An acceptability judgment study of 1+1 NN compounds in Chinese

Abstract

Chinese 1+1 NNs refer to compounds made of two monosyllabic nouns, such as shū-bāo ‘book-bag’ and jī-dàn ‘chicken-egg’. They occur frequently, do not violate any prosodic constraint, and appear to be highly productive. However, in Qin and Duanmu (2017), it was found that the mean acceptability ranking was quite low for randomly constructed 1+1 NNs. Since the focus of Qin and Duanmu (2017) was on a different issue, the set of 1+1 NNs was small and not of balanced design. In this study, we gathered acceptability scores from 17 Chinese native speakers on 1000 randomly constructed 1+1 NNs. It is found that the mean acceptability score is only 22.6%, even lower than that of Qin and Duanmu (2017). In addition, while Qin and Duanmu (2017) found ambiguity, naturalness, and frequency to have significant effects on acceptability scores, the present study did not find ambiguity to be relevant. We also found that 1+1 NNs consisting of two elastic nouns are significantly less acceptable than those consisting of one or two non-elastic nouns, although the effect size is rather small. Possible reasons for the low acceptability of 1+1 NN compounds are discussed, including semantic transparency, grammatical relations between the two nouns of a compound, and modern vs. classic vocabulary.