Phonological properties of word classes and directionality in conversion

Abstract

In the study of the word-formation process of conversion, one particularly difficult task is to determine the directionality of the process, that is, to decide which word represents the base and which the derived word. One possibility to inform this decision that has received only limited attention is to capitalize on word-class-specific phonological properties. This paper empirically investigates this option for English noun-verb conversion by building on recent findings on phonological differences between these two word classes. A large-scale study of phonological properties is carried out on CELEX data, employing the quantitative techniques of conditional inference trees and random forests. An important result of this analysis is that the accuracy of phonological cues varies widely across different subsamples in the data. Essentially this means that phonological cues can be used as a criterion to determine the directionality of words that are at least two syllables in length. When restricted to this part of the lexicon, phonological properties represent a fairly accurate indicator of source word class and are therefore a useful addition to the linguist's toolkit for determining directionality in conversion. Based on this result, the paper also discusses the relations of phonological properties to other criteria commonly employed to determine directionality.