To capture usage-based relations between near-synonyms, I cluster collocation data using exploratory multifactorial methods. My investigation is restricted to quite and rather in the contexts where ...they intensify adjectives in the British National Corpus. I use correspondence analysis and multiple correspondence analysis to visualize and interpret distances between (a) the two intensifiers, (b) the adjectives they modify and the respective semantic classes they belong to, and (c) syntactic information regarding how intensifiers and adjectives pattern together. Results show that quite and rather constructions form a consistent network. The first key finding is that they typically follow a division of labor in the intensification of adjectival meanings. When a positive and a negative connotation are available for a given adjective, rather tends to intensify the negatively connoted adjective. The second key finding is the following: in the strict frame of the pre-determiner vs. pre-adjectival alternation, quite displays a preference for the pre-determiner position, and rather for the pre-adjectival position.
Pour cerner les relations entre quasi-synonymes dans une approche fondée sur l'usage, j'exploite des fréquences de collocation à l'aide de méthodes multifactorielles exploratoires. Mon étude se limite à quite et rather dans les contextes où ils intensifient des adjectifs dans le British National Corpus. J'ai recours à l'analyse factorielle des correspondances puis à l'analyse des correspondances multiples pour visualiser et interpréter des distances entre (a) les deux intensifieurs, (b) les adjectifs intensifiés ainsi que les classes sémantiques respectives auxquelles ils appartiennent et (c) les propriétés syntaxiques concernant l'agencement entre les intensifieurs et les adjectifs. Les résultats montrent que quite et rather appartiennent à un réseau cohérent de constructions. Dans ce réseau, les deux adverbes se répartissent les tâches dans l'intensification de sens adjectivaux. Le premier des deux résultats principaux de cette étude est le suivant : lorsqu'un adjectif a deux connotations, l'une positive et l'autre négative, il sera intensifié de préférence par rather lorsque sa connotation est négative. Le deuxième est que dans le strict cadre de l'alternance pre-déterminant vs. pré-adjectival, quite apparaît de préférence avant le déterminant et rather avant l'adjectif.
Linguists have debated whether complex prepositions deserve a constituent status, but none have proposed a dynamic model that can both predict what construal a given pattern imposes and account for ...the emergence of non-spatial readings. This paper reframes the debate on constituency as a justification of the constructional status of complex prepositional patterns from a historical perspective. It focuses on the
construction, which denotes a relation of internal location between a located entity (a trajector) and a reference entity (a landmark). Four subschemas of the Internal Location construction are examined:
(
),
(
),
(
), and
(
). All occurrences are extracted from the COHA, along with their co-occurring landmark NPs. Using vocabulary growth curves, all patterns are shown to be productive over the whole period covered by the corpus, although at different levels. Using
, a semantic vector space with the landmark collocates of each pattern is made. Curves indexed on association scores are plotted to see how densely semantic areas have been populated across four consecutive periods: 1810s–1860s, 1870s–1910s, 1920s–1970s, and 1980s–2000s. Two divisions of labor have emerged.
and
are in complementary distribution and operate mostly at the level of abstract locations whereas
and
are in parallel distribution and operate at the level of concrete locations.
The Lecture Series is a new initiative by the French Cognitive Linguistics Association (AFLiCo). The Association has held successful biennial workshops (AFLiCo JET) for 10 years now, and the 6th ...edition was due to take place in Grenoble in the fall of 2020. AFLiCo JET workshops have provided a forum for high-quality research in cognitive linguistics and, more generally, usage-based approaches to language (see e.g. CogniTextes special issue 19). With the COVID-19 crisis preventing us from pla...
