Abstract
The frequencies of words vary with the discourse context, because any given word is more relevant to some topics of discussion than to others. In the statistical natural language processing literature, the term burstiness is used to characterize the tendency of topical words to occur repeatedly in bursts, separated by lulls in which they occur more rarely This article builds on the study of word burstiness by Altmann et al. (PLoS ONE 4:e7678, 2009). The study analyzed the archive of the USENET discussion group talk.origins, developed a novel method for quantifying burstiness, and showed that the burstiness of words is strongly correlated with their semantic type (in the sense of Montague semantics). Using the same dataset, I here explore the burstiness of abstract derived nouns (such as argument) in relation to their verb stems (e.g. argue) and frequency-matched nonderived nouns (such as science). I ask whether the burstiness of the derived form is inherited from the stem along with other stem features, such as the argument structure, or whether it is determined by the deverbal suffix. Overall, derived nouns pattern just like nonderived nouns, indicating that the suffix acts like the morphological head in determining the discourse statistics. This finding is interpreted in the light of Carlson’s theory of dialogue games (Carlson in Dialogue games: An approach to discourse analysis. Synthese language library, vol. 17. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1983).
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Pierrehumbert, J.B. (2012). Burstiness of Verbs and Derived Nouns. In: Santos, D., Lindén, K., Ng’ang’a, W. (eds) Shall We Play the Festschrift Game?. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30773-7_8
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