Annotating complex words to investigate the semantics of derivational processes

Abstract

In this paper, we present and test an annotation scheme designed to analyse the semantic properties of derived nouns in context. Aiming at a general semantic comparison of morphological processes, we use a descriptive model that seeks to capture semantic regularities among lexemes and affixes, rather than match occurrences to word sense inventories. We annotate two distinct features of target words: the ontological type of the entity they denote and their semantic relationship with the word they derive from. As illustrated through an annotation experiment on French corpus data, this procedure allows us to highlight semantic differences and similarities between affixes by investigating the number and frequency of their semantic functions, as well as the relation between affix polyfunctionality and lexical ambiguity.

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