AbstrAct This study examines the effects of syntax and part of speech on the semantic variation o... more AbstrAct This study examines the effects of syntax and part of speech on the semantic variation of the lexeme hassle, in British and American English. The study aims to show how quantitative techniques are useful in the description of semantic structure and its variation. ...
Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic pheno... more Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. Ideally, research in cognitive linguistics should be based on authentic language use, its results should be replicable, and its claims falsifiable. Consequently, more and more studies now turn to corpora as a source of data. While corpus-based methodologies have increased in sophistication, the use of corpus data is also associated with a number of unresolved problems. The study of cognition through off-line linguistic data is, arguably, indirect, even if such data fulfils desirable qualities such as being natural, representative and plentiful. Several topics in this context stand out as particularly pressing issues. This discussion note addresses (1) converging evidence from corpora and experimentation, (2) whether corpora mirror psychological reality, (3) the theoretical value of corpus linguistic studies of ‘alternations’, (4) the relation of corpus...
This study examines the use of exploratory multivariate statistics to explain the semantic compos... more This study examines the use of exploratory multivariate statistics to explain the semantic compositionality of grammatical constructions. Such an approach moves away from methods that grew out of a modular understanding of linguistic structure by treating the various linguistic and ...
Cognitive Foundations of Language Structure and Use, 2014
This volume seeks to advance and popularise the use of corpus-driven quantitative methods in the ... more This volume seeks to advance and popularise the use of corpus-driven quantitative methods in the study of semantics. The first part presents state-of-the-art research in polysemy and synonymy from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. The second part presents and explains in a didactic manner each of the statistical techniques used in the first part of the volume. A handbook both for linguists working with statistics in corpus research and for linguists in the fields of polysemy and synonymy.
This study examines the possibility of using corpus-driven quantitative techniques to describe em... more This study examines the possibility of using corpus-driven quantitative techniques to describe emotion concepts. It examines the concept of ANXIETY in American English, British English, Japanese and Swedish. In Cognitive Linguistics, the description of emotion concepts, based on lexical semantics, is done with the analytical framework of the Idealised Cognitive Model and the Theory of Conceptual Metaphors. Despite the descriptive power of this approach, it does not produce falsifiable results and does not account for social variation. Multifactorial Usage-Feature Analysis takes the theory and analytical assumptions of this tradition and provides a means for empirically testing proposed conceptual structures as well as interpreting them relative to social-cultural variation. The case study focuses on four conceptual metaphors associated with the concept of anxiety and a range of causes of the emotion state. It examines the relationship between the different causes and the metaphors r...
The idea of 'corpus semantics', just like the possibility of 'quantifying meaning', is not self-e... more The idea of 'corpus semantics', just like the possibility of 'quantifying meaning', is not self-evident. This introduction to the field of corpus-driven Cognitive Semantics attempts to explain how semantic analysis can, and indeed, should turn to corpus methods. It also explains why quantitative techniques are needed in this endeavour. How can we identify and explain the semantic structuring of language empirically? The usage-based approaches of post-Generativist and post-Structuralist linguistics avoid positing analytical constructs that form the basis of language structure. However, without a structurally independent langue or an 'ideal' speaker's competence, against what predictive model can we test our hypotheses or attempt to falsify our claims about that structure? Without such analytical constructs, linguistic research, whether Functional or Cognitive, must adopt an inductive, sample-based, empirical methodology. To these ends, experimental techniques for the analysis of semantics have been developed, yet usage-based methods remain poorly represented within the field. Moreover, Cognitive Linguistics, a principal proponent of the Usagebased Model, recognises no internal language modules, such as syntax, lexis, or prosody. From a non-modular perspective, the study of meaning must account for the integration of all these components of language structure and do so simultaneously in a functionally and cognitively plausible manner. Corpusdriven methods, and multivariate statistics more specifically, are perfectly suited for such a task. There are, therefore, two fundamental tasks ahead of us. Firstly, we must adopt inductive research methods. Whether elicited through experimentation,
Cognitive Linguistics has recently brought metonymy and part-whole referencing to the fore of res... more Cognitive Linguistics has recently brought metonymy and part-whole referencing to the fore of research. Although we accept the work of Lakoff (1987) on conceptual metonymy and Langacker (2000) on the processing of part-whole references, their apparatuses do not adequately ...
