Do semantic features capture a syntactic classification of compounds? Insights from compositional distributional semantics

Classifying compound words has been the ultimate goal of much research in for-
mal linguistics. A popular, cross-linguistically applicable classification (Bisetto &
Scalise 2005) distinguishes three main types of compounds, namely Subordinate,
Attributive, and Coordinate on the basis of the underlying syntactic relation be-
tween the compound elements. Similar tripartitions have also been proposed in
cognitive psychology by works exploring conceptual combination. Focusing on the
type of semantic interpretation assigned to novel combinations, three main classes
have been traditionally described, namely Relation-linking, Property-mapping,
and Hybrid or Conjunctive (see Wisniewski 1996). Based on these commonali-
ties, we conjecture that syntax-based compound types might also be explained by
means of the semantic properties of the compound and its constituents. Using a
compositional model of distributional semantics (cDSM), we show that (a) the con-
tribution of each constituent in determining the meaning of the compound and
(b) the semantic similarity between the two constituent words are significant pre-
dictors of these classes. These findings suggest that the various compound types
identified by syntactic criteria can also be predicted by means of semantic features.
On the one hand, this confirms the validity of the proposed linguistic categoriza-
tion. On the other hand, we bring further evidence proving the effectiveness of
cDSMs in describing linguistic phenomena.