Individual differences in word senses

IF 1.8 1区 文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS
Rachel E. Ramsey
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引用次数: 2

Abstract

Abstract Individual differences and polysemy have rich literatures in cognitive linguistics, but little is said about the prospect of individual differences in polysemy. This article reports an investigation that sought to establish whether people vary in the senses of a polysemous word that they find meaningful, and to develop a novel methodology to study polysemy. The methodology combined established tools: sentence-sorting tasks, a rarely used statistical model of inter-participant agreement, and network visualisation. Two hundred and five English-speaking participants completed one of twelve sentence-sorting tasks on two occasions, separated by a delay of two months. Participants varied in how similarly they sorted the sentences as compared to other participants, and mean agreement across all 24 tasks did not meet an established threshold of acceptable agreement. Between the two test phases, inter-participant agreement varied to a significant but trivial degree. Networks generated for each dataset varied in the degree to which they captured all participants’ responses. This variation correlated with inter-participant agreement. The data collectively suggest that word senses may be subject to individual differences, as is the case in other linguistic phenomena. The methodology proved replicable and has a promise as a useful tool for studying polysemy.
词义的个体差异
摘要个体差异与多义词在认知语言学中有着丰富的文献,但对个体差异在多义词中的应用前景却知之甚少。本文报道了一项调查,旨在确定人们对一个他们认为有意义的多义词的意义是否存在差异,并开发一种新的研究多义词的方法。该方法结合了现有的工具:句子排序任务、一种很少使用的参与者间一致性统计模型和网络可视化。205名讲英语的参与者两次完成了12项句子排序任务中的一项,间隔两个月。与其他参与者相比,参与者对句子的排序方式各不相同,所有24项任务的平均一致性都没有达到可接受一致性的既定阈值。在两个测试阶段之间,参与者之间的一致性差异很大,但程度很小。为每个数据集生成的网络在捕捉所有参与者反应的程度上各不相同。这种变化与参与者之间的一致性相关。这些数据共同表明,词义可能会受到个体差异的影响,其他语言现象也是如此。该方法被证明是可复制的,有望成为研究多义词的有用工具。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
3.30
自引率
17.60%
发文量
21
期刊介绍: Cognitive Linguistics presents a forum for linguistic research of all kinds on the interaction between language and cognition. The journal focuses on language as an instrument for organizing, processing and conveying information. Cognitive Linguistics is a peer-reviewed journal of international scope and seeks to publish only works that represent a significant advancement to the theory or methods of cognitive linguistics, or that present an unknown or understudied phenomenon. Topics the structural characteristics of natural language categorization (such as prototypicality, cognitive models, metaphor, and imagery); the functional principles of linguistic organization, as illustrated by iconicity; the conceptual interface between syntax and semantics; the experiential background of language-in-use, including the cultural background; the relationship between language and thought, including matters of universality and language specificity.
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