=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-1347/paper16 |storemode=property |title=Using distributional data to explore derivational under-markedness: a study of the event/property polysemy in nominalization |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1347/paper16.pdf |volume=Vol-1347 |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/networds/Montermini15 }} ==Using distributional data to explore derivational under-markedness: a study of the event/property polysemy in nominalization== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1347/paper16.pdf
            Using distributional data to explore derivational under-
            markedness: a study of the event/property polysemy in
                                 nominalization

                                        Fabio Montermini
                                           CLLE-ERSS
                              CNRS & Université de Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès
                               fabio.montermini@univ-tlse2.fr

                                                                ever, especially in the study of the semantics of
                      Abstract                                  derivational processes, given the pervasiveness
                                                                and systematicity of such phenomena as polyse-
    This paper proposes a corpus-based anal-
                                                                my, semantic underspecification, etc. The first
    ysis of deverbal suffixed nouns in Italian
                                                                goal of this talk is thus to present arguments in
    displaying an ambiguity between a clear
                                                                favor of an usage-based model of derivational
    event reading (partenza ‘departure’) and
                                                                morphology, i.e. an approach in which the prop-
    a clear property reading (intelligenza ‘in-
                                                                erties of complex lexemes, and the rules by
    telligence’). It focuses, in particular on
                                                                which they are formed, are investigated via a
    words derived with the suffixes -nza and
                                                                thorough observation of their real contexts of
    -zione. Three sets of syntactic contexts
                                                                use. The perspective adopted here is an exem-
    for words containing the two suffixes
                                                                plar-based one, in the sense that morphological
    (high- and low-frequency -nza words and
                                                                competence is considered to emerge on the basis
    high-frequency -zione words) were ex-
                                                                of the linguistic material speakers are exposed to,
    tracted from a large corpus of contempo-
                                                                and that this dynamics can be simulated by tak-
    rary Italian and coded according to their
                                                                ing into account large amounts of real usage da-
    semantic reading. The comparison of the
                                                                ta. The analysis presented can also be qualified
    three datasets, on the one side, confirms
                                                                as distributional, since it is inspired, in its fun-
    an evolution, already observed in the lit-
                                                                damental assumption, by distributionalist ap-
    erature, of -nza from a typically deverbal
                                                                proaches which are current in semantics (cf.
    action suffix to a typically deadjectival
                                                                Lenci, 2008 for an overview), according to
    property suffix, and, on the other side,
                                                                which there is a correlation between a unit’s
    shows that the same ambiguity is ob-
                                                                meaning and its syntactic distribution.
    served with -zione nouns, although, un-
                                                                    The second goal of the talk is to provide evi-
    like the case of -nza, in this case it re-
                                                                dence in favor of a non-compositional view of
    mains a marginal feature. The results ob-
                                                                morphological derivation, according to which the
    tained show the interest of large-scale
                                                                semantic properties of complex lexemes cannot
    empirical observations for the analysis of
                                                                be simply computed on the basis of the sub-
    morphological phenomena, and militate
                                                                elements they contain, but rather on the basis of
    in favour of a model in which (regular)
                                                                the lexical relations they enter into. The lack of
    polysemy should be considered as a con-
                                                                full isomorphism between the form and the
    stituting property of derived words.
                                                                meaning of complex lexemes has been observed
1    Introduction                                               and investigated in many cases and in many lan-
                                                                guages. These include cases of over-marking,
Although having a strong empirical basis is an                  where an element (e.g. an affix) is present with-
important feature of most current studies of mor-               out carrying any evident meaning (cf. Roché,
phological derivational phenomena, these are                    2009, among others, for several examples in
often realized on (sometimes very large) series of              French), and parallel cases of under-marking,
complex words taken in isolation, or on the basis               where a relevant semantic differentiation lacks
of some examples which are intended to exem-                    an overt formal counterpart. The existence of the
plify the totality of the uses a derived lexeme can             latter has been observed since a long time, and is
enter into, or at least the most common, ‘un-                   linked with several other phenomena which are
marked’, ones. This approach is reductive, how-                 well known in the literature on morphology and

