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LIN 3098 Corpus Linguistics

LIN 3098 Corpus Linguistics. Albert Gatt. In this lecture. Some more on corpora and grammar Construction Grammar as a theoretical framework Collostructional analysis. Part 1. Constructions and construction grammar. Some things we’ve established.

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LIN 3098 Corpus Linguistics

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  1. LIN 3098 Corpus Linguistics Albert Gatt

  2. In this lecture • Some more on corpora and grammar • Construction Grammar as a theoretical framework • Collostructional analysis

  3. Part 1 Constructions and construction grammar

  4. Some things we’ve established • Grammatical constructions (“rules”) enter into non-arbitrary relations with words. • Collocational frameworks • The “idiom” principle vs the “open choice” principle • Collexeme and colligation analysis • Both of these are about the extent to which specific syntactic frames and words “attract” eachother: • Collocational frameworks: [a N of]: nouns tend to be quantities (number etc) • Colligation: consequence tends to occur surrounded by a and of • ...

  5. Some things we’ve established • We can think of grammatical constructions as falling on a continuum from complex, abstract constructions to lexical items. • Constructions themselves have meaning: • E.g. It-object construction • People find it hard to exist in a drug-free world. • a stereotyped way of presenting a situation in terms of how it is evaluated • evaluation is placed after the verb • The words used in constructions are important clues to identifying their meaning and use: • E.g. 98% of verbs in the it- construction are find and make

  6. Construction grammar • Theoretical framework that views syntactic “rules” as: • Combinations of linguistic entities (words, phrases) • With semantic/pragmatic properties that are not fully predictable from their parts. • Constructions are represented as complex frames, with slots for specific lexical items. • They also have meanings. • They restrict the classes of lexical items that can enter the construction: a word is permitted in the construction if its meaning is compatible with the construction meaning.

  7. Example: the ditransitive alternation • Verbs like give can enter into two semantically similar, but syntactically quite different constructions: • Ditransitive: A give X Y • E.g. John give Mary a book • Prepositional dative: A give Y to X • E.g. John give a book to Mary • Do these constructions mean slightly different things? • Hypothesis: • The ditransitive involves direct, active transfer (including metaphorical transfer) • “John transferred a book from himself to Mary” • The prepositional dative involves caused movement • “John caused a book to go to Mary”

  8. Example: the ditransitive alternation • Hypothesis: • The ditransitive involves direct, active transfer (including metaphorical transfer) in a face to face situation • The prepositional dative involves caused movement from one location to another • If this hypothesis is correct, then we should observe: • More verbs that have a “direct transfer” meaning in the ditransitive. • E.g. give • More verbs that have a “caused movement” meaning in the prepositional dative • E.g. bring

  9. Example 2: Covariational conditional • English: • The Xer the Yer • “The morethe merrier” • “The more I think about itthe weirder it seems” • Note: X/Y can be single lexemes, clauses.... • Maltese: • Iktar ma X, iktar Y • Iktar ma naħseb, inqas nifhem • More restricted: X and Y need to be clauses (or at least verbs) • Interestingly: X has a negation particle “ma”, but this is not interpreted negatively. • Meaning/function: • Specifying that there is a link between two elements or variables (X and Y).

  10. Exploring these in corpora • Recent work in Corpus Linguistics has proposed Collostructional Analysis: • Based on the same assumptions as Construction Grammar • Grammatical structures viewed as meaningful units • Focuses on the relationship between lexis and grammatical constructions, but is more sophisticated than collocational frameworks.

  11. Collostructional analysis • Usually asks questions of the form: is X strongly attracted to Y? • E.g. Is the verb give strongly attracted to the ditransitive construction? • This is usually done in one of three ways: • Collexeme analysis • Distinctive collexeme analysis • Covarying collexeme analysis

  12. Part 2 Collexeme analysis

  13. Basic idea • Question: Given some construction G, what kinds of words can I find in slot S of G? • E.g. Ditransitive: [V NP NP] • What verbs can enter this construction? • (I.e. Is there a special restriction on what we can find?) • Given a particular construction, find all occurrences of the construction in the corpus. • For the slot of interest, look at the lexical items that occur there. • Compare their frequency: are there differences between the items in the likelihood with which they occur in the same construction?

