Can word formation be understood or understanded by semantics alone?

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Debates persist on whether semantic or grammatical factors primarily drive word formation, particularly English verb past tense inflection.
• Previous research suggested semantic similarity influences the choice between regular and irregular past tense forms.
• The role of grammatical derivation, especially from nouns to verbs (denominals), in past tense regularization remains debated.

Purpose of the Study:

• To re-examine claims that semantic factors, rather than grammatical ones, dictate regular vs. irregular past tense verb choices.
• To investigate the influence of noun-to-verb derivational status on past tense regularization.
• To clarify the interplay between semantic context and grammatical cues in verb inflection.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1 replicated a prior study, introducing novel verbs in semantic contexts mimicking existing regular or irregular verbs.
• Experiment 2 tested novel denominal verbs in contexts varying in grammatical salience.
• Experiment 3 assessed acceptability ratings for past tense forms based on semantic distance and noun-to-verb derivational status.

Main Results:

• Semantic similarity influenced past tense choices for novel verbs, consistent with prior findings.
• Grammatical derivation, when made salient, led to a preference for regular past tense forms, contrary to previous findings with ambiguous contexts.
• Noun-to-verb derivational status, not semantic distance, predicted acceptability of regular past tense forms for derived verbs.

Conclusions:

• Semantic factors can influence past tense choices in specific contexts but do not explain the regularization of irregular verbs in derivational contexts.
• Grammatical derivation plays a crucial role in the regularization of English verbs.
• The ambiguity of grammatical processes in prior studies may have led to overemphasizing semantic influences.