313
LEXICAL DERIVATION AND THE FORM CLASS OF WORD ASSOCIATIONS* JOHN T. E. RICHARDSON**
University ofSussex Certain words are claimed by linguists to be derived out of simple lexical items. Such words should therefore be likely to elicit free associates from the grammatical category of their stems. Simple words, on the other hand, should follow the usual rule of eliciting associates from their own grammatical category. Previous research suggests that this is the case, but provides no criterion for distinguishing between simple and derived words. The present study explicitly specifies which words are to be regarded as derived, and finds no effect of the grammatical category of the stem upon the category of the associate.
INTRODUCTION
Linguists have recently shown interest in a phenomenon known as lexical derivation, according to which the lexical representation of one word (e.g. happiness) is felt to be derivative upon that of another (happy). Two approaches have been adopted towards this phenomenon (Chomsky, 1970): the &dquo;transformationalist&dquo; approach suggests that a derived word is the result of a transformation operating upon the base lexical item underlying the corresponding stem; the &dquo;lexicalist&dquo; approach suggests that the derived word and its stem have the same lexical representation, which is neutral between the two forms. Briem and Loewenthal (1968) and Kintsch (1972) found that derived words were more difficult to remember than simple words, which they took as evidence for a transformationalist account of lexical derivation. However, Richardson (1975) argued that these results were due entirely to the confounded variables of imageability and concreteness (Paivio, Yuille and Madigan, 1968); when the two latter variables were controlled, simple and derived nouns were found to be equal in difficulty. This finding is consistent with a lexicalist view, but it is difficult to handle on a transformationalist account. One might, however, take it as consistent with the view that there is no genuine difference between the two types of noun at all. One way to decide this would be to use simple and derived words as stimuli in a word-association experiment. On either a lexicalist or a transformationalist approach, derived words should be highly associated with their stems, and thus likely to evoke them as responses. Words whose stems belong to other syntactic categories should therefore be likely to yield associates from those categories. Simple words, on the other hand, should be more likely to yield associates from the grammatical category of the stimulus. Lowenthal (1969) produced *This research was supported **Now at Brunel University.
by the Science Research Council.
Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on March 8, 2016
314 evidence
supporting this prediction, in that nouns derived from adjectives were more likely to elicit adjective responses than simple nouns or nouns derived from other bases, and adjectives derived from nouns were more likely to elicit noun responses than simple adjectives or adjectives derived from other bases. The chief difficulty in accepting this finding is that Lowenthal gave no examples of her material, nor any criterion by which a given word might be categorized as simple or derived. There is also the possibility, mentioned above, that differences between simple and derived words might be caused by the confounded variables of imageability and concreteness, since derived words are typically rather abstract (Kintsch, 1972; Richardson, 1975). The following study avoids these difficulties : the three variables are manipulated independently, and both criteria for and examples of simple and derived nouns are offered.
METHOD
Materials The materials are described in detail elsewhere (Richardson, 1975). They comprise lists of ten nouns, varying orthogonally high and low imageability, high and low concreteness, and simple versus derived nouns. Words were matched on the basis of imageability and concreteness (Paivio, et al., 1968), and also on the basis of frequency (Thomdike and Lorge, 1944). As far as possible, all words contained three syllables. A derived noun was defined as a noun consisting of an explicit noun-forming suffix, together with a stem which was identical with, or was a minimally modified form of, an English word in common use. Any noun which did not satisfy this condition was regarded as a simple noun. This yielded simple nouns such as disaster, fantasy, charlatan, and economy, and derived nouns such as pollution, happiness, socialist, and distinction. Among the derived nouns there were 5 with noun stems, 9 with adjective stems, and 26 with verb stems. Eight other words were used for practice.
eight
Procedure The 80 words were combined into ten sets on the basis of their rank frequency within each list; that is, the most frequent word in each list was put into one set, the next most frequent into another, and so on. The eight words in each set were then randomized. The ten experimental and one practice set were printed on separate pages of a response booklet. The subjects were instructed to go through the booklet at their own rate, writing beside each word the first thing that occurred to them associated with that word in any way whatsoever. The order of the 10 experimental pages to the ten subjects was determined by a Latin square. The subjects were undergraduates at the University of , Sussex, who were tested individually. .
