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Thinking about THINK ABOUT: Convergences and divergences between the English and Polish predicate

Thinking about THINK ABOUT: Convergences and divergences between the English and Polish predicate. Iwona Kokorniak and Karolina Krawczak kokorniak@ifa.amu.edu.pl karolina@ifa.amu.edu.pl. Presentation outline. Cognitive grammar assumptions Aim of the study Corpus data Results Observations.

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Thinking about THINK ABOUT: Convergences and divergences between the English and Polish predicate

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  1. Thinking about THINK ABOUT: Convergences and divergences between the English and Polish predicate Iwona Kokorniak and Karolina Krawczak kokorniak@ifa.amu.edu.plkarolina@ifa.amu.edu.pl

  2. Presentation outline • Cognitive grammar assumptions • Aim of the study • Corpus data • Results • Observations

  3. Cognitive Grammar (CG) assumptions:Construal vs. coding the unpredictability of grammar arises from the objectivist approach to semantics cognitive grammar finds “semantic value in every one of its uses” (Langacker 1991: 294) event can be construed in many ways; a number of lexical items and grammatical constructions can be used to convey these construals

  4. Construal vs. coding in CG • “construal is partly a matter of linguistic convention and partly of the speaker’s communicative objectives” (Dąbrowska 1997: 115) • it bears objective as well as subjective meaning: it refers to the role of a substantive; it encodes the speaker’s interpretation of that role

  5. CG assumptions about construals “every verb defines a distinct set of participant roles that reflects its own unique semantic properties” (Langacker 1991: 284) characteristics of the entities designated to interact with one another in the relations contribute to the construal of the event the meaning assigned by the verbs is distributed across the sentence, which is concordant with the Langackerian conceptualisation of the whole event, and also with the theory of ‘distributed semantics’ by Shina and Kuteva (1995)

  6. Construal of mental verbs • mental verbsrepresent what originates in the subject’s mind, the ‘internal reality’(Shinzato2004: 862) • THINK treated as one of semantic primes (Wierzbicka 1996) • Danielewiczowa (2002: 35-38) warns against putting all mental verb uses into one category: X myśli, że…’X thinks that…’, X myśli, co/kto/kiedy…’‘X thinks wh-’, X myśli o…’X thinks about’, Xmyśli coś zrobić ’intend to do sth’, X myśli. ‘X thinks’,etc. • formal linguistic differences reflect semantic differences, i.e. each verb use refers to a different mental state • each epistemic verb constitutes part of a whole (Danielewiczowa 2000a, 2000b, 2002)

  7. Object of study:think about vs. myśleć o • two equivalents of the mental process: examination of grammatical constructions with the English mental verb think about and its Polish equivalent myśleć o • belong to two languages of the same Indo-European family

  8. Aim of the study • should the constructions they appear in yield the same “patterns of usage features” (Glynn 2009), or“behavioural profiles” (Gries 2006, Divjak and Gries 2006)? • What are the convergences and divergences between myśleć o & think about? • possible with the advent of statistical softwaresuch as R (http://cran.r-project.org) • Statistics: Correspondence Analysis (Glynn 2009, in press), Logistic Regression Analysis (Grondelaers et al. 2008; Glynn 2010) • can analyze the structure of complex data

  9. Corpus data • The National Corpus of Polish Language (NKJP) (http://nkjp.pl/),with over 250 million words • the British National Corpus (BNC) (http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/), with over 100 million words • Both with advanced search capacities • 240 random hits of myśleć o • 240 random hits of think about

  10. Formal variables Tense: Pr, Pt, Ft Verb form: Finite, Infinite Mood: Conditional, Indicative, Imperative Interrogative: Interrogative, Noninterrogative Negation: Negative, Positive Aspect: English: Simple, Progessive, Perfect Simple, Perfect Progressive; Polish: Imperfect, Perfect; Impersonal Constructions: Personal Constructions, Impersonal Person: 1st Person, 2nd Person, 3rd Person, Person N/A (e.g. należałoby się domyślać) Number: Singular, Plural Adverb Semantics: Manner, Intensifier, Addition, Contrast, Location, Temporal, Frequency,Hypothetical

  11. Subject form and semantics Form: NP, Pronoun, Numeral, Adjective, Proper name Krawiec, On, Sześciu, Niewidomi, Adam Visibility: Overt, Nonovert Sołtys myślał chwilę o swojej córce i nagle ożywił się… myślał wtedy o znaku krzyża… Semantics: Human, Metonymic, Dyrektor vs. Ministerstwo Finansów

