Lexical Semantics and Distribution of Suffixes - A Visual Analysis

Proceedings of the EACL 2012 Joint Workshop of LINGVIS & UNCLH, pages 7–15, Avignon, France, April 23 - 24 2012. c⃝2012 Association for Computational Linguistics Lexical Semantics and Distribution of Suffixes — A Visual Analysis Christian Rohrdantz1 Andreas Niekler2 Annette Hautli1 Miriam Butt1 Daniel A. Keim1 1 University of Konstanz first.last@uni-konstanz.de 2Leipzig University of Applied Sciences aniekler@fbm.htwk-leipzig.de Abstract We present a quantitative investigation of the cross-linguistic usage of some (rel- atively) newly minted derivational mor- phemes. In particular, we examine the lexi- cal semantic content expressed by three suf- fixes originating in English: -gate, -geddon and -athon. Using data from newspa- pers, we look at the distribution and lex- ical semantic usage of these morphemes not only within English, but across sev- eral languages and also across time, with a time-depth of 20 years. The occurrence of these suffixes in available corpora are comparatively rare, however, by investigat- ing huge amounts of data, we are able to arrive at interesting insights into the dis- tribution, meaning and spread of the suf- fixes. Processing and understanding the huge amounts of data is accomplished via visualization methods that allow the pre- sentation of an overall distributional pic- ture, with further details and different types of perspectives available on demand. 1 Introduction It is well-known that parts of a compound can be- gin to lead an additional life as derivational suf- fixes, or even as stand-alone items. A famous example is burger, which is now used to denote a food-item (e.g., burger, cheese burger, veggie burger) and is originally from the word Ham- burger, which designates a person from the Ger- man city of Hamburg. These morphemes are gen- erally known as cranberry morphemes (because of the prolific use of cran). Some other examples are -(o)nomics, -(o)mat or (o)rama. While it is well-known that this morpholog- ical process exists, it is less clear what condi- tions trigger it and how the coinage “catches” on to become a regular part of a language. Given the current availability of huge amounts of dig- ital data, we decided to investigate whether we could gain an insight into the use and spread of some of these morphemes via quantitative meth- ods, thereby confirming our intuitions. Furthermore, we decided to focus not just on the use of the cranberry morphemes in their lan- guage of origin, but also on their use and spread in other languages. In particular, we want to model the contexts in which these suffixes are used to coin new words and how these neologisms trans- port to other languages. We chose to look at the following three morphemes: -gate, -geddon and -athon because they tend to be used in “newswor- thy” contexts and are therefore likely to appear in newswire and newspaper corpora, which are available to us in large amounts. This paper describes work in progress, where we visually analyze the lexical semantics and use of the three suffixes -gate, -geddon and -athon. We were able to add some time-depth to our in- …

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