_
Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on March 8, 2016
,
315 TABLE 1 Mean percentage of responses of different form classes, (C), and lexical complexity of stimulus.
by imageability (7)~ concreteness,
TABLE 2
Mean percentage of responses of different form
classes, by derivational status
of stimulus
RESULTS The results are presented in two forms, in each case using the statistical technique3 appropriate for generalizing over both subjects and materials (Clark, 1973). Table 1 shows the form-class of the responses in terms of the original factorial design of the experiment. Separate analyses of variance were carried out upon whether or not a subject gave a noun to a given word, whether or not he gave an adjective, and whether or not he gave a verb. There was no significant effect in any of these three analyses. The overall figure of 81.5’% noun responses agrees closely with the figure of 79% noun responses to nouns which Lowenthal 1(1969) deduces from Deese (1962). The second analysis classifies the derived nouns according to the form-class of their stems. This is summarized in Table 2. Once again, three separate analyses of variance were carried out upon the noun, adjective, and verb responses, using unweighted-means solutions. These were used to compare the nouns derived from adjectives or verbs with the nouns derived from nouns and with the simple nouns. In no case was there a
significant effect. The failure to find a represent a failure of the
significant effect of any of the experimental procedure, because
stimulus attributes does not in every analysis there was a
Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on March 8, 2016
316
highly significant variance due to the different stimuli. It must therefore be concluded that the experimental procedure was sensitive to between-stimulus effects, but that none of the stimulus attributes studied contributed
to
these.
DISCUSSION These data fail to replicate the findings of Loewenthal (1969). There is no evidence that the grammatical category of a noun’s stem affects the category of the responses which it evokes in free association. Her results must therefore be put down either to sampling error, or to the use of unreliable (and unspecified) criteria for selecting her stimulus materials. In this case, there exists no good evidence for the psychological reality or importance of the linguistic distinction between simple and derived nouns. One should observe that linguists themselves have given no objective criteria for identifying the phenomena which they discuss. The present results suggest that it is of the utmost importance that they attempt to do so in future. The failure of imageability and concreteness to affect performance in this experiment is somewhat surprising, since these variables often correlate with measures of associative meaningfulness (Paivio, 1971, pp. 80-81). Of course, the aspect of performance studied here is not a direct guide to the processes involved in association tasks. But the results speak against an explanation of the frequently reported finding that nouns usually evoke noun responses, and adjectives evoke adjective responses, in terms of subjects responding with a word of similar imageability to the stimulus (cf. Paivio, 1971, pp. 272-276). For, if the difference between nouns and adjectives in the form-class of their associates is a simple result of the fact that nouns are more imageable than adjectives, then abstract nouns should be more likely to elicit adjective responses than concrete nouns. The results of this experiment suggest that the tendency to give paradigmatic responses in word-association tasks reflects a genuine effect of grammatical category, and not one of stimulus imageability.
REFERENCES and LOEWENTHAL, K. (1968). Immediate recall of nominalizations and adjectivalizations. Psychon. Sci., 11, 209. CHOMSKY, N. (1970). Remarks on nominalization. In JACOBS, R. A. and ROSENBAUM, P. S. (eds.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar (Waltham, Mass.) CLARK, H. H. (1973). The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. J . verb. Learn. verb. Behav., 12, 335. DEESE, J. (1962). Form class and the determinants of association. J . verb. Learn. verb. Behav.,
BRIEM, J.
1, 79.
Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on March 8, 2016
317 W. (1972). Abstract nouns: Imagery versus lexical complexity. J. verb. Learn. verb. Behav., 11, 59. LOEWENTHAL, K. (1969). The form class of word associations to nominalizations and adjectivalizations. Psychon. Sci., 16, 197. PAIVIO, A. (1971). Imagery and Verbal Processes (New York). PAIVIO, A., YUILLE, J. C. and MADIGAN, S. (1968). Concreteness, imagery, and meaningfulness values for 925 nouns. J . exp. Psychol., 76 (1, Pt. 2). . exp. RICHARDSON, J. T. E. (1975). Imagery, concreteness, and lexical complexity. Quart. J , 27, 445. Psychol. THORNDIKE, E. L. and LORGE, I. (1944). The Teacher’s Word Book of 30,000 Words (New York).
