Contents:
Robinson concludes by highlighting the potential benefits of employing a socio-cognitive method: They emphasize the importance of usage-based studies of lexical semantics based on more advanced techniques than just the extraction of examples from corpora. As the authors explain, by keeping track of the contexts in which a word appears, vector space models of lexical semantics approximate word meaning by modeling word use. To illustrate the usefulness of this computational-linguistic approach to lexical semantics, Peirsman, Heylen and Geeraerts present a case study based on a Dutch corpus of million words and implement two types of word space models: The case study in question investigates how the use of religion names has changed after the attacks of 11 September The authors conclude that both the document-based and the syntax-based model show that islam has become distributionally more similar to words related to terrorism and politics and that christendom, by contrast, remains characterized by cultural and more positive dimensions.
Constructional variation This section comprises three chapters that explore a variety of topics related to lectal variation in grammar and constructions. In this study, which focuses on alternative constructions of genitive relations in British and American English, the author first selects the range of conditioning factors regarding choice of of-genitive vs. As a next step, the factors are subjected to a multivariate logistic regression model together with data extracted from three corpora of British and American English.
In the analysis special attention is paid to how the external, sociolinguistic factors shape and determine the factor weights of the factors which are internal to language. In addition to the logistic regression analysis, the study furthermore relies heavily on visualization techniques such as cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling. The next paper discusses the evolution of gender systems in the two national varieties of Dutch, Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch.
The results show that grammatical gender plays a much more important role in the Flemish children than in the Netherlandic data: While East Flemish children show attestations of feminine gender for non-animate count nouns and mass nouns, the children from the Dutch province only use feminine pronouns to refer to female humans or animates. On the basis of the qualitative data obtained, De Vogelaer deduces that three gender systems are operating in East Flemish children the traditional three-gender system, the innovative dyadic grammatical system, and semantic gender but that both the northern and southern systems are acquired as predominantly semantic systems.
The author draws the tentative conclusion that northern and southern Dutch pronominal gender will ultimately converge in a system of semantic agreement. The last chapter in this section likewise examines structural differences in national varieties of Dutch, but from different methodological and analytical perspectives. Constructions form prototype categories exhibiting a cline from good to bad examples Could you pour me a cup of coffee vs. Could you taste me this wine.
Furthermore, constructions vary from language to language, either in nature or in the degree of productivity. As Colleman points out, in present-day standard Netherlandic Dutch, the benefactive ditransitive is a marked construction which is only possible with a handful of rather infrequent verbs related to food provision or preparation. However, the construction is productive in southern and eastern local dialect varieties with verbs from the semantic classes of creation and obtainment.
In this chapter, the author investigates whether the wider semantic possibilities of the benefactive ditransitive in southern dialects manifest themselves in the standard language of Belgian speakers of Dutch as well. In order to test the distribution Introduction 15 of benefactive ditransitives in Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch, six frequent verbs of creation and obtainment were selected and searches were made for benefactive constructions in three different corpora representing various modes and registers of standard Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch.
The results show that standard Belgian Dutch is more tolerant of the construction than standard Netherlandic Dutch. Colleman concludes that for the ditransitive to be possible in standard Netherlandic Dutch the preparatory act and the actual transfer must be contiguous, if not simultaneous, subevents. The semantic properties of abstract argument structure constructions can thus be subject to language-internal variation just like the semantic properties of lexical items.
Variation of lectal awareness and attitudes The third and last part of the volume implies a thematic shift: Within this group of three papers, we may note a difference with regard to the taxonomical level at which linguistic variation is studied. Whereas the last contribution deals with sound change in relation to attitudes within an apparently uniform lectal community, in the first two chapters focus is on the perception of lects perceived as whole units: In more specific terms, this cluster of contributions examines the acquisition of lectal awareness, differing attitudes towards lectal varieties and differing attitudes towards a specific lectal variable.
The aims of the investigation were to determine the crucial stages at which young children acquire receptive competence of lectal varieties at different levels of specificity and discuss potential predictors of the success rate: The first experiment assessed the degree of identifiability of L1 accents in Spanish children across three age groups.
The second experiment examined the degree of correct identification of L2 ac- 16 Dirk Geeraerts, Gitte Kristiansen and Yves Peirsman cents. The results speak of consistent type-token relationship and a statistically significant increase in correct identification. As shown by data collected in an additional questionnaire, a high degree of success correlated with accents presenting a high degree of social stereotyping. In the light of the findings the author discusses the experiential grounding of linguistic stereotype formation and concludes that formal characteristics such as phonetic salience have fewer effects on correct identification than relative social salience such as social stereotyping.
