Transcript BeReEm - Wydział Anglistyki UAM :: AMU Faculty of English

Conceptual gender of
THOUGHT in Polish
Iwona Kokorniak
[email protected]
Presentation outline
1. Linguistic relativity
2. Grammatical gender and natural gender
3. Differences between females and males
4. Study question and research
5. Data
6. Analysis
7. Results
8. Observations
Linguistic relativity
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The idea that thought is shaped by language is
most commonly associated with Benjamin Lee
Whorf (1956).
linguistic diversity - their speakers too should
differ in how they perceive and act in
objectively similar situations
strong Whorfian view - thought and action are
entirely determined by language - abandoned.
Linguistics relativity – weak version
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answering the question whether language shapes thought
has proven to be a very difficult task
evidence to the affirmative (e.g. Boroditsky 2001,
Bowerman 1996, Davidoff et al 1999. Gentner and Imai
1997, Levinson 1996, Lucy 1992, Dehaene at al 1999)
evidence to the contrary (e.g. Heider 1972, Malt at al
1999, Li and Gleitman 2002)
recently a considerable resurgence of research available
language is a powerful tool in shaping thought
one’s native language plays a role in shaping habitual
thought
Linguistic relativity and grammatical
gender
• in a language with grammatical gender
speakers are required to mark objects as
gendered
• definite articles, gendered pronouns,
adjectives or even verbs modified to agree in
gender with the nouns
• Does talking about inanimate objects as if
they were masculine or feminine actually
lead people to think of inanimate objects as
having a gender?
Grammatical gender
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Boroditsky’s (2003) finding indicates that people’s
thinking about objects is influenced by the
grammatical genders their native language assigns
to the objects’ names
these results suggest that the seemingly arbitrary
linguistic processes, such as grammatical gender,
are pervasive in most fundamental domains of
thought, and influence the assignment of the
natural gender
Grammatical gender and natural gender
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subjects rated grammatically feminine objects to be more
similar to females and grammatically masculine objects
more similar to males
Spanish and German speakers asked to describe a ‘key’
(a word masculine in German and feminine in Spanish)
and ‘bridge’ (feminine in German and masculine in
Spanish)
‘key’ in German was ‘hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated,
and useful’, while in Spanish it was ‘golden, intricate, little,
lovely, shiny, and tiny’.
‘bridge’, in German : ‘beautiful, elegant, ‘fragile’, peaceful,
pretty, and slender’, while in Spanish ‘big, dangerous,
long, strong, sturdy and towering’.
Grammatical gender and natural gender
1a) Beate ist Eigentümerin dieses Grundstücks.
Beate.FEM is owner-FEM of.this property
‘Beate is the owner of this property’.
1b) Die Stadt ist Eigentümerin dieses Grundstücks.
The.FEM city.FEM. is owner-FEM of.this property
‘The city is the owner of this property’
1c) Die Stadt ist Eigentümer dieses Grundstücks.
The.FEM city.FEM. is owner-MASC of.this property
‘The city is the owner of this property’ (Panther and Thornburg 2009:
19-22)
Grammatical gender and natural gender
2a) Der Landkreis ist Eigentümer dieses Grundstücks.
The.MASC county.MASC is owner.MASC of.this property
‘The county is the owner of this property’
2b)
*Der Landkreis ist Eigentümerin dieses Grundstücks.
The.MASC county.MASC is owner.FEM of.this property
‘The county is the owner of this property’
•
Abstract categories
3) Kunst is die Vermittlerin des Unassprechlichen.
Art.FEM is the mediator-FEM of.the unspeakable
‘Art is the mediator of the unspeakable’ (Panther and Thornburg
2009: 19-22)
Differences between males and females – gender
stereotyping
Study question
• Does grammatical gender influence
people’s way of thinking about
THOUGHT?
• myśl ‘thought, idea’– feminine
grammatical gender
• pogląd ‘opinion, view’– masculine
grammatical gender
Data
• the National Corpus of Polish Language
(NKJP) (http://nkjp.pl/),
• over 240 million words
• advanced search capacities
• myśl – 19,356 occurrences
• pogląd – 5,931 occurrences
• myśl – 269 out of 1000 concordances
• pogląd – 322 out of 1000 concordances
Data excluded
•
Where no adjectives or adjectival phrases were
present
4a)Pogląd taki budzi znaczne wątpliwości,
‘Such an opinion raises considerable doubts’
4b) Nie istnieje żadna myśl o reformach…’
‘No thought about reforms exists…’
4c) Jedna jest ziemia, jedna myśl na niej…
‘There is one Earth, and one thought on it…’
4d) Mam myśl!
