Transcript BeReEm - Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu

BeReEm
(Belief, Reason, Emotion)
Thinking about THINKING:
Constructions of Polish mental
verbs in discourse
Iwona Kokorniak and Karolina Krawczak
Presentation outline
1. Introduction into the project
2. Cognitive grammar assumptions
3. Corpus data
4. The adopted methodology
5. Results
6. Conclusions
7. Research perspectives
Aim of the project
• selected abstract concepts –
investigation of meaning crosslinguistically and diachronically
• syntactic-semantic analysis of examples
from the PWN Corpus of the Polish
language to start with
Cognitive Grammar (CG) assumptions:
Construal vs. coding
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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
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
(1) a. Peter has bought a red bike from his
friend Tom.
b. His friend Tom has sold Peter a red bike.
c. A red bike has been sold to Peter (by Tom).
d. *Peter has been bought a bike from Tom.
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
case markers depicting the relationships between the
participants involved in the processes are semantically
motivated
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)
hardly ever does language use two linguistic units to
express exactly the same ideas
Myśleć o vs. sądzić o
‘to think about’
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What’s the difference between the two
lexical items?
Both are mental verbs
Both can be combined with o+LOC:
(2) Co myślisz/sądzisz o wysyłaniu polskich żołnierzy do Iraku?
o+LOC – the mental experience is not directly
focused on the object of thinking but rather it
takes an indefinite constant circular movement
round the focal point (Radden and Dirven
2007)
The Polish PWN
Corpus data
• extracts from 386 books, 977 issues of
185 newspapers and magazines, 84
recorded conversations, 207 websites
and several hundred promotional
leaflets
• 40 million words; demo online version of
the corpus used – 7.5 million words
• 239 random hits of myśleć o
• 139 total hits of sądzić o
Coding schema categories
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Sentence tense: Pr, Pt, Ft, Not Applicable
Verb form: Finite, Infinite, Participle
Mood: Conditional, Indicative, Imperative
Interrogative: Interrogative, Noninterrogative, Indirect Question
Transitivity: Intransitive, Transitive, Complex Transitive
Negation: Negative, Positive
Aspect: Imperfect, Perfect, Aspect Not Applicable
Impersonal Constructions: Reflexive,
Impersonal Construction, Infinitive
-ono_participle,
Person: V1, V2, V3, VNA (e.g. należałoby się domyślać)
Number: VSg, VPl
Subject form and semantics
Object form and semantics
Non-
Subject
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Form: NP, Pronoun, Numeral, Adjective, Proper
name:
Krawiec, On, Sześciu, Niewidomi, Adam
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Visibility: Overt, Nonovert
Sołtys myślał chwilę o swojej córce i nagle ożywił się…
myślał wtedy o znaku krzyża…
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Subject competence: Specialist, Nonspecialist:
Komisarz
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vs. Nikt
Semantics: Human, Metonymic, Personified
Dyrektor vs. Ministerstwo Finansów vs. pan Osiełek
Direct Object
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Form: NP, Proper name, Pronoun, Not
Applicable, Clause
Case: o+LOC
Person: Obj1, Obj2, Obj3
Number: ObjSg, ObjPl, ObjNA (nie myślał
o niczym)
Semantics
NP: Human, Concrete, Abstract, Activity
Clause: Accomplishment,
State, Activity, Hypothetical
Achievement,
Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) for Verb
Person, Subject Visibility & Object Semantics
MCA for Object form and Object
semantics
MCA for Subject form and semantics,
Interrogative sentences, Negation and
Mood
Results: examples
(3) Myślałem o Makowskim, o Waliszewskim, o Czyżewskim, o Cybisie, o
naszej walce o stosunek bardziej zdecydowany, bardziej surowy
wobec ocen qualité malarskiej obrazów. V1/Nonovert
(4) A co pan sądzi o tym dziś... V3/Overt/SubjHUM/Inter
(5) Co jednak dziś należy sądzić o owych podobieństwach, dziś - to znaczy
późnym wieczorem niedzielnym, na kilkanaście godzin przed
planowanym na poniedziałek ósmym zabiegiem?
Inter/SubjVisibilityNA
(6) Nie myśl o autobusach zagranicznych typu neoplan. NonInter/Neg/Imp
(7) Przez cały czas gry Adelka myślała o martwych zwierzętach na stole w
przedpokoju. Obj2CONCR
(8) Chcę zadzwonić do mojej najlepszej przyjaciółki, by powiedzieć jej
dokładnie, co sądzę o jej nowym chłopaku. Obj2HUM/IndirQ
(9) A co sądzi o tym wszystkim policja? Inter/SubjMETO
Results: summary
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Wh- Subj sądzić o+LOC (139) Co pan sądzi o pomyśle Pawła
Piskorskiego? ‘What do YOU think about Paul Piskorski’s idea?’
Subj myśleć o+LOC (231) Z przerażeniem myślę o tym, co mnie teraz
czeka. ‘With terror I’m thinking about what awaits me’
Wh- Subj myśleć o+LOC (8)
about it?’
Co myślicie o tym? ‘What do you think
Conclusions
• Polysemy of myśleć o+LOC: ‘opinion’
vs. ‘activity of thinking’
• Synonymous forms for ‘opinion’: myśleć
o+LOC vs. sądzić o+LOC, but different
in language formality
Reserch perspectives
• Cross-linguistic analysis:
• Polysemy of think about in English reflected by aspect
(10) What do you think about…?
‘Co myślisz o…? vs.
(11) What are you thinking about?
‘O czym myślisz?
• Other criteria to be examined and
compared with the Polish data
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.
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!
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