The starting-point of the next chapter, which examines dialect evaluation rather than dialect identification, is the opposite perspective. In his study, Berthele employs visual stimulus mapping tasks and attribution tasks to elicit gestaltbased mental models of language varieties in the form of consistent patterns between visual traits and phonological features. Findings from these experiments which investigate folk perception of Swiss German dialects and from additional interviews provide evidence for a link between dialects with a high percentage of high vowels and chiseled, sharp and pointy forms.
However, as the author points out, a focus on inherent and potentially universal features does not automatically entail a universalist, non-relativist position. Rather, the goal is to show how potentially universal perceptual mappings of sounds and forms interact with cultural and other mental models of social or ethnic groups, languages and varieties. The aim of this investigation was to examine the cognitive and social factors involved in a phonological change in progress th-fronting in East-Central Scotland.
The data were collected over a period of 30 months from a group of 54 speakers who play in pipe bands in West Fife, Scotland and who form friendship groups who either favor or disfavor the use of the labiodental fricative under scrutiny. Data-gathering was thus carried out by means of ethnographic long-term participant observation, a technique commonly used in variation- Introduction 17 ist sociolinguistics. In order to reach a better understanding of the patterning of th the authors proceeded with a varbrul multivariate analysis into which linguistic, social and cognitive factor groups were included.
In this chapter Clark and Trousdale resort to notions such as multiple inheritance, schematicity and full and partial sanction to explain how the linguistic variable in question can have a range of different social meanings within the same community. It will be clear from these summaries that the contributions we have brought together in this volume are excellent illustrations of the two domains we identified above. The chapters in the first two sections are primarily concerned with variation of meaning both lexical meaning and constructional meaning and the third section is devoted to the meaning of variation, i.
While the studies combined in this volume far from exhaust the domain, they do illustrate the potentialities of Cognitive Sociolinguistics: References Bybee, Joan, and Paul Hopper eds. Bybee, Joan Diachronic linguistics. Croft, William Towards a social cognitive linguistics. Geeraerts, Dirk Lectal variation and empirical data in Cognitive Linguistics. Mouton de Gruyter A rough guide to Cognitive Linguistics. Basic Readings, Dirk Geeraerts ed.
Geeraerts, Dirk, and Stefan Grondelaers Looking back at anger: Cultural traditions and looking back at anger: Cultural traditions and metaphorical patterns. Taylor and Robert E. Harder, Peter The status of linguistic facts: Rethinking the relation between cognition, social institution and utterance from a functional point of view. Mind and Language Holland, Dorothy, and Naomi Quinn eds.
Itkonen, Esa What is Language? A Study in the Philosophy of Linguistics. Kemmer, Suzanne, and Michael Barlow Introduction. Its language, conceptualization, and physiology in the light of cross-cultural evidence. Kristiansen, Gitte How to do things with allophones: Linguistic stereotypes as cognitive reference points in social cognition. Labov, William Sociolinguistic Patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press. Introduction 19 Langacker, Ronald W. In Grammar and Conceptualization, Ronald W. Lavandera, Beatriz Where does the sociolinguistic variable stop?
Language in Society 7: Sinha, Chris Cognitive linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. Tomasello, Michael Constructing a Language: A technical state of the art. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1: Verhagen, Arie Constructions of Intersubjectivity: Discourse, Syntax, and Cognition. Zlatev, Jordan What's in a schema? Bodily Mimesis and the grounding of language. In From Perception to Meaning: Lexical and lexical-semantic variation Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity in dialects Dirk Geeraerts and Dirk Speelman Abstract We examine the role of concept characteristics in the study of lexical variation among dialects: More specifically, a regression analysis of data taken from a large lexical database of Limburgish dialects in Belgium and The Netherlands is conducted to illustrate that concept characteristics such as concept salience, concept vagueness and negative affect contribute to the lexical heterogeneity in the dialect data.
Dutch, lectal variation, lexical variation, dialectometry, dialectology, onomasiology, prototypicality, semantic fuzziness, affect 1. Setting the question To what extent do concept features determine the onomasiological heterogeneity that occurs in dialectological data? Onomasiological heterogeneity, in the way in which we intend it here, is the occurrence of synonymy across language varieties - in our case, across dialects.