‘I’ve got an idea’
Data analysed
• pogląd ‘opinion, view’
5a) Mieliśmy zbyt idealistyczny pogląd na człowieka’
(AdjMasculine)
‘We’ve had a too idealistic view about human beings’
5b) To bardzo pociągający pogląd i pochlebny (AdjFeminine)
‘it is a very attractive and flattering view’
5c) Każdy jego pogląd wydaje się jasny (AdjNeutral)
‘His each view seems to be clear’
Data analysed
•
myśl ‘thought, idea’
6a)Jego myśl okazuje się bezradna
‘His idea turns out to be helpless’ (AdjFeminine)
6b)Ta trzeźwa myśl z miejsca ostudziła mój miłosny zapał
(AdjMasculine)
‘This sobering thought instantly cooled down my enthusiasm for
love’
6c)Przychodzi mi do głowi dziwna myśl (AdjNeutral)
‘A strange thought comes to my mind’
pogląd ‘opinion, view’
myśl ‘thought, idea’
Results
Observations
• It is harder to ascribe feminine attributes
to masculine nouns than the other way
round
• Results only partially corroborate
observations made by Boroditsky (2001,
2003, 2003), Boroditsky at al.(2003) or
Panther and Thornburg (2009)
References
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Boroditsky, Lera. 2003. “Linguistic relativity”, in: L. Nadel (ed.) Encyclopedia of
cognitive science. London: MacMillan, 917-921.
Boroditsky, Lera, Laura Schmidt, and Webb Philips. 2003. “Sex, syntax and
semantics”, in: D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow (eds.) Language in mind:
Advances in the study of language and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
(Bradford Book), 61-79.
Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Linda L. Thornburg. 2009. “Introduction: On figuration and
grammar”, in: K-U. Panther, L. L. Thornburg and A. Barcelona (eds.). Metonymy and
metaphor in grammar [Human Cognitive Processing 25]. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 144.
Brannon, Linda. 2011. Gender: Psychological perspectives. Boston: Pearson.
Szczepaniak, Monika. 2005. “Męskość w opresji? Dylematy męskości w kulturze
Zachodu”, in: Elżbieta Durys and Elżbieta Ostrowska (eds.), Gender: Wizerunki
kobiet i mężczyzn w kuturze. Kraków: RABID, 25-37.
Thank you for your attention
[email protected]
Construal vs. coding in CG
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“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
CG assumptions about construals
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“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)
Construal of mental verbs
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mental verbs represent what originates in the subject’s
mind, the ‘internal reality’ (Shinzato 2004: 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’, X myśli coś zrobić ’intend to do sth’, X myśli.
‘X thinks’, etc.
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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)
Object of study:
think about vs. myśleć o
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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 IndoEuropean family
Aim of the study
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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 the two?
