An Investigation of Combinational Productivity for Abstract and Concrete Nouns

An Investigation of Combinational Productivity for Abstract and Concrete Nouns Phil Maguire (phil.maguire@ucd.ie) School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Ireland Edward J. Wisniewski (edw@uncg.edu) Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA Gert Storms (gert.storms@psy.kuleuven.ac.be) Department of Psychology, University of Leuven, Belgium intelligence. This phenomenon has the potential to reveal much about conceptual representation as well as language production and comprehension in general. In English, a language in which compounding is particularly productive, the simplest combinations consist of a modifier followed by a head noun. Usually, the head noun denotes the main category while the modifier implies a relevant subcategory or a modification of that set’s typical members. In this way, a cereal box is interpreted as a particular type of box, and more precisely as one that contains cereal as opposed to other types of boxes. While existing theories of conceptual combination have dealt primarily with the interpretation process, little focus has been directed towards understanding the circumstances in which combinations are used. As a result, existing theories do not make explicit predictions about which types of nouns are more likely to be used in combination or whether particular nouns will exhibit a preference for either the modifier or head position. Relation-based theories such as the Competition Among Relations In Nominals (CARIN) theory (Gagne & Shoben, 1997) assert that interpretation occurs when a relation linking the constituent nouns is selected. According to CARIN, the difficulty associated with this selection process is determined by how modifiers have been used in previously encountered combinations. However, the theory makes no predictions about combinational productivity as it is concerned solely with ease of interpretation and makes no reference to why combinations are used. On the other hand, slot-filling theories such as the dual-process theory (Wisniewski, 1997) and the concept specialization model (Murphy, 1988) relate combination function to conceptual content. These theories assume that during combination, the modifier concept fills a ‘slot’ in the head concept, thereby modifying or ‘specializing’ that concept. Thus, in the case of coffee bowl, the coffee concept fills the slot in bowl and describes the purpose of the bowl. Although slot-filling theories do not make explicit predictions about how nouns will be used in combination, Abstract Although various theories of conceptual combination have been proposed in the past, these models have addressed interpretation issues rather than addressing the circumstances in which combinations are used. As a result, existing theories make no explicit predictions about what kind of nouns will be used more often in combination and why this might be the case. In this study we address the issue of combination use and investigate whether differences in productivity exist for two very different types of noun, namely abstract and concrete nouns. The slot- filling view of conceptual combination (e.g. Wisniewski, 1997) motivated our hypothesis that differences in combinational preference for both the modifier and head role would be observed between these two types of noun. We extracted combinations involving a sample of abstract and concrete nouns from the British National Corpus and obtained type and token frequencies for how often each noun occurred in both the modifier and head positions. Results revealed that abstract nouns were more likely to occur in the head position while differences for concrete nouns were only partially supported. We also discovered that abstract nouns occurring in the BNC were far less likely to occur in combination than concrete nouns. We interpret these results in light of what they reveal about the use of compound phrases and discuss the implications for existing theories of conceptual combination. Keywords: Conceptual combination; noun-noun compounds; abstract concepts; slot-filling theory. Introduction Conceptual combination is commonly adopted by speakers in order to refer to novel concepts and ideas and as a result, compound phrases are abundant in everyday conversation (e.g. holiday tension, picnic beer). This ubiquity is also evidenced by the number of lexicalised combinations entering the English language (e.g. memory stick, laptop computer). Recently, noun-noun compounding has generated much interest within cognitive science because of the way it crosscuts such diverse disciplines as linguistics, psychology and artificial