KINTSCH,
Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on March 8, 2016
LEXICAL DERIVATION AND THE FORM CLASS OF WORD ASSOCIATIONS* JOHN T. E. RICHARDSON**
University ofSussex Certain words are claimed by linguists to be derived out of simple lexical items. Such words should therefore be likely to elicit free associates from the grammatical category of their stems. Simple words, on the other hand, should follow the usual rule of eliciting associates from their own grammatical category. Previous research suggests that this is the case, but provides no criterion for distinguishing between simple and derived words. The present study explicitly specifies which words are to be regarded as derived, and finds no effect of the grammatical category of the stem upon the category of the associate.
INTRODUCTION
Linguists have recently shown interest in a phenomenon known as lexical derivation, according to which the lexical representation of one word (e.g. happiness) is felt to be derivative upon that of another (happy). Two approaches have been adopted towards this phenomenon (Chomsky, 1970): the &dquo;transformationalist&dquo; approach suggests that a derived word is the result of a transformation operating upon the base lexical item underlying the corresponding stem; the &dquo;lexicalist&dquo; approach suggests that the derived word and its stem have the same lexical representation, which is neutral between the two forms. Briem and Loewenthal (1968) and Kintsch (1972) found that derived words were more difficult to remember than simple words, which they took as evidence for a transformationalist account of lexical derivation. However, Richardson (1975) argued that these results were due entirely to the confounded variables of imageability and concreteness (Paivio, Yuille and Madigan, 1968); when the two latter variables were controlled, simple and derived nouns were found to be equal in difficulty. This finding is consistent with a lexicalist view, but it is difficult to handle on a transformationalist account. One might, however, take it as consistent with the view that there is no genuine difference between the two types of noun at all. One way to decide this would be to use simple and derived words as stimuli in a word-association experiment. On either a lexicalist or a transformationalist approach, derived words should be highly associated with their stems, and thus likely to evoke them as responses. Words whose stems belong to other syntactic categories should therefore be likely to yield associates from those categories. Simple words, on the other hand, should be more likely to yield associates from the grammatical category of the stimulus. Lowenthal (1969) produced *This research was supported **Now at Brunel University.
by the Science Research Council.
Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on March 8, 2016
314 evidence
supporting this prediction, in that nouns derived from adjectives were more likely to elicit adjective responses than simple nouns or nouns derived from other bases, and adjectives derived from nouns were more likely to elicit noun responses than simple adjectives or adjectives derived from other bases. The chief difficulty in accepting this finding is that Lowenthal gave no examples of her material, nor any criterion by which a given word might be categorized as simple or derived. There is also the possibility, mentioned above, that differences between simple and derived words might be caused by the confounded variables of imageability and concreteness, since derived words are typically rather abstract (Kintsch, 1972; Richardson, 1975). The following study avoids these difficulties : the three variables are manipulated independently, and both criteria for and examples of simple and derived nouns are offered.
METHOD
Materials The materials are described in detail elsewhere (Richardson, 1975). They comprise lists of ten nouns, varying orthogonally high and low imageability, high and low concreteness, and simple versus derived nouns. Words were matched on the basis of imageability and concreteness (Paivio, et al., 1968), and also on the basis of frequency (Thomdike and Lorge, 1944). As far as possible, all words contained three syllables. A derived noun was defined as a noun consisting of an explicit noun-forming suffix, together with a stem which was identical with, or was a minimally modified form of, an English word in common use. Any noun which did not satisfy this condition was regarded as a simple noun. This yielded simple nouns such as disaster, fantasy, charlatan, and economy, and derived nouns such as pollution, happiness, socialist, and distinction. Among the derived nouns there were 5 with noun stems, 9 with adjective stems, and 26 with verb stems. Eight other words were used for practice.
eight
Procedure The 80 words were combined into ten sets on the basis of their rank frequency within each list; that is, the most frequent word in each list was put into one set, the next most frequent into another, and so on. The eight words in each set were then randomized. The ten experimental and one practice set were printed on separate pages of a response booklet. The subjects were instructed to go through the booklet at their own rate, writing beside each word the first thing that occurred to them associated with that word in any way whatsoever. The order of the 10 experimental pages to the ten subjects was determined by a Latin square. The subjects were undergraduates at the University of , Sussex, who were tested individually. .