The phenomenon is common enough: In dialectological and sociolinguistic research, the phenomenon is sometimes referred to as 'heteronymy' Goossens , Schippan , and is then analyzed within the basic framework of variational language studies: But from the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics, lexical variation may be determined by other factors next to such lectal ones: In particular, the linguistic development of prototype theory see Geeraerts has brought to the attention a number of non-traditional semasiological features that may well influence the type of onomasiological variation that occurs across lectal boundaries.
One such heterodox aspect is vagueness of meaning: If the conceptual boundaries are unclear, different lexical choices between dialects may well occur more readily. Another such heterodox feature is conceptual salience: If concepts are better known, highly familiar, more habitual, uniformity across dialects may be more easily achieved. So, can we establish whether conceptual salience and conceptual vagueness significantly influence the occurrence of onomasiological heterogeneity? We will study the question by means of a statistical analysis of a largescale database with dialectological data for the Limburgish dialects of Dutch.
We will suggest an operational definition of vagueness, salience, and heterogeneity, and perform a multiple linear regression analysis on the data to test the hypothesis that certain concept features do indeed enhance onomasiological variation. In order to study the influence of concept features from as broad a perspective as possible, we will add one more concept feature to the analysis, viz. Although we consider this to be an exploratory study, the overall results will be indubitable: In disciplinary terms, the present study intends to contribute to three strands of research.
First, it continues the line of quantitative, usage-based studies of onomasiological variation that was developed in our Leuven research group in the wake of Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Bakema and Geeraerts Second, it adds a topic for investigation to the field of quantitative dialectology, as it is illustrated by researchers like Goebl , Kretzschmar , Nerbonne and Kleiweg Within this approach, semantic factors have as yet hardly been taken into consideration.
With the present study, we would like to show how relevant it can be to do so. Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 25 And third, the paper is a contribution to dialectological studies within Cognitive Linguistics. In spite of pioneering but largely isolated efforts such as Moerdijk and Geeraerts , Swanenberg , Nilsson , Berthele , , , Sharifian , Szelid and Geeraerts , there is no standing tradition of dialectological research in Cognitive Linguistics.
That is to be regretted, because the inspiration could well be mutual. On the one hand, dialectological data raise the question whether differences of culture and conceptualization, one of the theoretical centers of attraction of Cognitive Linguistics, could be detected language-internally and not just, according to the usual perspective of Cognitive Linguistics, across languages.
On the other hand, the usage-based nature of Cognitive Linguistics challenges the traditional methodological focus of dialectology on language structure rather than language use. In this paper, we offer one more example of what such a cognitive linguistic dialectology could look like.
Sketching the design How then shall we try to answer our basic research question? In order to specify the design of our study, we need to say something about the material that we will be using as the descriptive basis of our investigation, about the explanatory variables that we will include, and about our operationalization of the response variable.
For additional detail, we refer to Speelman and Geeraerts , a follow-up study that compares the methodology presented here with alternative approaches to lexical dialectometry. The first installment was published in , and the dictionary is currently being completed at the universities of Nijmegen and Leuven. The Leuven collaborator on the project, Ronny Keulen, has been an indispensable help to us in the preparation of this study, by making available the electronic database behind the dictionary and by guiding us through its design.
The dictionary is organized thematically. In topical instalments like 'The household: Food and drink' or 'Agrarian terminology: Grassland farming', the traditional terminology of the dialects is described and charted - in a fairly literal sense, to the extent that the geographical distribution of the various terms is indicated by means of dialectological maps.
The human body' Keulen At present, the WLD is made available online http: The materials included in the WLD come from many sources. The bulk of the data was collected by means of questionnaires specifically designed for the dictionary project, but these questionnaires were complemented with material from older dialect surveys and sundry sources. However, because we would like to base our study on maximally homogeneous material in terms of age and geographical scope, we will only be using the questionnaires N10, N, N, N and N All of these were applied fairly systematically over the entire geographical region covered by the dictionary, in a fairly recent period roughly, the last third of the previous century.
This restriction means, for instance, that data culled from research monographs devoted to a single local dialect, or data from larger scale dialect surveys undertaken in the s are not included in our analysis. We need to insist on the systematicity with which the data are collected, because we would otherwise enhance the ambiguity of non-responses. If we do not find any name at all for a given concept in a given place, that could in principle have two reasons: The latter situation is one Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 27 that would be of interest to us could it be the case that lesser known concepts are lexically more heterogeneous than others?
