Transcript A common-sense paradigm for linguistic research

A common-sense paradigm
for linguistic research
Patrick Hanks
Professor in Lexicography
University of Wolverhampton
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How does meaning work?
•
A central question that needs to be addressed more
carefully in linguistics, in the light of corpus evidence.
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A WORKING HYPOTHESIS: Meanings are
interpersonal events
–
–
created and understood by pattern matching
subconsciously matching uses of words in texts and
conversations with patterns of word use that have been sorted
and stored in our brains.
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The idiom principle
• “Many if not most meanings require the presence of more
than one word for their normal realization. [...] Patterns of
co-selection among words, which are much stronger than
any description has yet allowed for, have a direct
connection with meaning.” – John Sinclair (1998).
• This implies that lexicographers and linguists need to study
collocations and phraseology in much more detail than
has been done up to now.
• This is now possible, thanks to the evidence of large
corpora.
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Do words have meaning?
• No. They have only meaning potential.
• Different aspects of a word’s meaning potential are
realized in different contexts.
– Corpus evidence shows that word meaning is probabilistic,
dependent on patterns arranged around prototypical collocations
– not defined by necessary and sufficient conditions (N&SCs), as
Leibniz and other great philosophers believed.
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Terminology vs. ordinary word
meaning
• Specialist terminology is defined by N&SCs.
• But such N&SCs have to be defined by using ordinary
words in their most normal contexts.
• Terminology is not natural language.
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Case study: What’s the meaning
of ‘elephant’?
• High probability: An elephant is a huge grey mammal
with a trunk and tusks. Elephants are traditionally believed
to have a good memory, etc., etc. …
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Exploiting features of a word’s
normal meaning
• Low probability (idiom): The elephant in the room (an
obvious and important fact that everyone concerned is
ignoring).
• Low probability (new concept) : elephant shrew (a species
of shrew with a long nose, like an elephant’s trunk).
• Low probability (new concept): elephant rhubarb (a
species of rhubarb that grows to be unusually large).
These expressions (and many others) exploit different features
of the normal meaning of elephant.
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Phraseology and allusion
Some anomalous corpus lines:
1.[His] bitter mien suggests inner torment and an elephant’s
memory for grievance.
2.The competition has come to resemble an elephant’s
graveyard.
3.[Referring to a project in the 1940s to design a new kind of
airliner] The project eventually became a white elephant and
was scrapped.
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Default meaning, idiom, and
allusion
• HYPOTHESIS: Concrete nouns such as elephant have a
central default meaning.
• But in phrase after phrase, corpus evidence shows that
other semantic forces are at work—forces not adequately
accounted for in current dictionaries, ncluding:
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Idioms
Allusions to folk culture
Exploitations of phraseological norms
Etc.
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Nouns, verbs, and adjectives
• Are noun meanings different in kind from verb or adjective
meanings?
• THREE HYPOTHESES:
• Nouns relate linguistic concepts to the world.
• Adjective subclassify nouns.
• Verbs relate nouns (noun concepts) to each other.
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Resonance theory
HYPOTHESIS: Meaning consists (at least in part) of three
kinds of psychological resonance:
• Experiential resonance
– The literal meaning of a word and its associations
– A word like ‘summer’ evokes all sorts of experiences, some highly
personal, others shared with other speakers of a language
• Semantic resonance
– Metaphors and other kinds of figurative language
• Intertextual resonance
– Phraseology picked up from someone else
– Aesop, Shakespeare, the Bible, or Fred next door
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Norms and Exploitations
• In order to understand meaning in language, it is
essential to distinguish between:
– norms (the basic shared conventions that S and H
mutually rely on – including conventional metaphors),
and
– exploitations (freshly created metaphors and other
tropes, unusual phrasing, etc.)
• Two different rule systems.
• The two rule systems interact.
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Grice (1975): relevance theory: people also communicate by
exploiting norms of linguistic behaviour, as well as by conforming to
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them
Regular and irregular
linguistic performance
• Norms are first-order regularities of linguistic behaviour
(usage)
• Alternations and idioms are second-order regularities of
linguistic behaviour
• Exploitations are irregularities, deliberately created by a
speaker or writer for rhetorical or literary effect.