           Copyright © by Fabio Montermini. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
In Vito Pirrelli, Claudia Marzi, Marcello Ferro (eds.): Word Structure and Word Usage. Proceedings of the NetWordS Final
                          Conference, Pisa, March 30-April 1, 2015, published at http://ceur-ws.org


                                                           76
semantics, including (regular) polysemy (Booij,
2010: 78-79), multifunctionality (Luschützky                (3)
and Rainer, 2013), morphological recycling                  una partenza / *latitanza / *intelligenza istantanea
(Hathout, 2011), etc. Morphological under-                  ‘an instant departure / lam / intelligence’
marking, precisely, constitutes the main focus of
the analysis proposed here.                                 una *partenza / latitanza / *intelligenza di due mesi
                                                            ‘a two-month departure / lam / intelligence’
2     The data
                                                            una *partenza / *latitanza / intelligenza ammirevole
In several languages, deverbal nouns present                ‘an admirable departure / lam / intelligence’
several instances of systematic polysemy, some
of which are well described in the literature (e.g.         Roughly, we can distinguish the three types
action / result, cf. Rainer, 1996, Bisetto and Mel-         above according to four dimensions, as exempli-
loni, 2007). In particular, this paper is focused on        fied in Table 1.
cases of nominalization which, in spite of their
frequency, have received less attention (but cf.                           action     punctual    bound     quantifiable
                                                            partenza         +           +          +            +
Kerleroux, 2008 on French) namely deverbal                  latitanza        +           –          +            –
nouns displaying an ambiguity between an event              intelligenza     –           –          –            –
and a property reading, as in the following ex-
amples for the lexeme vigilanza in Italian:                            Table 1: Types of deverbal nouns.

(1)                                                         More specifically, the analysis presented has
la polizia ha effettuato una vigilanza continua             been carried on on nominalizations containing
‘police guaranteed a continuous control’                    the two suffixes -nza and -zione1, which share
                                                            the property that, when they are constructed on a
vs.                                                         verb, they are linked, formally and semantically,
                                                            to its participle (respectively, the present and the
la sua vigilanza è calata del 50%                           past participles) or to the homophonous adjective
‘his/her attention decreased of 50%’                        (accogliere / accogliente ⇒ accoglienza ‘ac-
                                                            ceptance’; educare / educato ⇒ educazione ‘ed-
Although Italian is the main focus of this paper,           ucation’). In addition, they can also be construct-
it should be observed that the same ambiguity               ed on an adjective lacking a verbal counterpart
can be observed in other Romance languages                  (cf. frequente ⇒ frequenza ‘frequency’; perfetto
(and in English), involving several cognate affix-          ⇒ perfezione ‘perfection’), and in this case, base
es, such as those derived from Latin -antia, -atio,         adjectives more often correspond to an individu-
-mentum, -tura. In fact, this ambiguity should              al-level predicate. In spite of their similarities,
probably be ascribed to a specific property                 however, derived nouns in -nza and in -zione
deverbal suffixes possessed in Latin (cf. (2)),             present several important differences. The most
since it is not observed with other morphological           relevant one is probably the fact that while -nza
processes which cannot be directly linked to cor-           is mainly attached to stative verbs (cf. Gaeta
responding Latin constructions, such as verb-               2002), i.e. verbs which are semantically closer to
noun conversions or the (Germanic) deverbal                 (individual-level) adjectives (cf. Chierchia 1995:
suffix -al in English:                                      177), no such tendency is observed with -zione,
                                                            which, on the contrary, seems to display a pref-
(2)                                                         erence for active event verbs. Consequently,
Lat.: adaequatio (‘adequacy’), observantia (‘ob-            apart from some exceptions (cf. partenza ‘depar-
servation’)                                                 ture’), the property reading can be virtually ap-
                                                            plied to all -nza nouns, at least in some of their
The polysemy in question can also be linked to              uses, while for -zione the situation is reversed:
the larger spectrum of meanings that have been
                                                            1
observed for deverbal nouns; the typical event                In fact, both suffixes may present several different forms
reading and the typical property reading, in fact,          in surface, whose selection depends on the form of the base
                                                            they attach to. The forms given are intended to be labels for
can be considered as the two poles of a continu-
                                                            more abstract formal representations (on the formal prob-
um which includes the nominalization of more or             lems posed by –nza and –zione cf., respectively, Gaeta,
less permanent states (cf. Fradin, 2011, 2014):             2002: 127-129; Gaeta 2004, 346-348; Thornton, 1990;
                                                            Montermini, 2010).