Two recent methods based on distributional semantic models (DSMs) have proved very successful in learning high-quality vector representations of words from large corpora: word2vec and GloVe. Once ...trained on a very large corpus, these algorithms produce distributed representations for words in the form of vectors. DSMs based on deep learning and neural networks have proved efficient in representing the meaning of individual words. In this paper, I assess to what extent state-of-the-art word-vector semantics can help corpus linguists annotate large datasets for semantic classes. Although word vectors suggest exciting opportunities for resolving semantic annotation issues, there is still room for improvement in terms of the representation of polysemy, homonymy, and multiword expressions.
Corpus linguists dig into large-scale collections of texts to better understand the rules governing a given language. We advocate for ambitious corpus linguistics drawing inspiration from the latest ...developments of semiparametrics for a modern targeted learning. Transgressing discipline-specific borders, we adapt an approach that has proven successful in biostatistics and apply it to the well-travelled case study of the dative alternation in English. A dative alternation is characterized by sentence pairs with the same verb, but different syntactic patterns,
(prepositional dative) and
(double-object dative). Our aim is to explain how native speakers of English choose a pattern over another in any given context. The essence of the approach hinges on causal analysis and targeted minimum loss estimation (TMLE). Through causal analysis, we operationalize the set of scientific questions that we wish to address regarding the dative alternation. Drawing on the philosophy of TMLE, we answer these questions by targeting some versatile machine learners. We derive estimates and confidence regions for well-defined parameters that can be interpreted as the influence of each contextual variable on the outcome of the alternation (prepositional
. double-object), all other things being equal.
Non-redundant taxonomic models of construction grammar posit that only fully productive patterns qualify as constructions because they license an infinity of expressions. Redundant models claim that, ...despite subregularities and exceptions, partially productive patterns also count as constructions, providing the overall meanings of such patterns are not the strict sums of their parts. Because productivity is a major bone of contention between redundant and non-redundant construction grammar taxonomies, I examine the productivity of
which, according to
, is not a “construction” but merely a “pattern of coining” due to its limited type productivity. Expanding on
, this paper explores how a combination of symmetric and asymmetric association measures can contribute to the study of the “Productivity Complex” described in
. Although the productivity of
as
is admittedly limited at its most schematic level, some partially filled subschemas such as
or
are arguably productive.
Cet article fait le point sur le statut de la fréquence dans les grammaires de constructions sous l’angle de l’ancrage cognitif et des collocations. Je montre que le traitement intuitif des ...phénomènes de fréquences au détriment de l’empirie mène souvent à une vision faussée de l’usage. L’article est structuré comme suit. La première partie est épistémologique. J’y aborde le statut de la fréquence dans le contexte du tournant quantitatif dans les approches centrées sur l’usage. La deuxième partie est consacrée à l’étude de A as GN dans un corpus d’anglais américain. J’utilise trois outils : l’analyse collexémique covariante, la classification ascendante hiérarchique et ΔP, une mesure d’association permettant de repérer les collocations asymétriques. La troisième partie propose une discussion critique des résultats et des méthodes.
Pour cerner les relations entre quasi-synonymes dans une approche fondée sur l’usage, j’exploite des fréquences de collocations à l’aide de méthodes multifactorielles exploratoires. Mon étude se ...circonscrit à quite et rather dans les contextes où ils intensifient des adjectifs dans le British National Corpus. J’ai recours à l’analyse factorielle des correspondances puis à l’analyse des correspondances multiples pour visualiser et interpréter des distances entre (a) les deux intensifieurs, (b) les adjectifs intensifiés ainsi que leurs classes sémantiques respectives et (c) les propriétés syntaxiques concernant l’agencement entre les intensifieurs et les adjectifs. Il s’avère que quite et rather appartiennent à un réseau cohérent de constructions. Deux résultats principaux émergent. Premièrement, lorsqu’un adjectif a deux connotations, l’une positive et l’autre négative, il sera intensifié de préférence par rather lorsque sa connotation est négative. Deuxièmement, dans le strict cadre de l’alternance pre-déterminant vs. pré-adjectival, quite apparaît de préférence avant le déterminant et rather avant l’adjectif.
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