With the restrictions that we applied, we can base our investigation on a database of tokens of lexical items, divided over concepts and geographical places. The explanatory variables The concept features that we will incorporate into the analysis are threefold: Vagueness and salience are features that may be typically associated with prototype theory and a cognitive linguistic conception of lexical meaning. Negative affect, on the other hand, is a more traditional semantic feature. Vagueness and negative affect will be included in the form of a single operationalization, but salience will be measured in the form of three distinct factors which will be considered separately in the analysis: Let us now look at each of these five factors the three salience factors, vagueness, and negative affect in turn, and indicate why exactly we have included them and how we have tried to measure them.
The lack of familiarity of a concept is relevant because we suspect that less habitual concepts increase lexical uncertainty among language users, and decrease the probability of uniformity across dialects. If a concept is less common, it is communicatively less prominent, and the possibility or perhaps also the necessity for standardization is more restricted. Our operational measurement of lack of conceptual habituality is relatively basic: The results we get on the survey are consistent and intuitively plausible.
The inclusion of the number of observational gaps is motivated by the idea that a high number of places without responses may be an indirect indication of lack of familiarity with the concept: However, this reasoning assumes that the concept was indeed included in the survey. By restricting the database to the questionnaires N10, N, N, N and N, we have tried to ensure that this is indeed the case, but we cannot be entirely certain about the observational systematicity of the materials. An observational gap, in other words, is ambiguous between actual unfamiliarity and an inconsistency in the survey procedure.
Some caution with regard to this factor will be in order, then, all the more so since there might be a mathematical effect on heterogeneity in the opposite direction of what we expect fewer measurements may lead to a smaller number of names, thus possibly reducing heterogeneity.
In operational terms, the number of observational gaps is quantified straightforwardly as the absolute number of places out of the total of places in which no names were given for the concept at hand. The number of multiword expressions in the onomasiological range of a concept may be considered an indication of lack of salience for two reasons. Throughout the paper, we use the concept 'onomasiological range' to refer to the total set of expressions that occur as designations of the concept. If we take into account the relative frequency of those expressions within the onomasiological range, we talk about an 'onomasiological profile'.
First, the basic level hypothesis Berlin and Kay , Berlin suggests that cross-linguistically basic concepts are typically referred to with short words. Second, multiword answers may derive from the fact that people answer with a periphrastic description of the concept either because there is no name for the concept in their dialect or because they don't know it: According to the first reason, multiword expressions Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 29 constitute a structural reflection of lower concept salience; according to the second reason, multiword expressions reflect the fact that the concept is not structurally entrenched in the lexicon at all.
As a measurement, we take the proportion at the token level of the number of multiword answers in the total set of answers for a concept. The vagueness of concepts is measured in terms of their lexical nonuniqueness: We quantify lexical uniqueness of a concept as the number of lexical types in the onomasiological range of that concept that also features in the set of expressions associated with a different concept.
As an example, consider the following overview of the expressions found for the concept LIES 'groin'. The first column lists the lexical expressions we find, the second the frequency with which they are found, and the third mentions whether the same lexical expression may also be found as expressing another concept. In this example, then, five out of nine types are non-unique. Next to the introduction of a proportional token-based rather than type-based measurement, attention will have to be devoted to the distinction between vagueness and 30 Dirk Geeraerts and Dirk Speelman polysemy.
Some of the overlaps in the example, as in the case of vlim, do not constitute prime examples of the phenomenon that motivates the introduction of vagueness in the analysis. We are interested in the effect of vagueness because we assume that conceptual unclarity, like the fuzziness of the borderline between one concept and the other, may lead to lexical heterogeneity.
If a workable criterion for singling out such cases can be found but see Geeraerts , we will be able to investigate whether conceptual overlaps of the vlim type have a different effect from those of the lies type. For the present exploratory purposes, however, we restrict the analysis to the course-grained measure described above. The inclusion of negative affect is motivated by the recognition that taboo leads to rich synonymy Allan and Burridge Given domains like procreation and defecation, taboo is obviously relevant for the lexical field of the human body.
Negative affect is not restricted to such obvious taboo areas, however. The dictionary contains many questions in which it is explicitly asked to give pejorative terms for a certain concept, i. In practical terms, we did not start from these labels, but we used the same method for the identification of negative affect as for the identification of lack of familiarity: The results are again consistent and plausible: The response variable Lexical heterogeneity, the dependent variable in the investigation, is defined as a complex factor. If, in fact, we consider which phenomena can point to heterogeneity, we will not only wish to take into account lexical diversity the existence of different words for naming a concept but also Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 31 geographic fragmentation: Heterogeneity, then, may be defined as the product of lexical diversity and geographic fragmentation.
