A Lexical-Statistic Analysis of Semantic Heads and Modifiers

in Chinese Compound Words

Abstract

The aim of this paper is set to make explicit the theoretical linguistic notion behind
theterm‘ he a ,in particular, to investigate the morpho-semantic status of this notion
d’
in Chinese compound words from the viewpoint of lexical statistics.

In recent years, the notion of ‘

he ad’has been extended from syntax into morphology.
The head of a linguistic construction (be it a compound word, or a phrasal constituent)
could be defined informally as a component which in some sense represents and
dominates the whole construction.

In the studies of Chinese morphology, Huang (1998) argues that the assumption that
natural language makes use of the concept of lexical-headedness in constructing
complex morphological entities is untenable. While in the field of computational
linguistics, previous researches concerning the automatic semantic classification of
Chinese compounds (Lua 1997; Chen and Chen 2000) all presuppose and verify the
endocentric feature of compounds. That is, by supposing that compounds are
composed of a head and a modifier, determining the semantic category of the target
therefore boils down to determine the semantic category of the head compound.

Thi spa pe rwi llma inlyf ocusont he‘ heads’ins ema nti
ct erms .Instead of making a
fixed distinction, we rather take this headedness/headless issue as a matter of degree.
In addition, we assume that (1) the head-modifier relation exists in Chinese compound
words in a relative way. A morphemic component in a compound can be function as a
head, while be a modifier in other compounds. (2). thes e
ma ntic‘ headedne ss’c anbe
scored statistically based on the calculation of their morphological productivity using
the machine-readable semantic resources.

At the outset, we propose two types of measures of morphological productivity

inspired by Baayen (2001). A statistical experiment is then performed on the
randomly chosen 400 compound words extracted from a Chinese Thesaurus (CiLin).
Thes coreoft he i
r‘ headedne ss’is calculated based on the data from Sinica Corpus
and the Web. To evaluate this experiment, we have made human judgments. The
further evaluation step is set to turn to the Sinica BOW (Bilingual Ontological
Wordnet). The current result of which shows that there is indeed positive evidence
which demonstrates that the head-modifier relations exist in Chinese compound
words.

In conclusion, we believe that this analysis will shed light on the word formation
mechanism in Chinese.

Reference
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