Tyler Schoebelen

Measuring Compositionality in Phrasal Verbs

Is compositionality the kind of thing that can be measured? Working by analogy to paradigmatic approaches to morphology, I investigate whether the patterns of token and type frequencies for verbs, particles, and whole phrasal verbs can be used to measure compositionality. The analogy proves to be apt and through three corpus experiments, I show that some phrasal verbs are less decomposable than others. Experiment one establishes that opaque phrasal verbs (like give in, whose components are unentailed) have different distributions than fully entailed phrasal verbs (e.g., lift up, which entails the simplex meaning of both lift and up). Experiment two uses information theoretic terms and an even larger corpus to confirm that opaque and transparent phrasal verbs are indeed different. It also shows that information theoretic measurements are able to predict the entailment characteristics of different phrasal verbs. Experiment three adds information theoretic measures to Gries (2002)'s model of particle alternation (V Prt NP vs. V NP Prt). These additions improve the classificatory adequacy of Gries' model while reducing the overall number of factors. Taken together, the results suggest that the lexicon is not simply a list of entries but a highly interconnected network with patterns we can detect and describe.