Geographic fragmentation, however, needs to be analyzed further. On the one hand, it is linked to the geographical range of the terms: On the other hand, it is linked to the dispersion of the terms within that range: Let us now have a closer look at each of the three relevant phenomena diversity, range, dispersion and their operationalization. Lexical diversity is straightforwardly defined as the number of different types including multiword expressions in the onomasiological range of a concept.
A schematic representation of geographical dispersion 2. The dispersion of a concept is illustrated by means of Figure 1: If we think of the dotted rectangle in the figure as the total area under consideration in our case, the Limburgish dialect area , then the solid line may be used to indicate that part of the global area in which a given concept appears. In most cases in our database, the concepts appear in the Limburgish region in its entirety. A black dot indicates a place where we find an attestation for a given concept, and a white dot indicates a place where we get a null observation for the concept, i.
The situation on the left hand side of the figure is intuitively more dispersed than the situation on the right, but how can we turn that intuition into a quantitative measurement? We express dispersion as a proportion between average distances. First, we take the distance from one observation of a term to the immediately neighboring observation, i.
The distances are geographical distances, based on the latitude and altitude of the places. We do this for all other observations of the term and calculate the average distance to the immediately neighboring term observation. Informally, this is the average distance between a black dot and another black dot representing the same lexical item.
Second, we take the distance from one observation of a term to the immediately neighboring observation of the concept, i. We do this for all other observations of the term and calculate the average distance to the immediately neighboring concept observation.
Third, for each term, we take the proportion of the two averages that we just described. This measure yields the dispersion for a single term in the onomasiological range of a concept, but we are obviously interested in the overall dispersion for the concept. That is why we calculate a weighed average of the measures of dispersion of the individual terms: The range of a concept is illustrated by Figure 2. Each of the solid boxes indicates the maximal geographical range of a given term for a given concept, regardless of the dispersion within that maximal area of occurrence.
The situation on the left hand side of the figure is more fragmented than the situation to the right: In practical terms, range is calculated in the following steps. First, we calculate the surface that is covered by the attestations of one term. Second, we calculate the proportion of that surface to the surface that is covered by the concept Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 33 as a whole.
Third, we calculate this proportion for each term in a concept and then take the weighted average proportion. As before, we are weighting terms by their token size within the onomasiological profile of the concept. A schematic representation of geographical range Once we have a measure for diversity, dispersion, and range, we can go back to our earlier definition of heterogeneity as the product of diversity and geographic fragmentation.
Because geographic fragmentation rises as dispersion increases, and diminishes as range increases, fragmentation may now be defined as the proportion of dispersion and range. The overall formula for heterogeneity then takes the following form: Analyzing the data The response variable and the five explanatory variables are subjected to a multiple linear regression analysis.
The results of the analysis are presented in Table 2. The abbreviations used for the predictor variables as follows. The results of the multiple linear regression analysis Coefficients: Before we have a closer look at the results, a number of technical remarks need to be made; these will be relevant only for those readers who are familiar with the technical apparatus of a regression analysis.
First, because the residual values are not normally distributed when heterogeneity as such is used as the response variable, the regression analysis is based on the logarithm of heterogeneity. Second, to avoid cases of extreme data sparseness, we have restricted the analysis to concepts that are attested in at least ten places.
This leaves us with of the original concepts. Third, two interactions need to be mentioned in addition to the basic results. For one thing, lack of familiarity enhances heterogeneity only in the case of low or medium non-uniqueness, but it has no effect in the case of extremely high non-uniqueness. The second interaction is similar: Because both interactions do not substantially influence the analysis neither from a technical nor from an interpretative point of view , we consider it legitimate to simply focus on the model without interactions in the rest of the discussion even though the model with the interactions is intrinsically more accurate.
Fourth, we find 3 outliers and 19 influential observations in the data set. Leaving these 22 observations out of the analysis yields a slightly better model than the one presented in the table: However, Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 35 because these differences are not fundamental, neither from a technical or an interpretative point of view, we again concentrate on the original model that includes the 23 observations.
Now, what can we conclude from the results as presented in the table? With a significance value of less than 0. In the second place, all the factors that we included as explanatory variables appear to have a significant effect. This is indicated by the significance factors in the final column of the table. This is a crucial finding, because it corroborates our initial and fundamental assumption that concept features, and more specifically, heterodox concept features, influence lexical heterogeneity.
