English posture verbs An experientially grounded approach

1. English posture verbs An experientially grounded approach John Newman University of Alberta Conference on “Expressions of posture and motion in Germanic languages” Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, Brussels, Belgium October 24, 2008

2. Structure of Talk • Preliminaries - experiential realities • SIT, STAND, LIE as cardinal posture verbs • Action vs. state meanings • Inanimate subjects, including locative use • Final remarks – experiential realities

3. Preliminaries - experiential realities • SIT, STAND, LIE as cardinal posture verbs • Action vs. state meanings • Inanimate subjects, including locative use • Final remarks – experiential realities

4. Basic-level categories • Basic-level categories of things (cf. Lakoff 1987) • ‘dog’ and ‘chair’ • Basic-level categories of events? • ‘come’, ‘go’ • ‘see’, ‘hear’ • ‘eat’, ‘drink’ • ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’ • ‘give’, ‘take’

5. Sit, Stand, and Lie (2004), clay sculptures by Francis O. Cuyler

6. Sitting, standing, lying • The spatio-temporal domain • a strong contrast between the spatial configurations involved: • a compact shape associated with sitting • an upright, vertical elongation with standing • a horizontal elongation in the case of lying • a strong sense of the extension of a state through time

7. Sitting, standing, lying • The force-dynamics domain • the states are typically entered into through relatively brief movements • the states themselves are typically maintained for longer periods • there are clear differences between these states in terms of the sensorimotor control which is needed in order to maintain the position.

8. Sitting, standing, lying • The socio-cultural domain • sitting is a relatively comfortable position • standing allows a greater exercise of physical power, vision over a greater distance and is a prerequisite for walking, running etc. • lying is the least compatible with physical action and is associated with rest, sleep, sickness, and death

9. Preliminaries - experiential realities • SIT, STAND, LIE as cardinal posture verbs • Action vs. state meanings • Inanimate subjects, including locative use • Final remarks – experiential realities

10. Posture verbs and locatives • Posture verbs are the prototypical verbs which define a language type in the MPI-based research on “basic locative constructions”

11. “Revised” typology Ameka and Levinson (2007) • Type 0: No verb (Saliba) • Type I: Single locative verb • Ia: Copula (English) • Ib: Locative verb (Japanese) • Type II: A small contrastive set of locative verbs • IIa: Postural verbs (Dutch) • IIb: Ground space indicating verbs (Tidore) • Type III: Multiverb Positional verbs (German)

12. “Revised” typology Ameka and Levinson (2007) • Type 0: No verb (Saliba) • Type I: Single locative verb • Ia: Copula (English) • Ib: Locative verb (Japanese) • Type II: A small contrastive set of locative verbs • IIa: Postural verbs (Dutch) • IIb: Ground space indicating verbs (Tidore) • Type III: Multiverb Positional verbs (German)

13. ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’ • Posture verbs are the prototypical verbs which define a language type in the MPI-based research on “basic locative constructions” • Among the posture verbs, the set {‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’} can have a special status in a language

14. SIT, STAND, LIE in English • Corpora allow us to study usage • Corpus-based study of posture verbs: • ‘tell a lie’ sense found with lie(s) and lying • transitive vs. intransitive lay • both stand and lie are used as nouns • numerous idiomatic uses

15. Two corpora • SemCor 3.0: • 700,000 words of the BROWN corpus • all verbs lemmatized and sense-tagged according to Princeton WordNet 3.0 • written usage of American English • The Princeton WordNet Gloss Corpus: • more than 1.6 million words of the glosses of the WordNet 3.0 dictionary • a “gloss” is understood as the definition of a word and any example sentences

17. ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’ in Mbay • In Mbay (Nilo-Saharan), locational and existential constructions typically involve one of the three verbs ‘sit’, ‘stand’ and ‘lie’ (Keegan 2002) • Mbay also has a set of adverbs translating as ‘here’ and ‘there’ which are derived from ‘sit’, ‘stand’ and ‘lie’.

18. ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’ in Mbay

19. ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’ in Kxoé • Kxoé (Khoisan), it is precisely ‘sit’, ‘stand’, and ‘lie’ which function as present tense markers (Köhler 1962; Heine and Kuteva 2002)

20. ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’ in Euchee • Euchee (Amerindian isolate) ‘sit, stay’, ‘stand’, and ‘lie’ form the basis of a three-way noun-classification system (Wagner 1933-1938; Watkins 1976; Linn 2000) • The three forms function as articles/demonstratives occurring with singular inanimate nouns

21. ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’ in Euchee

22. ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’ • SIT, STAND, LIE are the cardinal posture verbs in English • ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’ can be a distinctive set of verbs in other languages • Mbay locational/existential constructions • Kxoé tense marking • Euchee noun classification system

23. Preliminaries - some experiential realities • SIT, STAND, LIE as cardinal posture verbs • Action vs. state meanings • Inanimate subjects, including locative use • Summary

24. From state to location • Posture verbs which are used with essentially static, at-rest meanings are more likely to lead to locative functions Dunn, Michael, Anna Margetts, Sergio Meira, and Angela Terrill. (2007). Four languages from the lower end of the typology of locative predication. Linguistics 45.5/6: 873–892.

