Semantic relations in Spanish suffixation

Abstract

This paper studies the relationships between morphological meanings in suffixation. The establishment of these relationships can often be influenced by a certain degree of subjectivity of the researcher, in order to avoid this, the co-occurrence of meanings in derivatives is taken as an evidence of the existence of a relation and, as it occurs between meanings, as an evidence of a semantic relation. For the classification of morphological meanings, a comparative analysis of several manuals on morphology of Spanish has been carried out. From this analysis, a taxonomic classification of 99 meanings was obtained. From this classification, 7300 derivatives created by 83 productive affixes were labeled through lexicographical sources. Once these derivatives were semantically labeled, a network of co-occurrences was built; their typology, structure and communities were analyzed. This analysis has important consequences for understanding the multifunctionality or afixal polysemy, the relationships between meanings, the uncertainty of the formations and the probabilistic forces that act in the formation of words.