This section examines the behaviour of syntactic classes with respect to phon-sem systematicity, looking at how nouns and verbs on the one hand, and masculine and feminine words on the other hand behave in the phon-sem correlation ranks. I examine both the ‘syntax’ and the ‘no syntax’
rankings.
Monaghan, Chater and Christiansen (2003) proposed that the phonological and the collocational typicality of a word with respect to its syntactic category enhance word processing. The words at the top of the correlation-ranked list have, obviously, a stronger match between their phonology and their semantics (which includes meaning and syntax), which is another expression of typicality. I now test whether nouns and verbs have different degrees of phonological typicality by looking for any differences in their distributions in the ranked list.
In line with the tests presented in chapter four, I will also look for an effect of gender on word systematicity. Table 5.14 shows the results of two-tailed t-tests applied to the comparisons between nouns and verbs on one hand, and masculine and feminine words on the other hand.
'syntax' ‘no syntax’
Table 5.14. Results of two-tailed t-tests for the distributions of syntactic category (verbs and nouns) and gender (masculine and feminine) in the phon-sem correlation word rankings.
Statistically significant results in bold. Fist line states which word type distribution is higher in the rank; t=t-value; df=degrees of freedom; p=significance.
Although not all results are statistically significant, some trends are apparent in Table 5.14. For the verb-noun distinction, the more heavily inflected verbs tend to present higher phon-sem correlation values in the 'syntax' condition.
In this condition, where the measurements of both phonology and semantics in this condition are laden with syntax, the phon-sem correlation is a manifestation of phonological typicality of syntactic categories. Therefore, these results support the idea that verbs have greater phonological typicality than nouns (although at least part of the phonological typicality must be based on the similarly-sounding word inflections).
In the ‘no syntax’ condition where the phonological and semantic similarity metrics remove a great deal of the syntax (§ 5.2.3), the phon-sem correlation cannot be equated with typicality of syntactic categories. Differences in the distributions of nouns and verbs are more likely to be related to word meaning as captured by cooccurrence statistics. In this condition, nouns present better systematicity than verbs.
Christiansen and Monaghan’s (in press) studies for English suggest that while cooccurrence statistics alone classify nouns better than verbs, classification of verbs relies more on word-internal cues. In agreement with those suggestions for English, the results presented in Table 5.14 above for Spanish also indicate that cooccurrence statistics, combined with phonological information, classify nouns better than verbs. Verb classification seems to rely on morphology (encoded in word-final phonological regularities) and also on patterns of cooccurrence with functors, as in the 'syntax' condition.
As far as gender is concerned, results are less clear, although there is a general trend for masculine words to be more systematic than feminine words. This suggests that the interaction between gender and systematicity is weaker than that of syntactic category and systematicity, and perhaps a larger set of data would reveal finer aspects of it.
Still on the subject of gender, in the cvcv word group there are six gender-incongruous words - words that have the typical ending of one gender, while grammatically taking the opposite gender, such as mano (hand), which looks masculine because it ends in the typical masculine phoneme -o, but it is actually feminine: una mano blanca (a white hand). The gender-incongruous words are mano (hand), moto (motorbike), foto (photograph), tema (subject), cura (priest) and sida (AIDS). This incongruity can be kept only in relatively frequent words, and some gender-incongruous words which fell into disuse actually changed their grammatical gender to match their form. Differences in systematicity between the genders could help explain gender-incongruous words. In the 'syntax' condition, because cooccurrence with (gendered) determiners and other functors is part of the metric, gender incongruous words are expected to group with the words of the same grammatical gender (e.g. la mano would group with feminine words). In the 'no syntax' condition, if incongruous words are grouped with words of the same grammatical gender (la mano grouping with la casa, la mesa etc), then we can infer that their 'semantic' gender is grammatically encoded by the determiners; if, on the other hand, they group with words with the same ending and opposite syntactic gender (la mano grouped with el perro, el pato), then we can infer that their 'semantic' gender is determined by their form.
In the 'syntax' condition, the six incongruous words are in the bottom half of the ranked word list, with the three masculine-form, grammatically feminine words at the very bottom (positions 203, 244 and 248 out of 252). In the 'no syntax' condition, while the three feminine-form, grammatically masculine words stay in similar rank positions, the masculine-form, grammatically feminine words go up in the correlation ranking to group with the more systematic, normal masculine words. This is true particularly of the less frequent moto (goes up to position 154 from 203) and foto (goes up to position 91 from 248), while mano is still quite close to the bottom in position 206 out of 252.
This small effect supports the claim that semantic gender is driven by word form. Studies on a larger section of the lexicon in a larger corpus, using the gender differences in phon-sem systematicity could help determine what drives the gender of words – form or syntax.
This section has shown that there are differences in the degree of systematicity between syntactic classes, and that those differences depend on the way systematicity is measured. If we include syntax in the similarity metrics, inflected forms are more systematic, as expected. If we remove syntax from the similarity metrics, the unmarked syntactic classes show higher phon-sem systematicity.
The next section examines the behaviour with respect to systematicity of Shillcock et al's (2001, submitted) proposed communicatively salient words, in Spanish.