Distribution-based Prediction of the Degree of Grammaticalization for German Prepositions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the degree of grammaticalization of German prepositions relates to corpus-based measures like entropy, frequency, and context types, finding that frequency and context diversity are better indicators than entropy.

Contribution

The study introduces a corpus-based approach to predict grammaticalization levels of German prepositions using quantitative measures, highlighting the importance of frequency and context diversity.

Findings

Frequency correlates strongly with grammaticalization degree.

Number of context types shows a strong correlation.

Entropy has a moderate correlation with grammaticalization.

Abstract

We test the hypothesis that the degree of grammaticalization of German prepositions correlates with their corpus-based contextual dispersion measured by word entropy. We find that there is indeed a moderate correlation for entropy, but a stronger correlation for frequency and number of context types.