About Plural Morphology and Game Animals: from Old English to Present-Day English

Toupin, Fabienne

doi:10.4000/lexis.964

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…For English nouns, the distinction between mass and count nouns comes to mind. Additionally, a major part of present-day English count nouns that never or occasionally take the suffix -s in their plural form are animal nouns that are hunted (e.g., duck, woodcock, and elk ) or fished (salmon and crab) (see Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1985, for lexemes other than animal names) (see Toupin, 2015, for an extended list of 85 animal nouns).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic properties of English nominal pluralization: Insights from word embeddings

Shafaei-Bajestan¹,

Moradipour-Tari²,

Uhrig³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Semantic differentiation of nominal pluralization is grammaticalized in many languages. For example, plural markers may only be relevant for human nouns. English does not appear to make such distinctions. Using distributional semantics, we show that English nominal pluralization exhibits semantic clusters. For instance, pluralization of fruit words is more similar to one another and less similar to pluralization of other semantic classes. Therefore, reduction of the meaning shift in plural formation to the addition of an abstract plural meaning is too simplistic. A semantically informed method, called CosClassAvg, is introduced that outperforms pluralization methods in distributional semantics which assume plural formation amounts to the addition of a fixed plural vector. In comparison with our approach, a method from compositional distributional semantics, called FRACSS, predicted plural vectors that were more similar to the corpus-extracted plural vectors in terms of direction but not vector length. A modeling study reveals that the observed difference between the two predicted semantic spaces by CosClassAvg and FRACSS carries over to how well a computational model of the listener can understand previously unencountered plural forms. Mappings from word forms, represented with triphone vectors, to predicted semantic vectors are more productive when CosClassAvg-generated semantic vectors are employed as gold standard vectors instead of FRACSS-generated vectors.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic properties of English nominal pluralization: Insights from word embeddings

Shafaei-Bajestan¹,

Moradipour-Tari²,

Uhrig³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Deer berasal dari kata deor dalam bahasa Skandinavia di masa old English sekitar abad ke-11 (Toupin, 2015). Sebelum tahun 1200-1400, deer merupakan perumpamaan bagi monster yang bentuknya menyerupai binatang berkaki empat yang hidup di alam liar.…”

Section: (4) Deerunclassified

Penyempitan Makna Amelioratif pada Nomina dalam Bahasa Inggris

Ardiansyah

2020

Diglosia

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Semantic change is a language phenomenon which may be found in a society. A kind of semantic change which which is remarkable to be examined is semantic narrowing. A positive meaning namely amelioration may be discovered through semantic narrowing. In addition, semantic narrowing in English is frequently discovered i nouns. Therefore, factors which can stimulate the process are necessary to be elaborated. Aim of the study was to examine nouns’ ameliorative semantic narrowing in English. Methods applied in the study were descriptive synchronic-diachronic methods. The methods were used to describe portrayal relating to the condition in past and present. Data in the study were six nouns which were collected from the video clips relayed on the television programs. Semantic narrowing found in the study were caused by several factors: (a), meaning change due to environmental change (b) meaning change due to language users’ response, and (c) meaning change due to association. The results showed that semantic narrowing has a correlation with homonymy and polysemy. Therefore, meaning change may have related or non-related meaning from the previous meaning. Longer period of the process and the society agreement have become challanges which should be realized due to acceptance of the new meaning.

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The pluralization palette: unveiling semantic clusters in English nominal pluralization through distributional semantics

Shafaei-Bajestan,

Moradipour-Tari,

Uhrig

et al. 2024

Morphology

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Using distributional semantics, we show that English nominal pluralization exhibits semantic clusters. For instance, the change in semantic space from singulars to plurals differs depending on whether a word denotes, e.g., a fruit, or an animal. Languages with extensive noun classes such as Swahili and Kiowa distinguish between these kind of words in their morphology. In English, even though not marked morphologically, plural semantics actually also varies by semantic class. A semantically informed method, CosClassAvg, is introduced that is compared to two other methods, one implementing a fixed shift from singular to plural, and one creating plural vectors from singular vectors using a linear mapping (FRACSS). Compared to FRACSS, CosClassAvg predicted plural vectors that were more similar to the corpus-extracted plural vectors in terms of vector length, but somewhat less similar in terms of orientation. Both FRACSS and CosClassAvg outperform the method using a fixed shift vector to create plural vectors, which does not do justice to the intricacies of English plural semantics. A computational modeling study revealed that the observed difference between the plural semantics generated by these three methods carries over to how well a computational model of the listener can understand previously unencountered plural forms. Among all methods, CosClassAvg provides a good balance for the trade-off between productivity (being able to understand novel plural forms) and faithfulness to corpus-extracted plural vectors (i.e., understanding the particulars of the meaning of a given plural form).

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About Plural Morphology and Game Animals: from Old English to Present-Day English

Cited by 3 publications

References 7 publications

Semantic properties of English nominal pluralization: Insights from word embeddings

Semantic properties of English nominal pluralization: Insights from word embeddings

Penyempitan Makna Amelioratif pada Nomina dalam Bahasa Inggris

The pluralization palette: unveiling semantic clusters in English nominal pluralization through distributional semantics

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