This study takes the discussion on concept structure in metonymy presented by Truszczyńska (2003)... more This study takes the discussion on concept structure in metonymy presented by Truszczyńska (2003) as a starting point and raises further questions on its linguistic structure and cognitive processing. Although we agree with Truszczyńska that the fundamental issues for the study of conceptual metonymy are concept delimitation and concept structure, we argue that she overlooks some important insights into these issues. We focus especially on the interaction of metaphor and metonymy and Langacker's (1987) cognitive grammar and its proposals for the structuring and processing of metonymic language. We propose a methodology for concept delimitation and an alternative explanation for concept structuring. These are applied in a small case study of metonymic expressions for 'sorry' and 'forgive' in English. The discussion concludes that although better concept delimitation is an important step for the rigorous treatment of metonymic relations, current cognitive approaches to metonymy still do not offer sufficient means for explaining the role of context dependent signification. Within the theoretical school commonly referred to as cognitive linguistics, metonymic relations are believed to be more than a literary device and indeed more than a linguistic structure. Instead, it is believed that perceived contiguity between concepts results in complex categories made up of sub-concepts. In this view, metonymy is the linguistic result of the cognitive ability to represent the broader complex concept (the whole) by referring to a sub-concept (the part). This is argued to explain entrenched or "conventionalised" linguistic structures, referred to as 'conceptual metonymy', but it is also perhaps a cognitive process and linguistic structure that one employs in creative metonymy. However, this relatively simple statement is rife with assumptions and theoretical proposals difficult to verify. Recently, Truszczyńska (2003) has investigated some of these assumptions and proposals. For the most part, we agree with Truszczyńska's treatment, but we raise questions she fails to broach and consider some methodological ramifications of the theoretical issues at hand.
Correspondence analysis is a multivariate exploratory space reduction technique for categorical d... more Correspondence analysis is a multivariate exploratory space reduction technique for categorical data analysis. Although certainly true, such a description tells the linguist little. Equally true, but perhaps more helpful, is to describe correspondence analysis as an exploratory technique that reveals frequency-based associations in corpus data. Most importantly, perhaps, the technique visualises these associations to facilitate their identification. Linguists often wish to find relations between given linguistic forms, between their meanings and in what situations those forms and meanings are used. Correspondence analysis is especially designed for identifying such usage patterning. The visualisation of the relations takes the form of configuration biplots, or maps, which depict degrees of correlation and variation through the relative proximity of data points (which represent linguistic usage features and / or the actual examples of use). This paper describes how to perform corresp...
Developing empirical methods for the description of emotion concepts that are sensitive to social... more Developing empirical methods for the description of emotion concepts that are sensitive to social variation represents an important goal in both linguistics and psychology. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using Multivariate Usage-Feature Analysis (also termed Profile-Based Analysis) as a means for mapping such social-conceptual structure. The case study examines anger in American and British English with data from personal on-line diaries. Three underlying conceptual structures are identified, each determined relative to types of causes and responses associated with the anger event. The study employs multiple correspondence analysis to identify these patterns.
Cognitive Linguistics has recently brought metonymy and part-whole referencing to the fore of res... more Cognitive Linguistics has recently brought metonymy and part-whole referencing to the fore of research. Although we accept the work of Lakoff (1987) on conceptual metonymy and Langacker (2000) on the processing of part-whole references, their apparatuses do not adequately ...
This study examines the concept of HOME in 19C and 20C American culture. It draws on the theoreti... more This study examines the concept of HOME in 19C and 20C American culture. It draws on the theoretical assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics (Lakoff 1987, Langacker 1987), and seeks to capture the cultural patterns of this concept by examining language structure. Previous approaches in this line of research lack a means for result verification or hypothesis falsification. In response to this important shortcoming, we employ quantitative corpus-driven methods. Adapting these methods to the study of abstract concepts allows a means for verifying results but also for more accurate representation of variation inherent in society and cultural system.
