Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory最新文献

{"title":"The red dress is cute: why subjective adjectives are more often predicative","authors":"Lelia Glass","doi":"10.1515/cllt-2024-0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0044","url":null,"abstract":"Which adjectives tend to occur as attributive (<jats:italic>the cute/red dress</jats:italic>) versus predicative (<jats:italic>the dress is cute/red</jats:italic>) and why? Building on findings from Wiegand et al. (2013. Predicative adjectives: An unsupervised criterion to extract subjective adjectives. In Lucy Vanderwende, Hal DauméIII &amp; Katrin Kirchhoff (eds.), <jats:italic>Proceedings of the 2013 conference of the North American chapter of the </jats:italic> <jats:italic>Association for Computational Linguistics</jats:italic> <jats:italic>: Human language technologies (NAACL-HLT)</jats:italic>, 534–539. Atlanta, GA: Association for Computational Linguistics) and Vartiainen (2013. Subjectivity, indefiniteness and semantic change. <jats:italic>English Language and Linguistics</jats:italic> 17(1). 157–179), this paper argues that subjective adjectives such as <jats:italic>cute</jats:italic> tend to be placed in predicative position not just because they often describe discourse-new information, but because this position serves to foreground information that the hearer may disagree with. This claim is supported using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, Mark. 2008. <jats:italic>The corpus of contemporary American English: One billion words, 1990-present</jats:italic>. Available at: <jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\" ext-link-type=\"uri\" xlink:href=\"https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/\">https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/</jats:ext-link>) combined with human annotations for subjectivity from Scontras et al. (2017. Subjectivity predicts adjective ordering preferences. <jats:italic>Open Mind</jats:italic> 1(1). 53–66) <jats:italic>et seq.</jats:italic>; and data from image captions versus descriptions (for seeing versus low-vision people) from the National Gallery of Art. A production experiment manipulates the discourse context to further show that adjectives tend to be placed in predicative position when they express controversial information. Overall, this paper explores how the lexical semantics of adjectives shapes the pragmatic contexts in which they tend to be used, which in turn shapes the syntax of the sentences using them.","PeriodicalId":45605,"journal":{"name":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142189695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A corpus-based study on semantic and cognitive features of bei sentences in Mandarin Chinese","authors":"Yonghui Xie, Ruochen Niu, Haitao Liu","doi":"10.1515/cllt-2024-0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0031","url":null,"abstract":"<jats:italic>Bei</jats:italic> sentences in Mandarin Chinese with SOV word order have attracted extensive interest. However, their semantic features lacked quantitative evidence and their cognitive features received insufficient attention. Therefore, the current study aims to quantitatively investigate the semantic and cognitive features through the analysis of nine annotated factors in a corpus. The results regarding <jats:italic>bei</jats:italic> sentences show that (i) subjects exhibit a tendency to be definite and animate; non-adversative verbs have gained popularity over time, and intransitive verbs are capable of taking objects; (ii) subject relations tend to be long, implying heavy cognitive load, whereas the dependencies governed by subjects are often short, suggesting light cognitive load; and (iii) certain semantic factors significantly impact cognitive factors; for instance, animate subjects tend to govern shorter dependencies. Overall, our study provides empirical support for the semantic features of <jats:italic>bei</jats:italic> sentences and reveals their cognitive features using dependency distance.","PeriodicalId":45605,"journal":{"name":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142189764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Verb influence on French wh-placement: a parallel corpus study","authors":"Jan Fliessbach, Johanna Rockstroh","doi":"10.1515/cllt-2024-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0001","url":null,"abstract":"Our study investigates the effect of French verb lemmata on the preverbal (QV) or postverbal (VQ) positioning of interrogative forms equivalent to English ‘what’ (<jats:italic>que</jats:italic>, <jats:italic>quoi</jats:italic>, and related forms) within a French–Spanish parallel corpus of subtitles. We highlight and illustrate the corpus’s utility for studying less frequent verbs in combination with specific <jats:italic>wh</jats:italic>-forms. Our findings suggest that less frequent French verbs exhibit weaker associations with QV compared to their more frequent counterparts. A post-hoc study using Spanish translations reveals that French verbs correlated with QV often denote observable actions involving directly accessible Q-referents. We hypothesise that queries concerning ‘situationally accessible’ referents are predominantly utilised for non-standard, evaluative, or challenging questions, which are typically QV in French.","PeriodicalId":45605,"journal":{"name":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142189771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Idiosyncratic entrenchment: tracing change in constructional schematicity with nested random effects","authors":"Svetlana