                                                       77
most of them do not allow this reading, while              struction of property nouns. On the other hand,
others accept it, a behavior for which no clear            no comparable shift can be observed for -zione.
systematicity can be identified:
                                                           3      The analysis
(4)
                                                           In order to test the distribution of meanings
a. determinazione
                                                           for -nza and -zione nouns, in particular along the
    ‘determination’ / ‘determinedness’
                                                           event / property divide, I extracted the 61 most
                                                           frequent lexemes in -anza and -enza (the two
   educazione
                                                           possible formal variants)2 in the CorIs3, a large
   ‘education’ / ‘educatedness’
                                                           corpus of written Italian. For each of the lexemes
                                                           in question, 100 contexts of occurrence were
b. istruzione
                                                           randomly selected, each of which was semanti-
   ‘instruction’ / *‘educatedness’
                                                           cally coded according to its compatibility with
                                                           one of the two meanings in question. In particu-
   risoluzione
                                                           lar, the coding was based on such properties as
   ‘resolution’ / *‘determinedness’
                                                           the possibility of being determined by quantifica-
                                                           tion or a measure adjective, or the presence / ab-
In addition to the general features described
                                                           sence of temporal boundaries.
above, some empirical observations motivate a
                                                               Figure 1 shows the distribution of meanings
deeper large-scale observation of the two deriva-
                                                           according to the class of the base (verb vs. adjec-
tional processes in question. First, for some of
                                                           tive), and, as expected, a strong correlation be-
the -nza nouns displaying an event reading there
                                                           tween verbal bases and event reading, on the one
exists a corresponding noun containing extra
                                                           side, and adjectival bases and property reading,
morphological material denoting a property (cf.
                                                           on the other, are observed. The diagram also
assistenza ‘assistance’ ⇒ assistenzialità); simi-
                                                           shows that, for the most frequent -nza nouns, the
larly, to a past participle can correspond a de-
                                                           two schemes are more or less equally available.
rived noun denoting a property, either in concur-
rence with a -zione noun or not (cf. risoluto ⇒
risolutezza, determinato ⇒ determinatezza (vs.
determinazione). Second, the observation of real
language use shows that lexemes with a typical
event meaning can be used as property nouns,
and vice-versa, like in the following examples
taken from the Web:

(5) La produzione basata sulla concorrenza del
prezzo tende a tagliare i costi sostenuti dalla
produzione basata sulla qualità.
                                                               Figure 1: Distribution of meanings for the most fre-
‘Production based on low prices (lit. price con-               quent -nza nouns according to the class of the base.
currence) tends to cut the costs incurred by quali-
ty based production’.                                      In order to measure the functioning of this mor-
                                                           phological process in the speakers’ synchronic
Paolo […] era un uomo di estrazione nobile, di             competence, the same procedure was applied to
grande educazione e istruzione ed estremamente             low-frequency words containing -nza in the same
religioso e timorato di Dio.                               corpus (62 lexemes overall having a frequency ≤
‘St. Paul […] was a man of noble lineage, highly           3, 88 contexts overall). In this case, as shown in
educated and very cultivated (lit. of great educa-         Figure 2, a strong preference of -nza for adjec-
tion and instruction), and extremely religious and         tival bases and for the property reading can be
God-fearing’.                                              observed.

Finally, as shown by Benincà and Penello
                                                           2
(2005), and as confirmed by the data I have ana-             The lexemes in question range from presenza (frequency
lyzed, while nouns with a pure event reading               19,671) to indifferenza (frequency 1,671). Of course, the
                                                           least was cleared from all lexemes ending in -nza that could
were the predominant output for -nza in ancient            not be clearly linked to a synchronically existing word.
Italian, it is more employed today for the con-            3
                                                             http://corpora.dslo.unibo.it/coris_ita.html.




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4
  Ranging from amministrazione (frequency 17,139) to
previsione (frequency 3,987).




                                                           79
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