possible with the advent of statistical software such
as R (http://cran.r-project.org)
Statistics: Multifactorial Correspondence Analysis
(Glynn 2009, 2012), Logistic Regression Analysis
(Grondelaers et al. 2008; Glynn 2010)
can analyze the structure of complex data
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
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Formal variables
Tense: Pr, Pt, Ft, Not Applicable
Verb form: Finite, Infinite, Participle
Mood: Conditional, Indicative, Imperative
Interrogative: Interrogative, Noninterrogative, Indirect Question
Transitivity: Intransitive, Transitive,
Negation: Negative, Positive
Aspect: English: Simple, Progessive, Perfect Simple, Perfect
Progressive; Polish: Imperfect, Perfect, Aspect Not Applicable;
Impersonal Constructions: Personal Constructions, Reflexive, ono_participle, Infinitive
Person: V1, V2, V3, VNA (e.g. należałoby się domyślać)
Number: VSg, VPl
Adverb Semantics: Manner, Intensifier, Addition, Contrast, Location,
Temporal, Frequency, Hypothetical
Subject form and semantics
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Form: NP, Pronoun, Numeral, Adjective, Proper name
Visibility: Overt, Nonovert
Subject competence: Specialist, Nonspecialist:
Semantics: Human, Metonymic,
Direct Object form and semantics
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Form: NP, Proper name, Pronoun, Clause,
Gerund
Case: o+LOC
Person: Obj1, Obj2, Obj3
Number: ObjSg, ObjPl, ObjNA (nie myślał
o niczym)
Semantics
NP: Human, Thing, Abstract, Event
Clause: Accomplishment, Achievement,
State, Activity, Hypothetical, Event
Correspondence Analysis for Polish: Object Semantics,
Adverb Semantics & Person
Correspondence Analysis for English: Object Semantics,
Adverb Semantics & Person
Correspondence Analysis for Polish & English:
Language, Person & Object Semantics
Correspondence Analysis for Polish & English:
Language, Person & Adverb Semantics
Correspondence Analysis for Polish & English:
Language, Person, Adverb Semantics & Object
Semantics
Logistic Regression Analysis for English vs. Polish
use of THINK ABOUT
Deviance Residuals:
Min
1Q Median
-2.281 -0.908
0.000
3Q
1.015
Max
1.598
Coefficients:
Estimate
2.82696
-1.14736
-1.20056
0.08131
1.11255
-18.48631
-18.90885
-0.23059
-19.21141
0.72270
Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
1.20177
2.352 0.01866 *
0.37518 -3.058 0.00223 **
0.38086 -3.152 0.00162 **
0.24112
0.337 0.73596
0.47876
2.324 0.02013 *
2965.76468 -0.006 0.99503
3002.62643 -0.006 0.99498
0.41421 -0.557 0.57774
1616.58431 -0.012 0.99052
0.29175
2.477 0.01324 *
(Intercept)
NegationPos
V_PersV2
V_PersV3
V_PersVPersNA
Obj_SemanticsObjAccomplishment
Obj_SemanticsObjAchievement
Obj_SemanticsObjActivity
Obj_SemanticsObjEvent
Obj_SemanticsObjHuman
(…)
AdverbINTENS
-2.31274
1.21466 -1.904 0.05691 .
AdverbLOC
13.05619 821.14483
0.016 0.98731
AdverbMANNER
-1.26970
1.18072 -1.075 0.28222
AdverbTEMP
-2.36623
1.16856 -2.025 0.04288 *
--Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
(Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)
Null deviance: 665.39
Residual deviance: 492.19
AIC: 538.19
on 479
on 457
degrees of freedom
degrees of freedom
Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 17
P: 0
C: 0.795
R2: 0.398
Results: Examples
1. Ja ciągle jednak myślę o tym, żeby pojechać w kraj! (1st Person + Adverb of
Contrast)
[I am still thinking about going round the country!]
2. But can't we think about re-phrasing that so we get this idea of this joint
statement, some sort of dialogue on Okay. (1st Person + Object Achievement)
3. and I've just been thinking about lavatory while you've been speaking. (1st Person
+ Object Place)
4. Think about the lock. You want privacy, but you don't want your child to lock
himself in. (2nd Person + Object Thing)
5. the more she thinks about being depressed the more she'll get depressed. (3rd
Person + Object State)
6. W sadzie myślała o tym, że nie da się zatrzymać kwitnienia drzew (3rd Person +
Adverb of location)
[in the orchard, she thought about the fact that one cannot stop trees from blooming.]
7. It might be a good idea to start thinking about adoption. (Person N/A + Object
Event)
Observations
The results of the Correspondence Analysis show the following
correlations:
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adverbs of contrast and addition, objects designating achievement
or place & 1st Person;
objects designating accomplishments and things & 2nd Person;
Adverbs of location and intensifiers & 3rd Person
Objects designating events & impersonal uses
The results of the Logistic Regression Analysis for think about vs. myśleć
o reveal the following predictors:
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For English: temporal and intensifying adverbs, the use of positive
sentences, and second person uses
For Polish: impersonal uses
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
epistemicznych. Warszawa: Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej UW.
polskich
czasowników
Dąbrowska, Ewa. 1997. Cognitive semantics and the Polish dative. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Glynn, D., 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, D. 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, D. 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, D., K. Fischer (eds.), 2010. Quantitative Methods in Cognitive Semantics: Corpus-driven
approaches. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
References
Glynn, D. & J. 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 ofer “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.
Grzegorczykowi, 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 and 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.
THANK YOU!

[email protected]
[email protected]