Semantic Analysis of Verb-Noun Derivation in P rinceton W ord N et (2021)

Abstract: We present here the results of a morphosemantic analysis of the verb-noun pairs in the Princeton WordNet as reflected in the standoff file containing pairs annotated with a set of 14 semantic relations. We have automatically distinguished between zero-derivation and affixal derivation in the data and identified the affixes and manually checked the results. The data show that for each semantic relation an affix prevails in creating new words, although we cannot talk about their specificity with respect to such a relation. Moreover, certain pairs of verb-noun semantic primes are better represented for each semantic relation, and some semantic clusters (in the form of WordNet subtrees) take shape as a result. We thus employ a large-scale data-driven linguistically motivated analysis afforded by the rich derivational and morphosemantic description in WordNet to the end of capturing finer regularities in the process of derivation as represented in the semantic properties of the words involved and as reflected in the structure of the lexicon.

## introduction the focus of this paper is the study of the derivational patterns between english verb-noun pairs. the perspective adopted is semantic, with two correlated aims: identifying semantic regularities involved in derivation (i.e., semantic relations between the members of a derivational pair) and establishing the semantic conditions in which it occurs (the semantic classes to which the nouns and verbs belong expressed in terms of semantic primitives, or primes @xcite , i.e. language-independent semantic classes). the study is based on the semantically-labeled derivational pairs identified in the princeton word-net (pwn) @xcite presented in a standoff file @xcite . an in-depth study of the regularities will help paint a more detailed picture of the distribution of derivation, be it affixal or zero derivation. based on the perspective adopted in this work, conclusions will highlight similarities and differences between the so-called "zero" morpheme conversion and the affixes involved in derivation. throughout this paper we use the terms conversion and zero derivation interchangeably to refer to the process of creating new words without any lexical material or, in other words, with the zero affix; affixal derivation refers to the morphological process involving the attachment of a non-zero affix to a base form to create a new word; derivation is their hypernym, a general term designating the morphological process whereby new words are created either involving affixes or not foot_0 . ## related work zero derivation has been widely debated and discussed by linguists. its high productivity in english specifically for creating verbs from words of other parts of speech was noted by researchers @xcite , as well as the fact that derivatives with overt suffixes are a subset of the possible meanings of converted verbs @xcite . a variety of meanings involved in conversion was noticed by @xcite , by @xcite , @xcite , @xcite , @xcite , to mention but a few. criteria for establishing the direction of conversion were identified and discussed @xcite : semantic dependency, frequency, order of coining in the lan-guage. all studies consider words as entities involved in the process; however, our analysis here is done at the word sense level and is facilitated by the organizing principle of pwn, which takes the word sense as the minimal analysis unit. ## morphosemantic relations in wordnet the standoff file foot_1 consists of 16,812 foot_2 unique verbnoun pairs of which 53.57% represent patterns of affixal derivation and 46.43% are conversions. each pair is annotated with a morphosemantic relation (out of a set of 14 such relations). although not explicitly defined, the meaning of these relations may be inferred from the observation of the data. below, we sketch out a revised version of a description of these relations proposed by @xcite . many of the relations have a more or less direct correspondence in the domain of thematic relations; in fact, in the lexicalist approaches in the generative grammar of the 1980s, v-to-n derivation was accounted for as theta-role assignment from the predicate argument structure of the verb within the word structure of the noun @xcite , but this is not a one-to-one correspondence as the overview below shows. ## distribution of morphosemantic relations between affixal and zero derivation the theoretical findings sketched in section 2 and based on empirical analyses are reflected by the data we work with: on the one hand, zero derivation is found across all the relations under discussion; on the other, conversion is the prevalent process of creating new words for 8 relations (bymeans-of, undergoer, vehicle, result, property, location, uses, body-part), while suffixation is the dominant word-formation technique for 4 relations (agent, destination, material, state); for 2 semantic relations (instrument, event) conversion and derivation are in quite strong competition. these data are shown in an interesting case is that of the vehicle relation which is morphologically represented either by ø (57 cases) or by the suffix -er (37 cases). similarly, the relation destination displays the suffix -ee (in 25 cases), ø (in 2 cases) and verb suffixify (in other 2 cases). both relations are scarce in the data under study, as the figures show. the data presented clearly show that each relation is dominated by one or two affixes at most (including ø), and that zero derivation plays an important role in creating new nouns and verbs, at least in the dataset under discussion. based on our findings, -er and -ation are the most productive suffixes in these pairs, followed by ø. ## morphosemantic relations and derivational models besides the semantic perspective already incorporated by the morphosemantic relations (see section 3), another perspective relevant for the process of creating new words is the tendency of certain semantic primes of serving either as derivation bases or as derivation results. we illustrate these trends below for each of the 14 relations. ## discussion the presented data must be interpreted with a view to the pwn organization principles: all pairs contain words considered with only one of their possible meanings; i.e. the same pair of words may be found several times, labeled either with the same semantic relation or with a different one: e.g., the verb net and the noun net occur as a pair three times: once labeled as instrument (for the meanings 'catch with a net' and 'a trap made of netting to catch fish or birds or insects', respectively), and twice as result: the verb meaning 'yield as a net profit' and the noun denoting 'the excess of revenues over outlays in a given period of time (including depreciation and other noncash expenses)', and the verb meaning 'construct or form a web, as if by weaving' with the noun denoting 'an open fabric of string or rope or wire woven together at regular intervals'. not all senses of the words can enter a morphosemantic relation with all senses of another word: e.g., the verb net has four senses in pwn, the