The analysis of evaluation in text poses significant methodological challenges, which mainly aris... more The analysis of evaluation in text poses significant methodological challenges, which mainly arise from the fact that: a) evaluative meanings can be expressed through an open-ended range of lexico-grammatical resources; b) they can span multiple words; c) context and co-text play a key role in determining the evaluative meaning of words or phrases; d) the interpretation of evaluation in text depends on the reader’s/analyst’s reading position and is, therefore, necessarily subjective. These complexities have so far seriously limited the development of corpus-driven description of this phenomenon. This study addresses these methodological issues through the application of multivariate usage-feature / profile-based analysis (Geeraerts et al., 1994; Gries, 2003). This method bridges quantitative and qualitative perspectives and has been successfully applied to the description of various semantic and morphosyntactic phe- nomena. The method relies on the use of manual annotation software ...
Can contemporary empirical linguistic techniques be applied to literary analysis? This study take... more Can contemporary empirical linguistic techniques be applied to literary analysis? This study takes the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and applies corpus-driven multivariate analysis to the study of narratorial commentary. The study shows that new quantified techniques, when combined with the theoretical tenets of Cognitive Linguistics, can offer insights into poetics research. More specifically, two theoretical constructs of Cognitive Linguistics, construal and encyclopaedic semantics, make possible the application of multivariate statistics to the study of narratorial stylistics of different authors. The case study focuses on four English novels, two from the 19 century and two from the turn of the 20 century. The novels, G. Eliot’s Silas Marner, J. Austen’s Northanger Abbey, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and E. M. Forster’s Howards End, are chosen because they all have overt extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators who use narratorial commentary in an interesting way but...
According to the usage-based model of language propounded by Cognitive Linguistics, extralinguist... more According to the usage-based model of language propounded by Cognitive Linguistics, extralinguistic context is integral to language structure. Despite this, it is often sidelined in Cognitive Linguistic research. Polysemy represents a foundational line of research in Cognitive Linguistics, and this study demonstrates why extralinguistic concerns should be integrated into polysemy analysis. Following Gries (2006) and Glynn (2009), the analysis takes a corpus-driven multifactorial approach to semasiological structure. It applies this method to the lexeme annoy in British and American English. The data are taken from a non-commercial corpus consisting of personal on-line diaries and are analysed for a range of formal and semantic features. The statistical exploration of the results, using Multiple Correspondence Analysis, identifies three basic senses of the terms as clusters of usage features. One of these three senses is found to be canonical with the other two senses less central to...
AbstrAct This study examines the effects of syntax and part of speech on the semantic variation o... more AbstrAct This study examines the effects of syntax and part of speech on the semantic variation of the lexeme hassle, in British and American English. The study aims to show how quantitative techniques are useful in the description of semantic structure and its variation. ...
Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic pheno... more Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. Ideally, research in cognitive linguistics should be based on authentic language use, its results should be replicable, and its claims falsifiable. Consequently, more and more studies now turn to corpora as a source of data. While corpus-based methodologies have increased in sophistication, the use of corpus data is also associated with a number of unresolved problems. The study of cognition through off-line linguistic data is, arguably, indirect, even if such data fulfils desirable qualities such as being natural, representative and plentiful. Several topics in this context stand out as particularly pressing issues. This discussion note addresses (1) converging evidence from corpora and experimentation, (2) whether corpora mirror psychological reality, (3) the theoretical value of corpus linguistic studies of ‘alternations’, (4) the relation of corpus...
This study examines the use of exploratory multivariate statistics to explain the semantic compos... more This study examines the use of exploratory multivariate statistics to explain the semantic compositionality of grammatical constructions. Such an approach moves away from methods that grew out of a modular understanding of linguistic structure by treating the various linguistic and ...
Cognitive Foundations of Language Structure and Use, 2014
This volume seeks to advance and popularise the use of corpus-driven quantitative methods in the ... more This volume seeks to advance and popularise the use of corpus-driven quantitative methods in the study of semantics. The first part presents state-of-the-art research in polysemy and synonymy from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. The second part presents and explains in a didactic manner each of the statistical techniques used in the first part of the volume. A handbook both for linguists working with statistics in corpus research and for linguists in the fields of polysemy and synonymy.
This study examines the possibility of using corpus-driven quantitative techniques to describe em... more This study examines the possibility of using corpus-driven quantitative techniques to describe emotion concepts. It examines the concept of ANXIETY in American English, British English, Japanese and Swedish. In Cognitive Linguistics, the description of emotion concepts, based on lexical semantics, is done with the analytical framework of the Idealised Cognitive Model and the Theory of Conceptual Metaphors. Despite the descriptive power of this approach, it does not produce falsifiable results and does not account for social variation. Multifactorial Usage-Feature Analysis takes the theory and analytical assumptions of this tradition and provides a means for empirically testing proposed conceptual structures as well as interpreting them relative to social-cultural variation. The case study focuses on four conceptual metaphors associated with the concept of anxiety and a range of causes of the emotion state. It examines the relationship between the different causes and the metaphors r...
