An Inquiry into the Semantic Transparency and Productivity of German Particle Verbs and Derivational Affixation

This study addresses the relation between morphological productivity and semantic transparency. Using distributional semantics, we compare German particle verbs with German derivational affixation. We observed that derivational affixes, but not particles, tend to make strong independent semantic contributions to their carrier words. As a consequence, the semantic vectors of affixed words are predictable from their base words with higher accuracy than is possible for particle verbs. For particle verbs, but not affixed verbs, a greater semantic similarity within the set of complex words correlated negatively with the number of types. In turn, a greater number of types predicted a reduced probability of unseen types, again only for particle verbs. We argue that particle verbs primarily serve the onomasiological function of labeling, resulting in highly distinct semantic vectors for particle verbs. By contrast, derivational affixation groups complex words closely together in semantic space while maintaining consistent semantic relations with the base words. This enables these words to serve not only as labels, but also allows them to be used for syntactic recategorization.