complex word can be inferred from its structure and constituents. Recent studies have emphasized the need to distinguish two aspects of transparency: relatedness (i.e. the degree to which the meaning of lexical constituents is retained in that of a complex word) and compositionality (i.e. the degree to which the meaning of a complex word is determined by the meaning of its constituents and the way they are combined). In this paper, we investigate the influence of a variety of linguistic factors on both relatedness and compositionality. Our objective is twofold, as we seek to (i) determine more precisely the impact of lexical and morphological properties on transparency and (ii) better understand the distinction between relatedness and compositionality based on their respective determinants. The study focuses on deverbal nouns in French and estimates relatedness and compositionality based on human judgments and computational methods. The results indicate that the frequency and ambiguity of bases and derivatives, as well as the productivity and polyfunctionality of nominalizing suffixes, have different effects on relatedness and compositionality. They confirm the relevance of the distinction between the two aspects of transparency.