Versatility?

[A. Katz]

Batia,

Is your thesis available online? It sounds very pertinent to this 
discussion, and we could all profit by reading it.

Best,

    --Aya


On Mon, 21 Mar 2011, Batia Seroussi wrote:

> Hello all,
> One of the research questions of my doctorate, performed on native speakers
> of Hebrew in Tel-Aviv University under the supervision of Ruth Berman, dealt
> with the degree of compositionality or parsability of Hebrew derived nouns
> with respect to familarity/frequency. In line with Hay & Baayen, Bybee and
> others for English, familiarity/frequency interacted with the degree of
> compositionality, yielding the following equation: more familiar/frequent =
> less reference to the root, less familiar/frequent = more refrence to the
> root; Hebrew speakers who were asked to provide free associations, for
> example, tended to rely on the root extensively when confronted with
> unfamiliar/infrequent words whereas other types of associations (mainly
> semantic-pragmatic) were given to familiar/frequent Hebrew derived nouns.
> Batia Seroussi
> 2011/3/21 Joan Bybee <jbybee at unm.edu>
>
>> I agree with Lise. Jennifer Hay has also done a lot of very good research
>> on
>> the loss of transparency of derivational morphology. Plus you can check my
>> 2010 book, Language, Usage and Cognition, for both theory and data on these
>> points. No need to rely on anecdotes.
>>
>> Joan
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 5:38 PM, Lise Menn <lise.menn at colorado.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> Gary Libben and his group have done a great deal of psycholinguistic work
>>> on what people consciously and unconsciously know about compounds; it's
>> not
>>> necessary to rely on anecdote and introspection.  Check out the journal
>> The
>>> Mental Lexicon. Obviously no one has all the answers, but linguists
>>> shouldn't ignore the very good science that has been done in this area.
>>> Lise
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mar 20, 2011, at 5:31 PM, Tom Givon wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> Maybe it would be useful to add that among all the pieces of quaint
>>>> exemplars lie some general principles that have to do with both the
>> semantic
>>>> & phonological changes that affect compound expressions. Once the two
>> parts
>>>> co-vary in all (or most) contexts, and once the meaning of the compound
>>>> drifts away from the original composite meaning of the two parts, there
>> is a
>>>> growing semantic incentive to cease interpreting it as a composite,
>> given
>>>> that the predictability of the compound meaning from its parts gets
>> lower &
>>>> lower over time. In parallel, once two phonological sequences becomes
>> fused
>>>> as a single word, assimilation & reduction make the similarity to the
>> two
>>>> original parts less & less obvious. This is a typical "iconic
>> conspiracy" in
>>>> compounding & co-lexicalization. Ther rest is, as usual, history.  TG
>>>>
>>>> ====================
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 3/20/2011 4:53 PM, dharv at mail.optusnet.com.au wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I can attest that even in the aircraft industry plenty of people don't
>>>>> realize that helicopter means helical or twisting wing.
>>>>>
>>>>> At 3:45 PM -0600 20/3/11, Sherman Wilcox wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 20 Mar 2011, at 15:26, Pamela Munro wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>  The first time the observation about the analyzability of /rooster/
>> was
>>>>>>> made here, I thought, sure, I know the ending -/ster/, but what is
>> /roo/?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I routinely ask my students to analyze helicopter. No one can.
>> Everyone
>>>>>> thinks the word has an -/er/ suffix. Some of them come up with /heli-/
>>>>>> having to do with the sun, but then they can't figure out what the sun
>> has
>>>>>> to do with helicopters, or what -/copt/- might mean. Something that
>> chops
>>>>>> the sun's rays?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> Sherman Wilcox, Professor
>>>>>> Department of Linguistics
>>>>>> University of New Mexico
>>>>>> Albuquerque, NM 871131
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>> Lise Menn                      Home Office: 303-444-4274
>>> 1625 Mariposa Ave       Fax: 303-413-0017
>>> Boulder CO 80302
>>> http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/index.html
>>>
>>> Professor Emerita of Linguistics
>>> Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Science
>>> University of  Colorado
>>>
>>> Secretary, AAAS Section Z [Linguistics]
>>> Fellow, Linguistic Society of America
>>>
>>> Campus Mail Address:
>>> UCB 594, Institute for Cognitive Science
>>>
>>> Campus Physical Address:
>>> CINC 234
>>> 1777 Exposition Ave, Boulder
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Joan Bybee
>> HC 66 Box 118
>> Mountainair, NM 87036
>> 505-847-0137
>>
>
>