Complex words in complex words

Constituents of complex words can themselves be complex words. Some kinds o f complex constituents appear more often than others. This study presents a quantitative investigation of this phenomenon. We show that many kinds of base words are significantly overrepresented or underrepresented. This hold s not only for constituents of derived words, but also for constituents of compounds. We furthermore show that the degree of over-representation or un derrepresentation correlates with word frequency, word length, and degree o f productivity. We offer a functional explanation of this correlation in te rms of processing and storage in the mental lexicon.