How context determines meaning
-
Patrick Hanks✝
Abstract
It is an extraordinary fact that, although most speakers and writers of the English language (or, we may presume, any other language) believe that they are capable of expressing any meaning that they want to with considerable precision, the behaviour of the words they use is highly variable, with much variation in phraseology as well as subtle semantic distinctions. Even more extraordinary is the fact that only some of the logically predictable variants of any given phrase are accepted by native speakers as idiomatic.
This chapter shows how meanings are associated with phraseological norms rather than with words in isolation. It also illustrates the phenomenon of alternation among phraseological norms and shows how phraseological norms are not merely conformed to, but also exploited creatively in ordinary language use. Underlying this paper is the proposition that words in isolation do not have a determinable meaning per se. Instead they have meaning potential, different facets of which are activated in different contexts.
By detailed corpus pattern analysis of the verb blow, which typically expresses the causation of movement, we explore the relationship between core meaning and a rich set of patterns of idiomatic phraseology – phrasal verbs, idioms, and proverbs.
Abstract
It is an extraordinary fact that, although most speakers and writers of the English language (or, we may presume, any other language) believe that they are capable of expressing any meaning that they want to with considerable precision, the behaviour of the words they use is highly variable, with much variation in phraseology as well as subtle semantic distinctions. Even more extraordinary is the fact that only some of the logically predictable variants of any given phrase are accepted by native speakers as idiomatic.
This chapter shows how meanings are associated with phraseological norms rather than with words in isolation. It also illustrates the phenomenon of alternation among phraseological norms and shows how phraseological norms are not merely conformed to, but also exploited creatively in ordinary language use. Underlying this paper is the proposition that words in isolation do not have a determinable meaning per se. Instead they have meaning potential, different facets of which are activated in different contexts.
By detailed corpus pattern analysis of the verb blow, which typically expresses the causation of movement, we explore the relationship between core meaning and a rich set of patterns of idiomatic phraseology – phrasal verbs, idioms, and proverbs.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Introduction 1
- Monocollocable words 9
- Translation asymmetries of multiword expressions in machine translation 23
- German constructional phrasemes and their Russian counterparts 43
- Computational phraseology and translation studies 65
- Computational extraction of formulaic sequences from corpora 83
- Computational phraseology discovery in corpora with the mwetoolkit 111
- Multiword expressions in comparable corpora 135
- Collecting collocations from general and specialised corpora 151
- What matters more: The size of the corpora or their quality? 177
- Statistical significance for measures of collocation strength 189
- Verbal collocations and pronominalisation 207
- Empirical variability of Italian multiword expressions as a useful feature for their categorisation 225
- Too big to fail but big enough to pay for their mistakes 247
- Multi-word patterns and networks 273
- How context determines meaning 297
- Detecting semantic difference 311
- Index 325
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Foreword vii
- Introduction 1
- Monocollocable words 9
- Translation asymmetries of multiword expressions in machine translation 23
- German constructional phrasemes and their Russian counterparts 43
- Computational phraseology and translation studies 65
- Computational extraction of formulaic sequences from corpora 83
- Computational phraseology discovery in corpora with the mwetoolkit 111
- Multiword expressions in comparable corpora 135
- Collecting collocations from general and specialised corpora 151
- What matters more: The size of the corpora or their quality? 177
- Statistical significance for measures of collocation strength 189
- Verbal collocations and pronominalisation 207
- Empirical variability of Italian multiword expressions as a useful feature for their categorisation 225
- Too big to fail but big enough to pay for their mistakes 247
- Multi-word patterns and networks 273
- How context determines meaning 297
- Detecting semantic difference 311
- Index 325
