A Reconsideration of Asymmetries of Bracketing Paradoxes in English Derivation: a Corpus-based Approach

In this paper, I discuss some asymmetries of bracketing paradoxes from a corpus-based perspective. Through a critical examination of previous analyses of bracketing paradoxes, it is demonstrated that the cases of apparent asymmetries of bracketing paradoxes are consistently accounted for when combined with the frequency-based parsability in morphological processing. Based on the relative frequency, this paper argues that bracketing paradoxes are well-atttested when their immediate bases are frequent and productive enough to be accessed as a unit and stored as such in memory. This is an extension of Hay 2002 which conducted a comprehensive survey of differential frequency effects in suffix pairs. A frequency-based approach to bracketing paradoxes adopted in this paper can be a challenge to the conventional formal theory by assuming a major role of language use and have the potential to significantly advance our understanding of the asymmetries observed in the real language world.