Investigating E nglish Affixes and their Productivity with P rinceton W ord N et (2018)

Abstract: Such a rich language resource like Princeton WordNet, containing linguistic information of different types (semantic, lexical, syntactic, derivational, dialectal, etc.), is a thesaurus which is worth both being used in various language-enabled applications and being explored in order to study a language. In this paper we show how we used Princeton WordNet version 3.0 to study the English affixes. We extracted pairs of base-derived words and identified the affixes by means of which the derived words were created from their bases. We distinguished among four types of derivation depending on the type of overlapping between the senses of the base word and those of the derived word that are linked by derivational relations in Princeton WordNet. We studied the behaviour of affixes with respect to these derivation types. Drawing on these data, we inferred about their productivity.

## introduction affixes productivity, i.e. their use to create new words, can be studied on a corpus or on lists of words, in particular on dictionaries. working with a corpus has several advantages over working with a dictionary: words are seen "in action" (i.e. one can see in what contexts they are used, in what forms, with what frequency, etc.); one can find words that are not recorded in dictionaries, either because they are brand new creations or because they are obtained in a (highly) regular way by a very productive word formation rule; frequencies can be counted for either types or tokens. however, we chose princeton wordnet (pwn) @xcite version 3.0 for studying the productivity of english affixes. we wanted to test whether affixes productivity is influenced by the number of senses of the base form and of the derived word that are semantically unrelated. pwn has several characteristics that make it appropriate for our investigation. it contains quite a large number of words (155,287 lemmas) organized according to their senses (thus reaching 206,941 wordsense pairs) 1 . pwn also displays lexical density: "all" senses of a word are included; this is a great asset for our experiment, which is run at the word sense level. the hypothesis of our study is that the meaning of the derived word is compositional, being a function of the meaning of the base word and of the affix(es) contained (other authors @xcite formulate this as a function of the meaning of the rule and of the base). whenever no semantic resemblance can be found between the two (in other words, derived words have an idiomatic meaning rather than a compositional one -see @xcite ) we do not consider them a derivedbase pair of words. nevertheless, we presume that the original meaning(s) of the derived words is/are (a) compositional one(s), whereas the idiomatic one(s) is/are the result of a semantic evolution in independence of the semantic evolution of its base word. ## related work there are two lines of research interesting as background for our experiment: one has to do with the study of affixes productivity, and the other concerns the derivational morphology studies in connection to pwn or with other wordnets, each of them detailed in a separate subsection in what follows. 1 the data are taken from http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/man/wnstats.7wn.html . ## the experiment in this section we present an experiment in which we extracted the pairs of base -derived word from pwn and assigned them to a different class according to the way their senses are related by a derivational relation. ## results and their linguistic significance there are several results of this undertaking. one of them is the list of pairs extracted from pwn and enriched with information as described above. we discuss the others in the subsections below. ## conclusions and future work a mature resource, pwn can be used, besides in language-enabled applications, in linguistic studies of various types. our experiment is grounded in the assumption that derivation is a relation between word senses rather than between words as sets of meanings. this relation manifests in a formal and semantic way: formally, one word (the derived one) in the relation is obtained from the other (the base word) (usually) by adding some linguistic material (an affix); semantically, the meaning of the derived word is compositionally obtained from the meaning of the base word and of the affix(es) it contains. pwn follows this assumption and, thus, offers the perfect environment for testing the hypothesis that affixes that are involved in deriving words that develop meanings independently from their base word are morphologically productive ones. as shown above, this seems to be the case. we have also presented here, based on the data extracted from pwn and annotated, information about affixes frequency in general and, in particular, their frequency depending on four types of derivation defined ad hoc, thus their tendencies to participate in one type or another of derivation. however, as obvious from the discussion in this paper, the degree of coverage and of correctness of the derivational links in pwn varies from one affix to the other. it is straightforward that this fact has an impact on our research. nevertheless, we could not evaluate it for this presentation of results. as further work, we could also check if pwn granularity, already proved to be too fine, is reflected in the way derivation is marked in the network: for this, we would look, for each derived literal, at the number of derivational links each of its senses establishes with its base word. other aspects of affixes study that can be extracted from further processing the data we now have are: affixes capacity of allowing for the inheritance by the derived word of the meaning(s) of the base word (calculated as the percent of senses of the base word that are linked to the derived word), their capacity of allowing sense evolution (calculated as the percent of senses specific to the derived word) and the ratio of the derived word specific senses and of the base word specific senses. the semantic types of the base words to which one affix can attach is another line of research possible to be explored with our data. our experiment could be repeated for another language for which there is quite a large wordnet, in whose development the implementation of as many senses of a word as possible was an objective.