The idea of 'corpus semantics', just like the possibility of 'quantifying meaning', is not self-e... more The idea of 'corpus semantics', just like the possibility of 'quantifying meaning', is not self-evident. This introduction to the field of corpus-driven Cognitive Semantics attempts to explain how semantic analysis can, and indeed, should turn to corpus methods. It also explains why quantitative techniques are needed in this endeavour. How can we identify and explain the semantic structuring of language empirically? The usage-based approaches of post-Generativist and post-Structuralist linguistics avoid positing analytical constructs that form the basis of language structure. However, without a structurally independent langue or an 'ideal' speaker's competence, against what predictive model can we test our hypotheses or attempt to falsify our claims about that structure? Without such analytical constructs, linguistic research, whether Functional or Cognitive, must adopt an inductive, sample-based, empirical methodology. To these ends, experimental techniques for the analysis of semantics have been developed, yet usage-based methods remain poorly represented within the field. Moreover, Cognitive Linguistics, a principal proponent of the Usagebased Model, recognises no internal language modules, such as syntax, lexis, or prosody. From a non-modular perspective, the study of meaning must account for the integration of all these components of language structure and do so simultaneously in a functionally and cognitively plausible manner. Corpusdriven methods, and multivariate statistics more specifically, are perfectly suited for such a task. There are, therefore, two fundamental tasks ahead of us. Firstly, we must adopt inductive research methods. Whether elicited through experimentation,
Cognitive Linguistics has recently brought metonymy and part-whole referencing to the fore of res... more Cognitive Linguistics has recently brought metonymy and part-whole referencing to the fore of research. Although we accept the work of Lakoff (1987) on conceptual metonymy and Langacker (2000) on the processing of part-whole references, their apparatuses do not adequately ...
This study takes the discussion on concept structure in metonymy presented by Truszczyńska (2003)... more This study takes the discussion on concept structure in metonymy presented by Truszczyńska (2003) as a starting point and raises further questions on its linguistic structure and cognitive processing. Although we agree with Truszczyńska that the fundamental issues for the study of conceptual metonymy are concept delimitation and concept structure, we argue that she overlooks some important insights into these issues. We focus especially on the interaction of metaphor and metonymy and Langacker's (1987) cognitive grammar and its proposals for the structuring and processing of metonymic language. We propose a methodology for concept delimitation and an alternative explanation for concept structuring. These are applied in a small case study of metonymic expressions for 'sorry' and 'forgive' in English. The discussion concludes that although better concept delimitation is an important step for the rigorous treatment of metonymic relations, current cognitive approaches to metonymy still do not offer sufficient means for explaining the role of context dependent signification. Within the theoretical school commonly referred to as cognitive linguistics, metonymic relations are believed to be more than a literary device and indeed more than a linguistic structure. Instead, it is believed that perceived contiguity between concepts results in complex categories made up of sub-concepts. In this view, metonymy is the linguistic result of the cognitive ability to represent the broader complex concept (the whole) by referring to a sub-concept (the part). This is argued to explain entrenched or "conventionalised" linguistic structures, referred to as 'conceptual metonymy', but it is also perhaps a cognitive process and linguistic structure that one employs in creative metonymy. However, this relatively simple statement is rife with assumptions and theoretical proposals difficult to verify. Recently, Truszczyńska (2003) has investigated some of these assumptions and proposals. For the most part, we agree with Truszczyńska's treatment, but we raise questions she fails to broach and consider some methodological ramifications of the theoretical issues at hand.
Correspondence analysis is a multivariate exploratory space reduction technique for categorical d... more Correspondence analysis is a multivariate exploratory space reduction technique for categorical data analysis. Although certainly true, such a description tells the linguist little. Equally true, but perhaps more helpful, is to describe correspondence analysis as an exploratory technique that reveals frequency-based associations in corpus data. Most importantly, perhaps, the technique visualises these associations to facilitate their identification. Linguists often wish to find relations between given linguistic forms, between their meanings and in what situations those forms and meanings are used. Correspondence analysis is especially designed for identifying such usage patterning. The visualisation of the relations takes the form of configuration biplots, or maps, which depict degrees of correlation and variation through the relative proximity of data points (which represent linguistic usage features and / or the actual examples of use). This paper describes how to perform corresp...
