Alves, Diego; Fischer, Stefan; Teich, Elke
Syntagmatic Productivity of MWEs in Scientific English
Kr. Ojha, Atul; Giouli, Voula; Barbu Mititelu, Verginica; Constant, Mathieu; Korvel, Gražina; Seza Doğruöz, A.; Rademaker, Alexandre (Ed.): Proceedings of the 21st Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2025), Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1-6, Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A., 2025, ISBN 979-8-89176-243-5.
This paper presents an analysis of the syntagmatic productivity (SynProd) of different classes of multiword expressions (MWEs) in English scientific writing over time (mid 17th to 20th c.). SynProd refers to the variability of the syntagmatic context in which a word or other kind of linguistic unit is used. To measure SynProd, we use entropy. The study reveals that, similar to single-token units of various parts of speech, MWEs exhibit an increasing trend in syntagmatic productivity over time, particularly after the mid-19th century. Furthermore, when compared to similar parts of speech (PoS), MWEs show a more pronounced increase in SynProd over time.