In the third place, when we turn to the first column of figures, we observe that all factors have a positive effect on lexical heterogeneity, except for the factor 'missing places'. This means that heterogeneity increases as a concept is less familiar, exhibits more multiword answers, overlaps more with other concepts, and has a higher negative affect, but that heterogeneity decreases as the number of places with zero observations rises.
Except for the latter, these observations are entirely in accordance with the hypotheses that we put forward. The different behavior of the number of observational gaps is not a total surprise, however. When we introduced the factor, we mentioned that observational gaps could be ambiguous, to the extent that they could either result from an unsystematic survey technique, or from lack of familiarity with the concept.
A calculation of the effect of the factors which we will not present in detail here shows that the effect of the number of observational gaps is the weakest of all the factors considered, which we take as an extra indication that the factor needs to be scrutinized in more detail in the course of further investigations.
Suggesting further prospects The central conclusions to be drawn from our exploratory investigation into the sources of lexical heterogeneity in the Woordenboek van de Limburgse Dialecten are clear. Taking into account non-orthodox concept features 36 Dirk Geeraerts and Dirk Speelman salience and vagueness helps to account for lexical heterogeneity in dialect databases: And as the influence of negative affect shows, concept features need to be taken into account more generally: On top of these theoretically relevant conclusions, there is an important methodological conclusion to be highlighted: Given the apparent fruitfulness of the approach illustrated here, we may conclude with the identification of prospects for further research.
Quite a number of perspectives open up. In the first place, we may try out alternative forms of the study as it was presented here. As we indicated earlier, alternative operationalizations of the factors should be explored, like a token-based rather than a type-based measure of lexical non-uniqueness, or similarly, a token-based measure of diversity. The design may be varied in still other respects: In the second place, we may extend the study beyond its present limits by taking into account other regions: And even more appropriately, given our interest in semantics, we may envisage an extension towards other lexical fields, as represented by other installments of the dictionary: Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 37 References Allan, Keith, and Kate Burridge Euphemism, dysphemism, and cross-varietal synonymy.
LaTrobe working papers in linguistics 1: Berlin, Brent Ethnobiological classification. Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press. Berthele, Raphael Learning a second dialect: A model of idiolectal dissonance. In Dialectology Meets Typology. Geeraerts, Dirk Vagueness's puzzles, polysemy's vagaries. Prospects and problems of prototype theory. Meaning, Naming, and Context. Een onderzoek naar kleding- en voetbaltermen. Goebl, Hans Recent advances in Salzburg dialectometry. Literary and Linguistic Computing Goossens, Jan Strukturelle Sprachgeographie.
Moerdijk, Alfons, and Dirk Geeraerts Het systematische dialectwoordenboek en de lexicologische gebruiker. Taal en Tongval Nerbonne, John, and Peter Kleiweg Toward a dialectological yardstick. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics Travaux de l'Institut de Linguistique de Lund Schippan, Thea Lexikologie der deutschen Gegenwartssprache.
Sharifian, Farzad Cultural conceptualisations in English words: A study of Aboriginal children in Perth. Language and Education Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 39 Speelman, Dirk, and Dirk Geeraerts The role of concept characteristics in lexical dialectometry. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 2: Speelman, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers, and Dirk Geeraerts Profile-based linguistic uniformity as a generic method for comparing language varieties.
Computers and the Humanities Swanenberg, Jos Lexicale variatie cognitief-semantisch benaderd. Over het benoemen van vogels in Zuid-Nederlandse dialecten. Szelid, Veronika, and Dirk Geeraerts Usage-based dialectology. Emotion concepts in the Southern Csango dialect. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 6: Measuring and parameterizing lexical convergence and divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese Augusto Soares da Silva Abstract Following the model provided by the sociolectometrical and sociolexicological study that Geeraerts, Grondelaers, and Speelman performed for Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch, the present study investigates the relationship between the vocabulary of European Portuguese and that of Brazilian Portuguese.
Focusing on the lexical field of clothing terms and that of football terms, two main issues: European and Brazilian Portuguese, lectal variation, lexical sociolectometry, lexical variation, onomasiological variation, pluricentric languages, quantitative corpus sociolexicology, synonyms 1. Introduction This paper aims to present the main aspects and results of a research study into the lexical relationship between European Portuguese EP and Brazilian Portuguese BP. There are two main issues: Both issues involve a diachronic analysis, an external one for the former and an internal one for the latter.
