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Article published In:
Lingvisticæ Investigationes
Vol. 45:1 (2022) ► pp.83–115

Evaluating morphosemantic demotivation through experimental and distributional methods

| Université de Fribourg
| Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
| Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès
| Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès
| Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès
| Université de Fribourg

The lexicalization of morphologically complex words, i.e. their inclusion in the lexicon, can involve a loss of semantic compositionality. Such a phenomenon, called demotivation, has been overlooked in both morphological and lexical studies, notably regarding its gradual nature. This paper compares two measures of demotivation based on experimental and distributional semantics approaches. It builds on the evaluation of 78 pairs of French verbs and derived nouns selected to represent three levels of demotivation. The comparison of the two approaches using speakers’ judgements and word vector similarity indicates convergence on the identification of demotivation degrees within a continuum, while also highlighting specific aspects of each method. The study provides direction to further research on morphosemantic demotivation, bridging together semantic, morphological and methodological considerations.

Keywords: demotivation, semantics, experimental approach, distributional semantics, lexicon
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Material selection
    • 1.1Characteristics of the verb-noun pairs
    • 1.2Data collection
  • 2.Experimental approach
    • 2.1Method
      • 2.1.1Participants
      • 2.1.2Procedure
    • 2.2Results
  • 3.Automatic measurement of demotivation
    • 3.1Design
    • 3.2Results
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Convergence of experimental and distributional scores
    • 4.2Discrepancies between the two methods
    • 4.3Going further into the diachronic dimension of demotivation
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 December 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00068.wau
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