homonymous noun has six senses, but the only morphosemantic relations between them are the three mentioned above. on the other hand, the pwn files include 4,520 noun-verb derivational pairs that do not occur in the standoff file: e.g.: carbon and carbonate are linked by a derivational relation in the pwn, but they were not included in the standoff file. some pairs in the data are not direct derivatives: consider the homonymous verbs and nouns black or green, where both are derived from the corresponding adjectives. this is not the case with colors only: e.g. the verb and the noun equal are both derived from the respective adjective, too 6 . an interesting topic for research is the direction of conversion. there are examples of each direction among the pairs labeled with the same semantic relation: e.g. among the pairs labeled as agent, we find nouns created from verbs by means of conversion, such as snoop, as well as verbs converted from nouns, such as mouth. there are cases when, for the same pair of primes, affixation goes in one direction, while zero derivation goes in the opposite one: e.g. for the prime pair verb.possession -noun.person, nouns are derived from verbs (auctioneer from auction) and verbs are created from nouns via zero derivation (auctioneer). these observations need to be explored in more detail. researchers, see mainly @xcite and @xcite , have aligned derivational semantics (zero derivation in particular) with the semantics of verb classes. @xcite discuss the predictability of the semantics of nominalizations especially those denoting "an instance or a state aspectual meaning". such information can also be drawn from our data, but taking the form of clusters of hyponyms that belong to the same region of the wordnet structure (the same subtree). the more detailed analysis of the data leads us to conclude that the clusters give a more profound insight into the semantic conditions on derivation than general classes as it is clusters that provide the structured part of the lexicon involved. figure 2 exemplifies the distribution of synsets belonging to the prime verb.motion which are involved in the relation agent (see figure 3 provides a similar representation of the noun synsets involved in the agent relation with verbs of motion (verb.motion). most of them are nouns designating persons (286 out of 308), with a very small number of synsets from other primes. as not all derivational relations are assigned a morphosemanticl label (see above, this section), the question of the predictability of the morphosemantic relations arises. our analysis of several samples of the data shows that the relations are predictable only to a certain extent. a semantic relation of one of the 14 types could be automatically assigned to pairs of word senses that are derivationally related in pwn but lack a semantic label (as in the standoff file) if they occur in subtrees where a certain relation is already assigned to other pairs: consider the pairs in the standoff file: nickel:1 -nickel:1 , silver:1 -silver:1, copper:1 -copper:1 and chrome:1 -chrome:1. these four verbs are hyponyms of cover:1, while the nouns are hyponyms of metal:1; the semantic relation these pairs are annotated with is uses. however, there are other such pairs in pwn, e.g.: aluminium:1 -aluminize:1, where the verb is a hyponym of cover:1 and the noun is a hyponym of metal:1 and there is a derivational relation between them, but it is not labeled morphosemantically. given the four examples above, we can infer that the right semantic label for this pair (and other similar ones) is uses. in other cases inferring a semantic relation may not be so trivial, but at least the number of possibilities will be greatly reduced and manual validation will be facilitated. besides labeling new pairs, such regularities can also help to easily spot oddities in the data and correct them. regular polysemy is reflected in morphosemantic relations, especially as from a contemporary point of view a verb's sense may be considered to be related to more than one (closely) related noun senses or vice versa. such an example is found with nouns of the class noun.artifact (mostly containers) and nouns denoting the quantity that the respective container holds, e.g. barrel:2, cask:2 ('a cylindrical container that holds liquids') and barrel:4, barrelful:1 ('the quantity that a barrel (of any size) will hold'). each of the two synsets is related to barrel:1 ('put in barrels') by means of the relations location and undergoer, respectively. regular polysemy reveals how regularities between related meanings in the nominal or the verbal domain are reflected in the semantics of the relation in verb-noun pairs. observations on structured parts of the lexicon such as the ones discussed above enable us also to predict missing relations, both morphosemantic and derivational. consider jar:5 ('place in a cylindrical vessel') and the noun synsets jar:1 ('a vessel (usually cylindrical') and jar:2, jarful:1 ('the quantity contained in a jar'). although only the undergoer relation is encoded, the location relation is easily predictable on the basis of the barrel example above. exploring further the hyponyms of the synset containerful:1 ('the quantity that a container will hold'), we discover that 25 out of its 67 hyponyms have corresponding verbs, but only 3 of the verbs are appropriately linked to the noun synsets denoting the respective quantity and artifact (in a like manner to barrel) -the remaining verbs lack one or both morphosemantic relations or even the derivational ones. in such a way, we are able to tackle the inconsistencies in derivational and morphosemantic relations throughout this and other parts of the pwn structure. ## conclusions our study based on the pwn standoff file consisting of noun-verb pairs labeled with one of a set of 14 semantic relations shows the distribution of zero and affixal derivation within the data, at a general level, as well as with respect to each such relation. we have also presented the most frequent affixes by means of which words are created in the subgroups represented by relations labeled identically and showed that the zero affix is among the most frequent ones for each such subgroup: for some relations it is the prevalent affix and for others it competes with the prevalent one. the semantics of these pairs was further enriched with information about the semantic primes of each word in the pair and several noun-verb prime combinations proved more frequent in some subgroups, with some of the combinations even being specialised for a certain type of derivation. we intend to augment the work with other pairs extracted from the pwn files and already linked by a derivational relation. we envisage a better representation of certain affixes (especially verbal ones) that are sparse in the standoff file. our work can be extended to derivational relations for other languages using the corresponding wordnets. since the semantic dimension of morphosemantic relations is transferable across languages using the interlingual indexing within pwn, it facilitates the study of derivation across languages and possibly in comparison as well.