Other item-related and concept-related features will also be analyzed. Additionally, this study provides some insights into the synchronic issue of lexi- 42 Augusto Soares da Silva cal stratification in both varieties so as to evaluate whether distance between the standard and substandard strata is greater in BP or EP. Among the hypotheses about the relationships between EP and BP, it is conjectured i that there is an increasing influence of BP on EP and African varieties as a result of the popularity of Brazilian soap operas and football, as well as Brazilian emigration; ii that BP is more receptive to loanwords; iii that there is a greater distance between formal and informal registers in BP than in EP; and iv that despite the lack of clear hypotheses stated in the literature, a progressive and inevitable fragmentation of the Portuguese language is taking place i.
The present investigation is concerned with onomasiological variation involving denotational synonyms. The empirical background consists of several thousand observations of the use of alternative terms that designate 43 nominal concepts from the lexical fields of football and clothing. This corpus-based onomasiological investigation follows up on the original sociolectometrical and sociolexicological study that Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman performed for Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch.
Similar to Geeraerts et al. This paper is divided into six sections. Following this introduction, the second section provides the essential elements of the theoretical and methodological framework of this cognitive and quantitative sociolexicological study of the Portuguese language. Special emphasis is placed on the mutual impact of uniformity and item-related features. Additionally, the fifth section gives some insights into the question of stratification.
Cognitive Linguistics is a peer-reviewed journal of international scope. The latter situation is one Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity 27 that would be of interest to us could it be the case that lesser known concepts are lexically more heterogeneous than others? Brazilian Portuguese imports a larger number of loanwords and adapts and integrates them more easily than European Portuguese. Table 8 shows that the global divergence observed earlier is associated with two internal changes: Linguistic stereotypes as cognitive reference points in social cognition. Lexical and lexical-semantic variation Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity in dialects Dirk Geeraerts and Dirk Speelman 23 Measuring and parameterizing lexical convergence and divergence between European and Brazilian Portuguese Augusto Soares da Silva 41 Awesome insights into semantic variation Justyna A.
The conclusions and topics for further research are given in the last section. In this way, we hope to contribute to the development of Portuguese sociolinguistics and particularly to the issue of convergence and divergence between the European and Brazilian varieties of the language see Soares da Silva , a. Lexical convergence and divergence in Portuguese 43 2. Background and methodology Differences between EP and BP exist at all levels of linguistic structure. Innovative and conservative trends have emerged in both varieties, such that tradition is not the privilege of EP nor is innovation the privilege of BP.
One example is the famous essay written by Brazilian linguist Bagno However, linguistic purism is growing stronger in Brazil nowadays. Recently, a Federal bill made provision for forbidding the use of foreign words and stipulated the payment of fines for those who breached the law see Faraco BP presents a situation of diglossia — there is a clear distance between the idealized and prescriptive traditional norm and the real norm or norms used in big city centers — and also a wide dialectal continuum Mattos e Silva , while an increasing standardization of EP has been observed since the democratic revolution.
BP is now facing two major challenges: A population of million Brazilians is foreseen in the next 15 years, that is to say, a 40 million increase in population Castilho As mentioned in the previous section, the four hypotheses about lexical relationships between EP and BP are: As for the hypothesis of divergence, a well-known journalist wrote in a Portuguese reference newspaper: The object of study is a specific form of lexical variation, namely formal onomasiological variation Geeraerts, Grondelaers, and Bakema Onomasiological variation is formal when many different terms are used to refer to the same entity.
This variation is not due to a different conceptual classification of the same entity, but rather to the use of many different synonymous terms, i. Formal onomasiological variation is particularly interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view because the use of denotational synonyms generally gives some hints as to the relationships existing between language varieties. Indeed, denotational synonyms are likely to reveal sociolinguistic differences, i.
Formal onomasiological variation, of which contextual variation is an integral part, is essentially the most specific subject of sociolexicology and of this study. A third lexical field is still under study — health. The empirical background of this sociolexicological study consists of several thousand observations of the use of denotational synonyms which designate 43 nominal concepts from football and clothing terminologies.
Material was extracted from three different sources: All the material from i and iii was manually extracted. The sub-corpus of football contains 2. The sub-corpus of clothing extends to 1. This corpus is structured according to geographical, diachronic and stylistic variables and has, at present, an extension of 4 million tokens from the formal register used in sports newspapers and fashion magazines and 15 million tokens from the informal register of Internet football chats and clothes labels.
The analysis was carried out for 21 sets of synonymous terms or onomasiological profiles from the lexical field of football, which means that a total number of terms were studied in a database containing 90, observations of these terms used in sports newspapers and , observations of their use in Internet chats.