Vetchinnikova","doi":"10.1515/cllt-2023-0092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2023-0092","url":null,"abstract":"Usage-based constructionist approaches see language as an inventory of constructions at different levels of schematicity learned from the input. If so, personal constructicons should vary as a function of usage. Repeated use and chunking/entrenchment of concrete instances should lead to reanalysis of their internal structure and change in the level of schematicity. This paper exploits the reduction probability of <jats:italic>is</jats:italic> in <jats:italic>it is</jats:italic> as a diagnostic of reanalysis in a 1.75-million-word diachronic corpus of a single blogger over 8 years. All instances of <jats:italic>it is/it’s</jats:italic> (n = 10,929) were annotated at the constructional and lexical levels. A multilevel logistic regression model showed significant fixed effects of constructional entropy and construction-to-word association on reduction probability. Importantly, there remained substantial variation across lexical types of constructions in the extent to which they associated or became associated with reduction over time, suggesting idiosyncratic entrenchment and potential reanalysis as a function of usage.","PeriodicalId":45605,"journal":{"name":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142189765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Expressing smells in (American) English","authors":"D. Schönefeld","doi":"10.1515/cllt-2024-0055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0055","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The paper reports on a study of the usage of smell verbs over the last 200 years by speakers of American English. The focus is on how the expression of smell changes over time and what this reveals about the way speakers conceptualize and assess smells. The study is based on usage data from the COHA (Corpus of Historical American English). They were quantitatively analysed employing the methods of simple and (multiple) distinctive collexeme analysis. The results of our investigations indicate both a general increase over time in the usage of smell-verb constructions and a noticeable diversification of the smell vocabulary used by American English speakers. Moreover, the results of the collexeme analyses reveal more detailed aspects of the types of smell descriptors people use in smell talk. Reflecting what kinds of smell emitters are most typically and especially closely associated with the individual smell-verb constructions at particular times, they are informative about the sources of smells that are salient enough in our culture and (well-)known enough in the speech community to be used as functional smell descriptors and how these may change over time.","PeriodicalId":45605,"journal":{"name":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141643396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A radically usage-based, collostructional approach to assessing the differences between negative modal contractions and their parent forms","authors":"R. Daugs, David Lorenz","doi":"10.1515/cllt-2024-0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0051","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Starting from the premise that English negative modal contractions constitute partly variable patterns of associations that include both the preceding subject and the following verb infinitive, the study sets out to investigate distributional differences between can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t and their corresponding uncontracted parent forms. Given that some configurations are assumed to correlate with specific modal meanings (e.g. inanimate subjects and stative verbs > ‘epistemic prediction’; first person subjects > ‘(un)willingness’ or ‘commissive modality’), roughly 200,000 trigrams from COCA are submitted to distinctive covarying collexeme analysis in order to uncover if these contractions and their full forms are conventionalized and entrenched differentially enough to merit their separate treatment on both conceptual and methodological grounds. The results point to probabilistic tendencies, suggesting a cline where won’t and can’t appear to be more emancipated from their respective full-form analogue than shouldn’t. Furthermore, the study showcases how collostructional methods can be applied fruitfully to case studies embedded in Schmid’s (Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2020. The dynamics of the linguistic system: Usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Oxford: Oxford University Press) Entrenchment and Conventionalization Model.","PeriodicalId":45605,"journal":{"name":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141643362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cognitive and sociolectal constraints on the theme-recipient alternation: evidence from Mandarin","authors":"Yi Li","doi":"10.1515/cllt-2023-0127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2023-0127","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We explore the cognitive and sociolectal constraints that probabilistically regulate the theme-recipient (or “dative”) alternation in modern varieties of Mandarin and how these constraints interact with each other. Based on an extensively annotated corpus dataset and regression modeling, we found that the probabilistic grammar that shapes the theme-recipient alternation is fundamentally stable across regional and genre varieties of Mandarin. This general stability notwithstanding, significant variation regarding the importance of cognitive constraints across different sociolectal constraints is detected. Crucially, the analysis