In the realm of the philosophy of sounds and auditory experience there is an ongoing discussion concerned with the nature of sounds. One of the contestant views within this ontology of sound is that of the Property View, which holds that sounds are properties of the sounding objects. A way of developing this view is through the idea of dispositionalism, namely, by sustaining the theory according to which sounds are dispositional properties (Pasnau 1999; Kulvicki 2008; Roberts 2017). That portrayal, however, is not sufficient, as it has not inquired the metaphysical debates about dispositions beyond the conditional analysis. In this paper, I try to advance this view by including recent developments (for instance Bird 2007; Vetter 2015) in the field of dispositionalism and I analyse whether this new version can sort out known and new objections to Property View.
The paper deals with word forms occurring in the SYN corpus (1.2 billion words) only once, twice or three times, the so-called hapax legomena, which provide a basis for the study of potentiality in language. As the material was very large, only 20 samples were chosen, each containing 3 000 forms, i. e. 60 000 forms overall. Approximately 50 % of word forms were various mistakes, especially typing errors, or words from other languages. Therefore only the remaining 30 000 word forms were selected as the basis for this study. The analysis showed that the most relevant suffixes for hapax legomena are -ovský (e. g. jimmyreedovský), -ák (e. g. medvěďák), -ista (e. g. havlista), -ing/-ink (e. g. gardening, dancink), -ovitý (e. g. kladivovitý), type po vojensku, diminutives derived from abstracts (e.g. minulůstka) and names of women professions (e. g. meduprodavačka). Moreover, compound words with the first parts dlouho- (e. g. dlouhorožec), gala- (e. g. galamenu), jino- (e. g. jinomluva), kino- (e. g. kinofajnšmekr), mega- (e. g. megakatastrofa), nízko- (e. g. nízkohlučný), polo- (e. g. poločitelný), video- (e. g. videokomentář) were typical for new words.