Distributional Structure

2.3 Meaning as a function of distribution

1. Where does simple distributional regularity give out, according to Harris?
   (a) Morphemes differ in degree of independence (-hood vs -ness); (b) not every member of one class occurs with every member of another (not every adjective with every noun); (c) regularities hold only in narrow domains, the neighbouring phonemes or the sentence.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2.3, p. 155
2. At those points, what do people usually say, and what does Harris answer?
   That meaning alone decides (hood fits only certain nouns, adjectives make sense with doctor, sentences are strung along by meaning). Harris: choices are made by meaning, but they build a stock of combinations that shapes later choices, for “language is not merely a bag of words but a tool with particular properties which have been fashioned in the course of its use.”
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2.3, pp. 155–156
3. How is the degree of independence of a morpheme measured distributionally?
   By the number of different morphemes it occurs with and how widely they are spread over classes and subclasses: -hood attaches to very few predecessors, -ness to many. Members of a distributional class share an element of meaning, stronger the more distributional characteristics the class has.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2.3, p. 156
4. State Harris’s distributional hypothesis about meaning.
   If A and B are more different in meaning than A and C, their distributions will often be more different too: difference of meaning correlates with difference of distribution.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2.3, p. 156
5. What do oculist, eye-doctor and lawyer illustrate?
   Oculist and eye-doctor occur in almost the same environments, except sentences containing both (“An oculist is just an eye-doctor under a fancier name”). Many environments of oculist (“I’ve had my eyes examined by the same oculist for twenty years”) rarely take lawyer. What matters is the relative frequency of environments, not truth.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2.3, pp. 156–157
6. How does Harris classify relations between two elements A and B by their environments?

   environments	relation
   same, except A’s always contain some X that B’s never do	complementary alternants (knife/knive-)
   identical throughout	free variants
   different in a regular way	e.g. dialectal (ain’t/am not)
   almost identical, except sentences containing both	synonyms (oculist/eye-doctor)
   some shared, some not	different meanings, by the amount of difference
   never the same	different grammatical classes

   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2.3, p. 157
7. Can a word’s meaning be fully defined by its co-occurrents, according to Harris?
   No: we can’t list all co-occurrents (rare selections are unobservable) or define meaning fully from them, but we can roughly measure differences in selection between elements and so say something about differences in meaning.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2.3, p. 157
8. What is the fullest environmental unit for distributional investigation?
   A consecutive discourse of one or more persons: there are regularities between parts of neighbouring sentences (e.g. pronouns), which don’t extend from one discourse to another.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2.3, pp. 157–158