Toward a Typology of Semantic Transparency

Résumé du livre

This thesis proposes an extension to existing models of semantic transparency in compounding by incorporating previously unexplored features into the concept. Although the term semantic transparency is widely used in research on multi-word lexemes, the concept is often viewed as simply a matter of semantic compositionality, which is to say that transparency is determined solely by the meaning of individual constituents. While this approach offers a number of advantages, it is nevertheless insufficient on two accounts: one, it groups together a number of compositional compounds that are otherwise semantically distinct (e.g. ice breaker ~ ice cube ~ ice age), and two, it offers no clear means to order or rank partially compositional compounds (e.g. firefly ~ butterfly ~ barfly). This thesis therefore argues for a more holistic approach to semantic transparency, one that views the phenomenon as both scalar and multi-faceted, the result of which is a more granular model capable of further distinguishing between several different compound types.The typology of semantic transparency of compounds proposed in this work consists of four basic factors supported by a dataset consisting of more than 1,000 French NN and N Ă N compounds extracted from Wiktionary. The first factor, headedness, touches on features pertaining to a compound's semantic head, for which concepts such as canonical position and strong/weak centricity are advanced. Second, compositionality is formalized according to a four-way configuration based on how individual constituents contribute meaning to the whole. The third factor, semantic homogeneity, relates to the degree of shared meaning between analogically similar compounds. Finally, the implicit semantic relations within compounds are explored. Consequently, fifteen basic associations are proposed and evaluated using the compound data collected from Wiktionary. Together, these four factors yield a typology involving sixteen possible transparency profiles, each of which is ordered according to the relative weight of its semantic features. It is believed that this typology offers a far richer conceptual space within which to further the discussion of semantic transparency as it pertains to complex constructions such as compounds.