Historical and psycholinguistic perspectives on morphological productivity: A sketch of an integrative approach

TL;DR

This paper combines cognitive computational modeling and diachronic analysis of Thomas Mann's writings to explore morphological productivity, revealing how form-meaning systematicities influence language processing and historical language use.

Contribution

It introduces an integrative approach combining a cognitive computational model with historical analysis to study morphological productivity and speaker-specific language behavior.

Findings

The Discriminative Lexicon Model captures form-meaning systematicities in morphology.

Thomas Mann's novel word production is very low compared to input.

Production likelihood decreases as the distance of derived words from the centroid increases.

Abstract

In this study, we approach morphological productivity from two perspectives: a cognitive-computational perspective, and a diachronic perspective zooming in on an actual speaker, Thomas Mann. For developing the first perspective, we make use of a cognitive computational model of the mental lexicon, the discriminative lexicon model. For computational mappings between form and meaning to be productive, in the sense that novel, previously unencountered words, can be understood and produced, there must be systematicities between the form space and the semantic space. If the relation between form and meaning would be truly arbitrary, a model could memorize form and meaning pairings, but there is no way in which the model would be able to generalize to novel test data. For Finnish nominal inflection, Malay derivation, and English compounding, we explore, using the Discriminative Lexicon Model as a computational tool, to trace differences in the degree to which inflectional and word formation patterns are productive. We show that the DLM tends to associate affix-like sublexical units with the centroids of the embeddings of the words with a given affix. For developing the second perspective, we study how the intake and output of one prolific writer, Thomas Mann, changes over time. We show by means of an examination of what Thomas Mann is likely to have read, and what he wrote, that the rate at which Mann produces novel derived words is extremely low. There are far more novel words in his input than in his output. We show that Thomas Mann is less likely to produce a novel derived word with a given suffix the greater the average distance is of the embeddings of all derived words to the corresponding centroid, and discuss the challenges of using speaker-specific embeddings for low-frequency and novel words.