Abstract
AbstractLexical ambiguity in the English language is abundant. Word-class ambiguity is even inherently tied to the productive process of conversion. Most lexemes are rather flexible when it comes to word class, which is facilitated by the minimal morphology that English has preserved. This study takes a multivariate quantitative approach to examine potential patterns that arise in a lexicon where verb-noun and noun-verb conversion are pervasive. The distributions of three inflectional suffixes, verbal -s, nominal -s, and -edare explored for their interaction with degrees of verb-noun conversion. In order to achieve that, the lexical dispersion, context-dependency, and lexical similarity between the inflected and bare forms were taken into consideration and controlled for in a Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape (GAMLSS; Stasinopoulos, M. D., R. A. Rigby, and F. De Bastiani. 2018. “GAMLSS: A Distributional Regression Approach.”Statistical Modelling18 (3–4): 248–73). The results of a series of zero-one-inflated beta models suggest that there is a clear “uncanny” valley of lexemes that show similar proportions of verbal and nominal uses. Such lexemes have a lower proportion of inflectional uses when textual dispersion and context-dependency are controlled for. Furthermore, as soon as there is some degree of conversion, the probability that a lexeme is always encountered without inflection sharply rises. Disambiguation by means of inflection is unlikely to play a uniform role depending on the inflectional distribution of a lexeme.
Highlights
The English language makes it easy to verb a noun
I will attempt to show that the probability of occurrence of inflectional suffixes is affected by the relative frequency of nominal versus verbal uses, textual specificity, as well as lexical and contextual boundedness
Forms that show a similar degree of association to both categories exist in a potential “uncanny valley”, and it will be argued that there is a noticeably different distribution of inflectional suffixes for those forms
Summary
The English language makes it easy to verb a noun. Conversion is a remarkably productive word formation process in analytic languages. This study will focus on word class ambiguity and explore its effect on the distribution of inflections. Forms that show a similar degree of association to both categories exist in a potential “uncanny valley”, and it will be argued that there is a noticeably different distribution of inflectional suffixes for those forms. These differences might point to systemic tendencies or even restrictions that, among other reasons, could be caused by a more general tendency to avoid ambiguity
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