Participle-Prepended Nominals Have Lower Entropy Than Nominals Appended After the Participle
This addresses a linguistic problem for researchers in syntax and semantics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories of grammatical constraints.
The study tackled the problem of comparing entropy in English compound and phrasal constructions, finding that compounds like 'London-made' have significantly lower entropy than phrasal paraphrases like 'made in London' when measuring the nominal slots conditional on the participle.
English allows for both compounds (e.g., London-made) and phrasal paraphrases (e.g., made in London). While these constructions have roughly the same truth-conditional meaning, we hypothesize that the compound allows less freedom to express the nature of the semantic relationship between the participle and the pre-participle nominal. We thus predict that the pre-participle slot is more constrained than the equivalent position in the phrasal construction. We test this prediction in a large corpus by measuring the entropy of corresponding nominal slots, conditional on the participle used. That is, we compare the entropy of $α$ in compound construction slots like $α$-[V]ed to the entropy of $α$ in phrasal constructions like [V]ed by $α$ for a given verb V. As predicted, there is significantly lower entropy in the compound construction than in the phrasal construction. We consider how these predictions follow from more general grammatical properties and processing factors.