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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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.
{"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}