_
Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on March 8, 2016
,
315 TABLE 1 Mean percentage of responses of different form classes, (C), and lexical complexity of stimulus.
by imageability (7)~ concreteness,
TABLE 2
Mean percentage of responses of different form
classes, by derivational status
of stimulus
RESULTS The results are presented in two forms, in each case using the statistical technique3 appropriate for generalizing over both subjects and materials (Clark, 1973). Table 1 shows the form-class of the responses in terms of the original factorial design of the experiment. Separate analyses of variance were carried out upon whether or not a subject gave a noun to a given word, whether or not he gave an adjective, and whether or not he gave a verb. There was no significant effect in any of these three analyses. The overall figure of 81.5’% noun responses agrees closely with the figure of 79% noun responses to nouns which Lowenthal 1(1969) deduces from Deese (1962). The second analysis classifies the derived nouns according to the form-class of their stems. This is summarized in Table 2. Once again, three separate analyses of variance were carried out upon the noun, adjective, and verb responses, using unweighted-means solutions. These were used to compare the nouns derived from adjectives or verbs with the nouns derived from nouns and with the simple nouns. In no case was there a
significant effect. The failure to find a represent a failure of the
significant effect of any of the experimental procedure, because
stimulus attributes does not in every analysis there was a
Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on March 8, 2016
316
highly significant variance due to the different stimuli. It must therefore be concluded that the experimental procedure was sensitive to between-stimulus effects, but that none of the stimulus attributes studied contributed
to
these.
DISCUSSION These data fail to replicate the findings of Loewenthal (1969). There is no evidence that the grammatical category of a noun’s stem affects the category of the responses which it evokes in free association. Her results must therefore be put down either to sampling error, or to the use of unreliable (and unspecified) criteria for selecting her stimulus materials. In this case, there exists no good evidence for the psychological reality or importance of the linguistic distinction between simple and derived nouns. One should observe that linguists themselves have given no objective criteria for identifying the phenomena which they discuss. The present results suggest that it is of the utmost importance that they attempt to do so in future. The failure of imageability and concreteness to affect performance in this experiment is somewhat surprising, since these variables often correlate with measures of associative meaningfulness (Paivio, 1971, pp. 80-81). Of course, the aspect of performance studied here is not a direct guide to the processes involved in association tasks. But the results speak against an explanation of the frequently reported finding that nouns usually evoke noun responses, and adjectives evoke adjective responses, in terms of subjects responding with a word of similar imageability to the stimulus (cf. Paivio, 1971, pp. 272-276). For, if the difference between nouns and adjectives in the form-class of their associates is a simple result of the fact that nouns are more imageable than adjectives, then abstract nouns should be more likely to elicit adjective responses than concrete nouns. The results of this experiment suggest that the tendency to give paradigmatic responses in word-association tasks reflects a genuine effect of grammatical category, and not one of stimulus imageability.
REFERENCES and LOEWENTHAL, K. (1968). Immediate recall of nominalizations and adjectivalizations. Psychon. Sci., 11, 209. CHOMSKY, N. (1970). Remarks on nominalization. In JACOBS, R. A. and ROSENBAUM, P. S. (eds.), Readings in English Transformational Grammar (Waltham, Mass.) CLARK, H. H. (1973). The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research. J . verb. Learn. verb. Behav., 12, 335. DEESE, J. (1962). Form class and the determinants of association. J . verb. Learn. verb. Behav.,
BRIEM, J.
1, 79.
Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on March 8, 2016
317 W. (1972). Abstract nouns: Imagery versus lexical complexity. J. verb. Learn. verb. Behav., 11, 59. LOEWENTHAL, K. (1969). The form class of word associations to nominalizations and adjectivalizations. Psychon. Sci., 16, 197. PAIVIO, A. (1971). Imagery and Verbal Processes (New York). PAIVIO, A., YUILLE, J. C. and MADIGAN, S. (1968). Concreteness, imagery, and meaningfulness values for 925 nouns. J . exp. Psychol., 76 (1, Pt. 2). . exp. RICHARDSON, J. T. E. (1975). Imagery, concreteness, and lexical complexity. Quart. J , 27, 445. Psychol. THORNDIKE, E. L. and LORGE, I. (1944). The Teacher’s Word Book of 30,000 Words (New York).
KINTSCH,
Downloaded from las.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO on March 8, 2016
