Towards a Model for the Prediction of Chinese Novel Verbs

Towards a Model for the Prediction of Chinese Novel Verbs* Paul You-Jun Chang a and Kathleen Ahrens a, b a Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan R. O. C. r95142005@ntu.edu.tw b Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong ahrens@hkbu.edu.hk Abstract. As previous word adoption models, though proposing potential factors that influence the survival of neologisms, receive little empirical examination, this corpus-based study compares the performance of two such models by providing clear operational criteria for each factor in the models and, consequently, proposes a hybrid model that improves the previous results. We focus on seventy-seven Chinese novel verbs that appeared about ten years ago, defining their survival/failure in the real world, and examine the accurate prediction ratio of the two models. Both models display an overall accuracy of about 60 percent. However, as certain factors, e.g., unobtrusiveness, appear to be invalid predictors for the Chinese data, we attempt to improve the results by deleting inappropriate factors and by adjusting the weightings. As the overall accuracy was improved to about 70 percent, we suggest that this study would shed light on the potential factors that influence the survival of Chinese novel verbs. Keywords: Neologism, Word Adoption Model, Unobtrusiveness. 1. Introduction One interesting aspect about the human cognition is its ability to create. And creativity in language has doubtlessly inspired numerous studies. Among others, one phenomenon that commonly occurs would be the emergence of neologisms. For one thing, all words, together with their senses, that exist in our current vocabulary were once new (Klein and Murphy, 2001) and must have undergone a certain developmental process to finally remain in the vocabulary. For another, we still see this process going on in everyday life as can be seen from the coinage of new words, such as blog or Y2K. Previous studies on neologisms, therefore, mostly focused on the collection of new words (e.g., Algeo and Algeo, 1991), the analysis of their inherent features (Hsu, 1999; Rey, 1995), or their relationship with the society (Hsu, 1999). Metcalf (2002; cf. Chang, 2008) and Kjellmer (2000), among the few, nevertheless attempted to observe the factors that influence the adoption of neologisms in a language and, respectively, proposed a scoring system to assess the possibility for novel words to survive or to fail. 1 Interestingly, these two models are similar regarding certain factors as important, e.g., morphological productivity, * We appreciate comments from two anonymous reviewers and Siaw-Fong Chung, as well as comments from the audience in CLDC-2 for a previous, smaller-scale paper. We also appreciate Professor Janice Fon for her comments on the statistics and Yu-You Chen, Yao-Zhu Zhang, and Yi-Wei Lin for help in collecting the frequencies. The remaining errors are our own. 1 Part of this paper (mainly 2.1 and parts of Sections 3 and 4, about Metcalf’s model,) were presented at The Second Conference on Language, Discourse, and Cognition (CLDC-2). As an extension, this study contrasts Metcalf’s model with Kjellmer’s and proposes a hybrid model for improvement of the …

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