What is it about?
When people see a new compound noun (e.g. zoom shirt) for the first time, they can interpret it in many ways. We asked people to tell us what they thought some new compound words meant. We found that there are usually more possible meanings than researchers have tended to assume. The number of possible meanings depends to a large extent on the degree of ambiguity of the words making up the compound. Compounds with more possible meanings are also perceived as being more difficult to interpret.
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Why is it important?
This finding is important because compound nouns make up a large part of the vocabulary of many languages and are especially important as a way of forming words for new concepts. However, much work on the psychology of language, as well as computational work on language, tends to assume that compounds have just one meaning. The role of word ambiguity in shaping individual speakers' interpretations has been neglected up until now.
Perspectives
When we started this research, we did not anticipate that people would come up with such a wide range of meanings for the compounds we asked them to interpret. The richness and diversity of interpretations, reflecting differences in individual experiences, was very striking and not something that current relevant theories can accommodate. Some interpretations initially seemed a bit 'off the wall', but in virtually all cases, once we understood where the person was coming from and the connections they were making, the interpretation did make sense.
Melanie Bell
Anglia Ruskin University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Constituent polysemy and interpretational diversity in attested English novel compounds, The Mental Lexicon, October 2020, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/ml.00013.sch.
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