The semantics of -ee and -ation – a distributional semantic approach

This paper analyzes nominalizations with the suffixes -ee and -ation usinga distributional semantic approach. Comparing denominal and deverbalnominalizations with the same suffix, a novel perspective on the eventualityof denominal nominalizations is given. The present study makes use ofcosine similarities of word vectors of bases and their pertinent derivativesto gain insight into their underlying semantic similarity. The results of thepresent study show that nominalizations and their bases are overall similarto each other. This similarity is in some cases affected by relative frequency,base polysemy, and word class of the base.