The role of semantics, pre-emption and skew in linguistic distributions: the case of the un-construction.
We use the Google Ngram database, Nail File a corpus of 5,195,769 digitized books containing ~4% of all books ever published, to test three ideas that are hypothesized to account for linguistic generalizations: verbal semantics, pre-emption and skew.Using 828,813 tokens of un-forms as a test case for these mechanisms, we found verbal semantics was