The analysis is also comprised of 22 onomasiological profiles of clothing items for men M and women F , which means that terms were studied in a database compiling 12, observations of their use in fashion magazines and 3, observations of their use in labels and price tags pictured from clothes shops. All the profiles including their denotational synonyms are listed in the appendix terms with a strong popular mark were excluded to avoid inflating differ2 ences.
The name of each profile is translated into English. The profiles for football are: The profiles for clothing are: The quantitative methods used to measure convergence and divergence as well as other types of distances between EP and BP are uniformity U measures and featural A measures.
Both were developed by Geeraerts, Grondelaers, and Speelman The onomasiological profile of a concept in a particular language variety is the set of alternative synonymous terms used to designate that concept in that language variety, together with their frequencies. Uniformity is a measure for the similarity between the profiles in the different language varieties. For instance, uniformity between two samples of data is obtained as follows: This result is obtained by making the sum of the lowest relative frequencies of each alternative term: Technically, the uniformity for a concept can be calculated with the following formula see Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman The relation between Y1 and Y2 — in the present study, between EP and BP — is accounted for from a pragmatic and communicative perspective rather than a structural one.
In fact, the attested occurrences of an onomasiological profile are an important factor for calculating the convergence or divergence between language varieties.
Diachronically, convergence and divergence can be quantified through increasing or decreasing uniformity. Synchronically, the greater the distance there is between the standard and substandard registers, the smaller uniformity there is between these two registers. This is a rule arbitrarily chosen to account for a statistical margin of error. These percentages equal the sum of the smallest relative frequency for each alternative term, i.
The increase in uniformity between EP and BP from Another profile-based uniformity measure consists of calculating uniformity within a single language variety. The internal uniformity reaches its highest value when all the speakers, in every circumstance, choose the same lexical item to denote a given concept. The internal uniformity value will decrease the more terms there are competing to denote the same concept, and the more dominant some of these terms become.
As Table 2 shows, the inter- Lexical convergence and divergence in Portuguese 49 nal uniformity is greater in the s Portuguese database I This can be explained by the two factors which contribute to determine internal uniformity. First, P50 has a single term which is clearly dominant whereas B50 has two dominant terms. Second, there are more highly frequent alternative terms in B50 than in P The proportion of terms possessing a special feature, or A measure, is given in the following formulae.
If we consider the loanword feature, for example, the highest 50 Augusto Soares da Silva score 1 is given to loanwords keeping their original form, and the lowest score 0. The internal linguistic factors which may have played a role in the global evolution of the two varieties will be discussed in section 4. Three questions need to be asked: Is internal uniformity greater in EP or BP?
Figure 1 systematizes the percentages obtained in the calculation of external U and internal I uniformity for football terms: This means that convergence is found at the level of the most frequent concepts see Table 4. At the same time, the results show a great distance between the two varieties along the three time periods. These results, therefore, do not confirm the divergence expectation between EP and BP. There seems to be a convergence pattern in the first two periods, but only at the level of the weighted measure.
The convergence pattern is not very clear, since the difference between the percentages from both periods is not high. It should be mentioned that all the phonetic and graphic variants were considered as alternative terms of the onomasiological profile in question. However, golo P and gol B , as well as chuto P and chute B , were not split into alternative terms, because they are intrinsic to their respective national variety.
The results of four alternative calculations are the following: A similar stable situation is evidenced by the result of the last alternative calculation. This means that the inclusion or exclusion of a variant or of a single concept may change the picture entirely, which may pose some problems, particularly since the studied concepts were picked by hand and do not represent the entire lexical field. However, the remainder of the calculations still indicates convergence between and Interestingly, the result is the same whether or not the phonetic and graphic variants are separated.
Furthermore, the concepts studied are representative of the lexical field of football and there is a balance between the more frequent and the less frequent concepts. The question of the preference for the weighted measure may be more problematic. Given the alternative calculations, we might in fact question whether the unweighted measure is not being given less attention than it may actually deserve.
We reiterate that, for the present study, the pragmatic perspective which integrates the differences in frequency of the concepts studied is more important than the structural perspective which attributes the same weight equally to every concept. For this reason, and because the concepts studied are common, the unweighted calculation will continue to be used. Another issue in our discussion is the behavior of the profiles, i. The only common characteristic is the fact that some of the profiles relate to less frequent concepts, as Table 4 shows we will come back to this question at the end of this section.
In conclusion, the results seem to indicate a slight convergence between EP and BP between and However, this is a restricted convergence. Volume 25 Issue 4 Nov , pp.
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