Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

English allows for both compounds (e.g., London-made) and phrasal paraphrases (e.g., made in London). While these constructions have roughly the same truth-conditional meaning, we hypothesize that the compound allows less freedom to express the nature of the semantic relationship between the participle and the pre-participle nominal. We thus predict that the pre-participle slot is more constrained than the equivalent position in the phrasal construction. We test this prediction in a large corpus by measuring the entropy of corresponding nominal slots, conditional on the participle used. That is, we compare the entropy of α in compound construction slots like “α-[V]ed” to the entropy of α in phrasal constructions like “[V]ed by α” for a given verb V. As predicted, there is significantly lower entropy in the compound construction than in the phrasal construction. We consider how these predictions follow from more general grammatical properties and processing factors.