Participle-Prepended Nominals Have Lower Entropy Than Nominals Appended After the Participle

TL;DR

This study compares the entropy of nominal slots in English compounds and phrasal paraphrases, finding that compounds have lower entropy, indicating less semantic variability and greater constraint in their structure.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that participle-prepended nominals in compounds are more constrained than their phrasal counterparts, based on corpus-based entropy measurements.

Findings

Lower entropy in compounds than in phrasal constructions

Compounds constrain semantic variability more than phrasal paraphrases

Supports grammatical and processing explanations for structural differences

Abstract

English allows for both compounds (e.g., London-made) and phrasal paraphrases (e.g., made in London). While these constructions have roughly the same truth-conditional meaning, we hypothesize that the compound allows less freedom to express the nature of the semantic relationship between the participle and the pre-participle nominal. We thus predict that the pre-participle slot is more constrained than the equivalent position in the phrasal construction. We test this prediction in a large corpus by measuring the entropy of corresponding nominal slots, conditional on the participle used. That is, we compare the entropy of $\alpha$ in compound construction slots like $\alpha$-[V]ed to the entropy of $\alpha$ in phrasal constructions like [V]ed by $\alpha$ for a given verb V. As predicted, there is significantly lower entropy in the compound construction than in the phrasal construction. We consider how these predictions follow from more general grammatical properties and processing factors.