Exploring semantic differences between the Indonesian prefixes PE- and PEN- using a vector space model

Indonesian has two prefixes, and , that are similar in form and meaning, but are probably not allomorphs. In this study, we applied a distributional vector space model to clarify whether these prefixes have discriminable semantics. Comparisons of pairs of words within and across morphologically defi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory 2022-10, Vol.18 (3), p.573-598
Main Authors: Denistia, Karlina, Shafaei-Bajestan, Elnaz, Baayen, R. Harald
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
cosine similarity
distributional semantics
Indonesian
Morphemes
Morphology
Prefixes
Semantics
similarity judgements
Words
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Summary:Indonesian has two prefixes, and , that are similar in form and meaning, but are probably not allomorphs. In this study, we applied a distributional vector space model to clarify whether these prefixes have discriminable semantics. Comparisons of pairs of words within and across morphologically defined sets of words revealed that cosine similarities of pairs consisting of a word with and a word with were reduced compared to pairs of only words, or of only words. Furthermore, nouns with were more similar to their base words than was the case for words with . The specialized use of for words denoting agents, and the specialized use of for denoting instruments, was also visible in the semantic vector space. These differences in the semantics of and thus provide further quantitative support for the independent status of as opposed to
ISSN:1613-7027
1613-7035
DOI:10.1515/cllt-2020-0023