  14. Practical task 1 • Run a CQL search for the ditransitive construction. • Specify that: • You want any one of these verbs: give, bring, make, tell, ask • The verb should be followed by two NPs • For our purposes, you can specify the NP pattern as something consisting of: • Andeterminer • A noun

  15. Practical task 1 • After you’ve run your query, create a frequency list of the node forms. • You will need to identify the “real” ditransitives from the others. • Pay particular attention to the verbs. • Do they form a coherent semantic class? • Do you find that some verbs are more likely to occur in this construction than others? • Would you say that these verbs are more “attracted” to this construction than others? • Based on the verb meanings, what evidence do you find for the hypothesis that the construction involves direct transfer?

  16. Some data (from Gries 2009) • Strongly attracted to the ditransitive: • Give, tell, send, ask, promise, earn • These seem to be strong “collexemes” of the ditransitive construction • Less attracted (though possible): • Make, do

  17. Part 3 Distinctive collexeme analysis

  18. Distinctive collexemes • Rather than checking if a word is associated with a specific construction, here we compare the occurrence of a word in two different (but related) constructions. • E.g. We know that give allows the dative alternation: • Give X Y • Give Y to X • Are we more likely to find it in one or the other?

  19. Practical task 2 • Conduct a query for the verb give: • In the ditransitive construction: give + NP + NP • In the to-dative construction: give NP to NP • Look at the results. Do you see a difference in the distribution? Why is this the case? • Do the same for the verb supply. • Do you notice any differences?

  20. The point • The point of distinctive collexeme analysis is to identify the “attraction” between specific lexical items and constructions. • For two related constructions: • If there is evidence of a strong degree of attraction between a lexical item and one of them, that suggests that the item “fits” the semantic restrictions of the construction very well. • But how do we explain the difference, where it exists? • It’s the same lexical item, why should it “prefer” one construction vs another? • The most likely explanation seems to be that the two constructions, though similar, have different semantic properties.

  21. Part 4 Covaryingcollexeme analysis

  22. Covaryingcollexeme analysis • Here, we are no longer focusing on the relationship between a word and a construction, but between different words within the same construction. • This is similar to what we do with collocations, but here, we’re taking more grammatical information into account.

  23. The method • Example: ditransitive: [NP V NP NP] • This contains a slot for an agent, a verb, a recipient and a theme • The second post-verb NP (the theme) is the entity undergoing the action. • Therefore, we would expect there to be a strong affinity between the verb and the theme. • (I.e. The verb should place strong semantic restrictions on what kind of theme we can have).

  24. Example • Example: ditransitive: [NP V NP NP] • NP ask NP NP • What sort of noun would you expect in the second post-verbal NP? • What about: • NP tell NP NP

  25. Practical task 3 • Search for the verb ask in the ditransitive construction • Count how many times the second (theme) post-verbal NP is headed by the noun question. • Now search for the noun question as the object of any other verb in the ditransitive, i.e. a pattern of the form: • Verb NP [the/a question] • How many times does question occur as an object of a verb other than ask? • What other verbs do you find?

  26. The point • These examples suggest that there is a strong tendency for words to “attract” eachotherwithin a specific grammatical construction • Note that this goes further than simple collocational analysis: • With collocations, we’re looking at words that co-occur within a specific distance • With covaryingcollexemes, we’re looking at words that co-occur in specific slots within the same construction.

  27. A final practical task • In SketchEngine, click Word Sketch on the left menu • Word sketches give you a list of the grammatical environments in which words occur with significant frequency. • Look for the nouns question and story • Look specifically at the object_of relation • What do you conclude about the differences between them? • (Follow this up by looking at other grammatical relations within the word sketch for each word).

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