Developing empirical methods for the description of emotion concepts that are sensitive to social... more Developing empirical methods for the description of emotion concepts that are sensitive to social variation represents an important goal in both linguistics and psychology. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using Multivariate Usage-Feature Analysis (also termed Profile-Based Analysis) as a means for mapping such social-conceptual structure. The case study examines anger in American and British English with data from personal on-line diaries. Three underlying conceptual structures are identified, each determined relative to types of causes and responses associated with the anger event. The study employs multiple correspondence analysis to identify these patterns.
Cognitive Linguistics has recently brought metonymy and part-whole referencing to the fore of res... more Cognitive Linguistics has recently brought metonymy and part-whole referencing to the fore of research. Although we accept the work of Lakoff (1987) on conceptual metonymy and Langacker (2000) on the processing of part-whole references, their apparatuses do not adequately ...
This study examines the concept of HOME in 19C and 20C American culture. It draws on the theoreti... more This study examines the concept of HOME in 19C and 20C American culture. It draws on the theoretical assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics (Lakoff 1987, Langacker 1987), and seeks to capture the cultural patterns of this concept by examining language structure. Previous approaches in this line of research lack a means for result verification or hypothesis falsification. In response to this important shortcoming, we employ quantitative corpus-driven methods. Adapting these methods to the study of abstract concepts allows a means for verifying results but also for more accurate representation of variation inherent in society and cultural system.
The analysis of evaluation in text poses significant methodological challenges, which mainly aris... more The analysis of evaluation in text poses significant methodological challenges, which mainly arise from the fact that: a) evaluative meanings can be expressed through an open-ended range of lexico-grammatical resources; b) they can span multiple words; c) context and co-text play a key role in determining the evaluative meaning of words or phrases; d) the interpretation of evaluation in text depends on the reader’s/analyst’s reading position and is, therefore, necessarily subjective. These complexities have so far seriously limited the development of corpus-driven description of this phenomenon. This study addresses these methodological issues through the application of multivariate usage-feature / profile-based analysis (Geeraerts et al., 1994; Gries, 2003). This method bridges quantitative and qualitative perspectives and has been successfully applied to the description of various semantic and morphosyntactic phe- nomena. The method relies on the use of manual annotation software ...
Can contemporary empirical linguistic techniques be applied to literary analysis? This study take... more Can contemporary empirical linguistic techniques be applied to literary analysis? This study takes the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics and applies corpus-driven multivariate analysis to the study of narratorial commentary. The study shows that new quantified techniques, when combined with the theoretical tenets of Cognitive Linguistics, can offer insights into poetics research. More specifically, two theoretical constructs of Cognitive Linguistics, construal and encyclopaedic semantics, make possible the application of multivariate statistics to the study of narratorial stylistics of different authors. The case study focuses on four English novels, two from the 19 century and two from the turn of the 20 century. The novels, G. Eliot’s Silas Marner, J. Austen’s Northanger Abbey, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and E. M. Forster’s Howards End, are chosen because they all have overt extradiegetic heterodiegetic narrators who use narratorial commentary in an interesting way but...
According to the usage-based model of language propounded by Cognitive Linguistics, extralinguist... more According to the usage-based model of language propounded by Cognitive Linguistics, extralinguistic context is integral to language structure. Despite this, it is often sidelined in Cognitive Linguistic research. Polysemy represents a foundational line of research in Cognitive Linguistics, and this study demonstrates why extralinguistic concerns should be integrated into polysemy analysis. Following Gries (2006) and Glynn (2009), the analysis takes a corpus-driven multifactorial approach to semasiological structure. It applies this method to the lexeme annoy in British and American English. The data are taken from a non-commercial corpus consisting of personal on-line diaries and are analysed for a range of formal and semantic features. The statistical exploration of the results, using Multiple Correspondence Analysis, identifies three basic senses of the terms as clusters of usage features. One of these three senses is found to be canonical with the other two senses less central to...
Uploads
Papers by Dylan Glynn