Volume 10, Issue 1

The present study is part of a larger research project developing computational tools for large-scale corpus-based semantic analyses. One such tool represents semantic structure with vector space models (VSMs). The paper shows that this tool and the models built require a deeper understanding, especially with a view to how its results relate to cognitive theories of meaning. Although token-based VSMs are increasingly used in corpus-based cognitive semantics, we believe it is insufficiently appreciated how alternative parameter settings deal with a range of semantic issues, such as granularity of meaning, prototypicality of the domain of application and interaction with syntactic patterns. For the purpose of this paper, we will focus on only one of those issues, viz. the prototypicality of the domain of application, presenting the results of three of our case studies on the Dutch adjectives heilzaam , hoekig , hachelijk and geldig . The models presented are built from a 520MW corpus of contemporary Dutch and Flemish newspapers and by varying parameters such as window size, part-of-speech and frequency thresholds in the selection of features. The resulting VSMs are evaluated through visual analytics: although multidimensional, they can be reduced to 2D and represented in scatterplots where more similar tokens appear closer to each other. The color-coding with manual sense tags employed here makes it possible to compare the groupings provided by human annotators with those of the computational models in a way consistent with the cognitive approach to meaning and categorization.

This study seeks to develop quantified methods for the description of conceptual metaphors. The study examines the target concept of boredom in contemporary English and Russian. It aims to not only identify which metaphors are used in the two languages, but also how they are used. Using the qualitative-quantitative approach of ‘behavioural profiles’, the study examines comparable informal and personal written language in both cultures, revealing that the most frequent metaphoric conceptualisations of boredom are as death , as an enemy or as an illness . Moreover, the study also shows quantitatively that, despite shared metaphor structures across the languages, there is some difference in how they are used. Through these results, the study highlights that the description of conceptual metaphors needs to pay more attention to their use but also demonstrates the importance of quantitative tools for those usage descriptions.

Plurale-tantum nouns ( scissors , leggings , glasses ) are an example of the systematic lack of an unmarked form of a lexeme. In contrast to singulare-tantum nouns, most notably mass nouns, this systematicity is mostly restricted to individual lexemes and analogously related ones ( trousers , pants , knickers ). It remains an open question whether there is any functionally motivated nominal subclass that goes beyond smaller lexical fields. The main goal of this paper is to estimate whether such extreme proportions in the absence or presence of inflectional markers cause distinctly high concentrations of lexemes, i.e. nominal subclasses. In a first step, the probabilities for a lemma to occur with plural -s were bootstrapped with replacement. Secondly, the bootstrapped data was equally split into 10 strata at varying inflection probabilities. Homonyms and polysemes that differ in their probability to be inflected are thus disambiguated. For each stratum, type frequencies were extrapolated by means of LNRE models. The same process was repeated for reference data sets containing verbal -ed and -ing . The bootstrapped data showed that frequency and proportion of inflection reveal clusters likely to represent different polysemes or homonyms. The type frequencies of the partially disambiguated singulare-tantum nouns turned out to be clearly distinct. However, for the plurale-tantum nouns, the extrapolated type frequencies were only marginally higher than those of the other suffixes, which are not usually thought to have a tantum-like subcategory.

The aim of this paper is to work towards an account of the multiple functions of the Polish dative reflexive pronoun sobie/se in spontaneous spoken discourse. Although typically used for recipient-beneficiary marking, sobie/se fulfills a wide range of semantico-pragmatic functions, comparable to ‘ethical datives’ found across many languages. Using corpus data from spontaneous spoken registers, I analyze the potential of sobie/se to be used in situation-backgrounding functions, focusing specifically on (i) scale-lowering and normalization, (ii) generic situations and ordinariness, (iii) narrative uses. In order to explore the relations between the marker and these situation-backgrounding functions, I present a quantitative, exploratory study comparing the uses of the state/posture verb siedzieć ‘to sit’ with and without sobie/se . The results suggest that narrative and generic uses are compatible with sobie/se – yet, at the same time, restricted to specific types of genericity and narrativity. On the methodological level, the results demonstrate that quantitative empirical analyses can be successfully employed in semantico-pragmatic analyses of constructions in spoken discourse, making it possible for researchers to elaborate and falsify their qualitative results.

This paper is an exploratory corpus-based study of a set of verbs of throwing and their co-occurrence with iconic gestures. It is hypothesized that the (in)formality and the metaphoricity of verbs is related to co-speech gesture frequency, but ultimately, relatively little evidence is found for such relationships. A simpler alternative assumption, i.e. that it is mental simulations that drive co-speech gesture alone, has to be dismissed, too, because the frequency of co-speech gesture is markedly different across verbs, ranging from roughly 41 to about 60 per cent ( lob vs. fling , respectively). One possible explanation might be that, just as with co-occurrences between purely verbal signs, some verbs are conventionally associated with certain types of gestures to a higher degree. With sufficient data, we can quantify these associations, making use of statistics developed for research on collocation and collostruction.