25. Action and State (German) • German sich hinsetzenis an “action” predicate • German sitzen is usually a “state” predicate • The “state” meaning is nevertheless often contextually salient with sich hinsetzen

26. German sich hinsetzen • Es kommt vor, daß ich mich dann für einige Augenblicke hinsetze und zu erraten versuche, was gerade passiert. ‘So I sit down [action predicate] for a few moments then and try to guess what just happened.’ [Mannheimer Morgen, 30.04.2002; Lo und Lu Roman eines Vaters]

27. German sich hinsetzen • Es kommt vor, daß ich mich dann für einige Augenblicke hinsetze und zu erraten versuche, was gerade passiert. ‘So I sit down [action predicate] for a few moments then and try to guess what just happened.’ [Mannheimer Morgen, 30.04.2002; Lo und Lu Roman eines Vaters]

28. German sich hinsetzen und.. • keinen freien Augenblick, um sich hinzusetzen und nachzudenken ‘no free moment to sit down and reflect’ • dachte, die Kinder würden sich hinsetzen und malen ‘thought that the children would sit down and paint’

29. German sich hinsetzen und.. • keinen freien Augenblick, um sich hinzusetzen und nachzudenken ‘no free moment to sit down and reflect’ • dachte, die Kinder würden sich hinsetzen und malen ‘thought that the children would sit down and paint’

30. German sich hinsetzen, um...zu • habe sich der jetzige Präsident hingesetzt, um sich auszuruhen ‘the current president sat down to rest’ • jeden Tag, wenn ich mich hinsetzen will, um etwas zu schreiben ‘every day, if I want to sit down to write something’ 

31. German sich hinsetzen, um...zu • habe sich der jetzige Präsident hingesetzt, um sich auszuruhen ‘the current president sat down to rest’ • jeden Tag, wenn ich mich hinsetzen will, um etwas zu schreiben ‘every day, if I want to sit down to write something’ 

32. The “sitting” frame Action is profiled: sich hinsetzen State is profiled: sitzen

33. Action and State (English) • Is SIT an ‘action’ or a ‘state’ verb?

34. State SIT in Bible • The neighbours therefore, and they which before had seen him that he was blind, said, Is not this he that satand begged? John 9:8 • Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met him: but Marysat still in the house. John 11:20 • But tosit on my right hand and on my left hand is not mine to give; but it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared. Mark 10:40

35. O.E. SITTAN > SIT in state sense

36. Action SIT in Bible And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. Luke 4:20 For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Luke 14:2 And he said, An hundred measures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, andsit down quickly, and write fifty. Luke 16:6

37. O.E. SITTAN > SIT in action sense

38. Two corpora • The Wellington Corpus of Written New Zealand English(WWC) • 1 million words of written New Zealand English (1986 to 1990), comparable to the Brown Corpus of written American English and the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen corpus (LOB) of written British English • The Wellington Spoken Corpus (WSC) • 1 million words of spoken New Zealand English collected in the years 1988 to 1994

39. Action SIT

40. State SIT

41. SITTING DOWN in the spoken corpus

42. Is English SIT ‘action’ or ‘state’? • sit (with or without down) occurs in clauses which range over ‘action’ and ‘state’ meanings • stand and lie are probably similar • The extension of English sit, stand, and lie to locative usage is presumably compromised by these facts

43. Preliminaries - experiential realities • SIT, STAND, LIE as cardinal posture verbs • Action vs. state meanings • Inanimate subjects, including locative use • Final remarks - experiential realities

44. Global and local corpus methods Search for all the forms of the posture verbs and inspect all results, as in Schönefeld (2006) – “global” [Using a 3 million word newspaper subcorpus of the BNC.] Schönefeld, Doris. (2006). From conceptualization to linguistic expression: Where languages diversify. In Stefan Th. Gries and Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics: Corpus-based Approaches to Syntax and Lexis, pp. 297- 344. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Search for a specific inanimate subject with a specific posture verb – “local”.

45. Schönefeld (2006)

46. Schönefeld (2006)

47. A “local” approach • Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA (Mark Davies), 375 million words + • Restrict verbs to the forms {sit, sits, sitting, sat} and {stand, stands, standing, stood} • The verbs occur within a window of three words to the left or right of HOUSE. • HOUSE functions as the head of the subject of the verb • This search yielded more than 500 hits which were subsequently inspected item by item

48. Refining the search Excluded: a. So the White House is sitting tight. b. Well, the White House is still standing by Rove and his comments. Included: c. The 1758 Cupola House sits on South Broad Street in the heart of the business district. d. The hill on which the Santa Fe Opera House stands…

49. HOUSE in five genres of COCA

50. HOUSE in five genres of COCA(= expected distribution of HOUSE + SIT/STAND)