revealed that recipient syntactic complexity has a much greater effect in Taiwan Mandarin than in Mainland Mandarin. The effect of theme concreteness is also found to be significantly reduced in telephone conversations compared to broadcast news. Corpus-based findings were cross-validated using a psycholinguistic rating task experiment. While the results of the two approaches demonstrate substantial overlap, they also exhibit diverging patterns at the level of interaction between regional variety and recipient complexity, potentially indicating nuanced differences between the two approaches. The findings provide evidence that interactional patterns between cognitive and sociolectal constraints on probabilistic grammatical alternations may be shared across languages, despite their distinct socio-cultural factors that shape variation in human interaction.","PeriodicalId":45605,"journal":{"name":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141673853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"CLLT ‘versus’ Corp\u0000 ora and IJCL: a (half serious) keyness analysis","authors":"Stefanie Wulff, Stefan Th. Gries","doi":"10.1515/cllt-2024-0050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0050","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this introduction to the special issue celebrating CLLT’s 20th anniversary, we look back and forward in time. To look back, we present the results of a (tongue-in-cheek) corpus-linguistic analysis of about 10 years worth of data of research published in CLLT, IJCL, and Corpora in order to distill the “essence” of CLLT for the reader. As an added bonus, we use the opportunity to discuss ways to improve established ways of performing keyness analyses. To look forward, we asked six (teams of) researchers who all have shaped corpus linguistics and thus the journal to give us their take on what the most significant developments in the field have been, and where they see the most impactful opportunities and challenges arise. This introduction briefly summarizes their contributions.","PeriodicalId":45605,"journal":{"name":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141098301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Transfer five ways: applications of multiple distinctive collexeme analysis to the dative alternation in Mandarin Chinese","authors":"Shengyu Liao, Stefan Th. Gries, Stefanie Wulff","doi":"10.1515/cllt-2024-0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0033","url":null,"abstract":"The dative alternation has been extensively studied in the world’s languages, and the meanings of the verbs participating in the alternation have been shown to play a key role in determining its argument realization options. The present paper presents a multiple distinctive collexeme analysis approach to the dative alternation in Mandarin Chinese, which involves a choice of one of five functionally similar alternants, and it does so by also discussing several ways to improve how this has been done statistically in most previous analyses. Linguistically, we identify the core semantic differences of the five constructions based on which verbs statistically prefer to occur in which pattern, focusing on semantic potential and direction of transfer. Methodologically, this study contributes to the slowly growing body of studies that use collexeme strengths that are not only less related to frequency than the traditional methods (i.e., association is measured in a less diluted way) and that are directional (i.e., we can focus on one direction of association from the verb to the construction).","PeriodicalId":45605,"journal":{"name":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141153761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Register and the dual nature of functional correspondence: accounting for text-linguistic variation between registers, within registers, and without registers","authors":"Jesse Egbert, Douglas Biber, Daniel Keller, Marianna Gracheva","doi":"10.1515/cllt-2024-0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2024-0011","url":null,"abstract":"During the past 20 years, corpus linguistic research on register variation has yielded important theoretical advances. The first part of this paper discusses these advances and the cumulative body of research that has produced them. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the goals of research on register variation. The traditional goal of the text-linguistic (TxtLx) approach to linguistic variation has been to describe registers and patterns of register variation: describing the linguistic and situational characteristics of registers. In this paper, we explore a related, but distinct, text-linguistic goal: to account for all linguistic variation among texts. Because the TxtLx framework assumes the importance of <jats:italic>functional correspondence</jats:italic> between linguistic characteristics and situational characteristics, it is reasonable to assume that in addition to register, we can use situational parameters coded continuously at the level of individual texts as additional predictors of text-linguistic variation. We describe the results of an empirical study to show that using both register categories and text-level situational parameters as predictors results in a more comprehensive and explanatory model of text-linguistic variation. In the conclusion we discuss the future of corpus-based register studies, focusing on unanswered questions related to theoretical claims about register.","PeriodicalId":45605,"journal":{"name":"Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141062280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}