The present study addresses the influence of language on the conceptualisation of locative events (e.g., the bottle on the table) in French, English, and Dutch which differ greatly in their habitual encoding of locative events. Dutch obligatorily expresses the disposition of the Figure ( viz . the bottle) via a Cardinal Posture Verb (CPV) like liggen ‘lie’, staan ‘stand’, or zitten ‘sit’. In French, the preferred locative marker is the neutral copula être ‘be’ which leaves dispositional nuances habitually unexpressed. English straddles the middle: while the neutral copula be is usually preferred, the CPVs are sometimes found because of diachronic reasons. Our study assesses the potential repercussions of these cross-linguistic differences on the perception of locative events via a recognition task involving eye-tracking and is run in a non-verbal and a verbal condition. Our findings show that, irrespective of the condition, recognition performance is affected by the linguistic preferences, which confirms the permanent effect of language on thought even beyond verbal contexts. The analysis of eye-movements corroborates this finding: depending on their language, the participants attend to the stimuli differently. In the verbal condition, language is used as a strategic tool to enhance memorisation and the participants’ eye-movements still reflect cross-linguistic differences.

Structural priming is a promising tool for testing similarity relations between constructions, but its applicability to larger-scale models of constructional networks is still limited. This article outlines the following two limitations of previous priming studies: first, they largely focus on priming between alternating constructions; and second, they often test the relations between instances of the same construction rather than between instances of different constructions. Three strategies are suggested for how future priming research could overcome these limitations. Concrete ideas for experimental setups are presented, and their benefits and limitations are addressed.

This paper reviews the so-called Lexical Integrity Principle, resting on the assumption that morphology and syntax are distinct components of grammar. In the forty-odd years since its original formulation, this principle has repeatedly come under fire. Phrasal compounds ([[ Lexical Integrity ] NP Principle ] N being an example!) are often adduced as counterevidence, but I here argue that phrases generally don’t appear inside compounds and that the principle therefore cannot be so easily discarded. The claim that parts of words cannot be syntactically manipulated has remained relatively unchallenged, which is another reason to uphold some aspects of Lexical Integrity. The separability of particle verbs, though, presents a well-known potential problem. I address recent voices that particle verbs, despite neuroscientific evidence of their lexical status, are not words, maintaining they can be items with word status, given for example their occurrence in the [V the N taboo-word out of NP] construction. A constructionist approach to alternation phenomena offers a solution to the separability issue, which consists in having schematic particle verb constructions whose grammatical status (and not just word order) is underspecified. As words, particle verbs stay together; as phrases, their parts can separate. To salvage the Lexical (or, better, Morphological) Integrity of words, this paper proposes a principle –a construction of sorts – that is a generalization emerging from how we use words.

We take as our point of departure the usage-based assumption that grammar emerges from language use and briefly review the claims regarding the storage of linguistic experiences and the gradual nature of generalization. We argue that in addition to studying the long-term effects of distributional evidence in the input, the usage-based paradigm should take up related research in pragmatics and cognitive linguistics with a focus on the “online” properties of the situation. By putting interaction center-stage, we can study the development of children’s emerging conversational skills, but also draw on the full richness of the situation, which provides further cues to language learning.

The usage-based approach to first language acquisition has become highly influential in research on first language acquisition. In recent research, it has also been adapted to account for language contact phenomena in multilingual first language acquisition, i.e. in situations in which children acquire two or more languages simultaneously. In this paper, we give a brief overview over these developments, summarize some first major results of this research program, and discuss remaining open questions and challenges. In particular, we review a number of studies that have used the traceback method, previously established in research on monolingual acquisition, to identify recurrent patterns in the early language of multilingual children, especially in their code-mixing, i.e. the use of more than one language in one utterance. We argue that the usage-based approach can help to shed light on some of the open questions in research in multilingual acquisition, especially as it is highly compatible with other prominent concepts in current research on multilingualism, and that it provides us with the methodological toolkit that is needed to investigate language contact phenomena in a data-driven way.

Humans are an incredibly creative species – our minds have evolved to a degree that has enabled us to think original thoughts and come up with novel solutions to a great number of problems. One domain of human cognition that has recently received considerable attention is linguistic creativity. The present contribution will take a closer look at how Construction Grammar can account for various types of verbal creativity. In addition to this, it will also explore the implications of creative utterances for Construction Grammar as a mental theory of language.