Quantifying semantic effects. The impact of lexical collocations on the inflectional variation of Dutch attributive adjectives

This paper wants to verify to what extent semantic effects contribute to the alternation between inflected and uninflected adjectives in a definite NP with a singular neuter head noun as observed in the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands. Existing accounts invoke the non-compositional semantics of the adjective-noun combination to interpret this case of inflectional variation, generally using highly idiomatic examples. We will argue for a combinatorial operationalisation of the semantic effect, based on lexical collocations. The influence of lexical collocations on the inflectional alternation will be measured by means of the log-likelihood test. Finally, the actual impact of lexical collocations on the inflectional alternation will be quantified integrating the semantic parameter together with other potential explanatory factors in a logistic regression analysis.