  12. Object form and semantics Form: NP, Propername, Pronoun, Clause, Gerund Person: 1st Person, 2nd Person, 3rd Person Number: Singular, Plural Semantics * NP: Human, Thing, Abstract, Event * Clause: Accomplishment,Achievement, State, Activity, Hypothetical, Event

  13. Correspondence Analysis for Polish: Object Semantics, Adverb Semantics & Person

  14. Correspondence Analysis for Polish: Exemplification

  15. Correspondence Analysis for English: Object Semantics, Adverb Semantics & Person

  16. Correspondence Analysis for English: Exemplification

  17. Correspondence Analysis for English: Exemplification

  18. Correspondence Analysis for Polish & English: Language, Person, Adverb Semx & Object Semx

  19. Correspondence Analysis for Polish & English: Exemplification

  20. Logistic Regression Analysis for English vs. Polish use of THINK ABOUT

  21. Observations The results of the Correspondence Analysis show the following correlations: • Polish myśleć o & English think about form two distinct groups relative to Person, Adverb Semantics and Object Semantics • Polish 1st Person & Object Human vs. English 1st Person & Temporal Adverbs • English 2nd Person & Object Thing vs. Nondescript Polish 2nd Person • Polish 3rd Person & Object Place vs. English 3rd Person & Object Event • Polish Impersonal & Adverb of Manner vs. nondescript English Impersonal

  22. Observations The results of the Logistic Regression Analysis for think about vs. myśleć o reveal the following predictors: • For English: temporal and intensifying adverbs, the use of positive sentences, and second person uses • For Polish: impersonal uses

  23. References Danielewiczowa, Magdalena. 2000a. “Główne problemy opisu i podziału czasownikowych predykatów mentalnych” [Main problems in the description and classification of mental verb predicates], in: Renata Grzegorczykowa – Krystyna Waszakowa (eds.), 227-247. Danielewiczowa, Magdalena. 2000b. “W związku z artykułem Galiny Kustovej ‘Niektóre problemy opisu predykatów mentalnych’ głos polemiczny” [On Galina Kustova’s ‘Some problems in description of mental predicates], in: Renata Grzegorczykowa – Krystyna Waszakowa (eds.), 265-273. Danielewiczowa, Magdalena. 2002. Wiedza i niewiedza: Studium polskich czasowników epistemicznych. Warszawa: Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej UW. Dąbrowska, Ewa. 1997. Cognitive semantics and the Polish dative. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Glynn, Dylan. 2009. Polysemy, Syntax, and Variation. A usage-based method for Cognitive Semantics. In: New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics, V. Evans & S. Pourcel (eds), pp. 77-106. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Glynn, Dylan. 2010. Testing the hypothesis. Objectivity and verification in usage-based Cognitive Semantics. In: Quantitative Cognitive Semantics. Corpus-driven approaches. D. Glynn & K. Fischer (eds.), 239-269. Berlin: Mouton. Glynn, Dylan. In press. Correspondence Analysis. Identifying usage patterns. In: Polysemy and Synonymy.Corpus methods and applications in Cognitive Semantics. D. Glynn & J. Robinson (eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Glynn, Dylan, Kerstin Fischer (eds.), 2010. Quantitative Methods in Cognitive Semantics: Corpus-driven approaches. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

  24. References Glynn, Dylan & Justyna Robinson (eds.). In press. Polysemy and Synonymy.Corpus methods and applications in Cognitive Semantics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Grondelaers, Stefan, Dirk Speelman & Dirk Geeraerts. 2008. National variation in the use of er “there”. Regional and diachronic constraints on cognitive explanations. Gitte Kristiansen & René Dirven (eds.), Cognitive sociolinguistics: Language variation ,cultural models, social systems. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Grzegorczykowa, Renata & Krystyna Waszakowa (eds.). 2000. Studia z semantyki porównawczej [Studies in comparative semantics] Vol. 1. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo UW. Janda, Laura. 1993. A geography of case semantics: The Czech dative and the Russian instrumental. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald. 1991. Foundations of cognitive grammar: Descriptive application. Vol. 2. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Radden, Günter &René Dirven. 2007. Cognitive English grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sinha, Chris and Tania Kuteva. 1995. “Distributed spatial semantics”, Nordic Journal of Linguistics 18: 167-199. Shinzato, Rumiko. 2004. “Some observations concerning mental verbs and speech act verbs”, Journal of Pragmatics 36: 861-882. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1996. Semantics, primes and universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  25. THANK YOU!  kokorniak@ifa.amu.edu.pl karolina@ifa.amu.edu.pl

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