– It is only by exploiting norms that we can ever say anything new.
• Mistakes are irregularities that occur accidentally, not
deliberately
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Exploitation rule 1: ellipsis
(omitting the obvious)
• I hazarded various Stuartesque destinations such
as Bali and Istanbul.
– Julian Barnes
– In isolation, this sentence is incomprehensible.
– But in context, the meaning is clear.
– (The phrase “a guess at” has been omitted, “because it’s
obvious”. See next slide.)
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Extended context makes the
meaning clear(er)
Stuart needlessly scraped a fetid plastic comb over his cranium.
‘Where are you going? You know, just in case I need to get in
touch.’
‘State secret. Even Gillie doesn’t know. Just told her to take light
clothes.’
He was still smirking, so I presumed that some juvenile guessing
game was required of me. I hazarded various Stuartesque
destinations like Florida, Bali, Crete and Western Turkey, each
of which was greeted by a smug nod of negativity. I essayed all
the Disneylands of the world and a selection of tarmacked spice
islands; I patronised him with Marbella, applauded him with
Zanzibar, tried aiming straight with Santorini. I got nowhere.
• (Other exploited verb uses in this extract are in italics)
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Exploitation Rule 2: Anomalous
argument
• Always vacuum your moose from the snout up,
and brush your pheasant with freshly baked bread,
torn not sliced.
—from The Massachusetts Journal of Taxidermy, 1986
(per Associated Press newswire)
• Can you vacuum a moose? ... Is it normal?
• “Can you say X in English? – the wrong question to ask.
Ask instead, “Is it normal?”
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Exploitation Rule 3: Metaphor
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Stoke Mandeville station is a little oasis; clean and bright and friendly.
New Town Hotel -- a relaxing oasis for professional and business men.
Driffield, which was a pleasant oasis in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
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The planned open-cast site was a pleasant oasis in a decaying industrial
landscape.
She regards her job as an oasis in a desert of coping with Harry’s illness
… an oasis in the midst of this desert of feuding.
•
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An oasis in English (and other European languages) is prototypically
pleasant, relaxing, calm, and surrounded by barren, nasty desert.
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The reality may be very different. What are the prototypical attributes of the equivalent
concept in Arabic?
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Measuring Collocations
• Collocations: “You shall know a word by the company it
keeps.” – J. R. Firth.
• Patterns: “We must distinguish from the general mush of
goings-on those elements which appear to be part of a
patterned process.” – J. R. Firth.
• The meaning of a word in context depends to a large extent
on its collocational preferences.
• Collocations in corpora can be measured, using statistical
tests such as mutual information, t-score, etc.
– See www.sketchengine.co.uk/
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Salient collocates for ‘oasis’ (SkE)
BNC freq for ‘oasis’: 307
Collocate
greenery
serenity
desert
calm
lush
tranquillity
peaceful
welcome
pleasant
tropical
Co-occurrences
3
2
12
7
2
2
3
4
3
4
Salience score
8.11
7.53
7.07
7.28
6.82
6.76
5.75
5.68
5.12
5.07
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Conclusions (1)
• Nouns (typically) are referring expressions.
– They represent concepts (and the world).
– They ‘plug into’ verbs.
• Verbs are ‘power sockets’:
• Plug some nouns into a verb, and you can make a
meaning, i.e.
– construct a proposition
– ask a question
– interact socially
– etc.
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Conclusions (2)
• Meanings in language are associated with words in
prototypical phraseological patterns (not words in isolation).
• Meanings in text are interpreted by pattern matching
– i.e. mapping bit of text onto the patterns in our heads
– The patterns in our heads come from ‘lexical priming’ (Hoey 2005)
– Members of a language community share primed patterns
• Some uses match well onto patterns; these are ‘norms’
• Some uses seem surprising; these are ‘exploitations of
norms’[or mistakes].
• For each language, a corpus-driven lexical database will
identify the normal phraseology associated with each word
• A set of exploitation rules is needed to explain creative usage.
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A “double-helix” theory of meaning
in language
• A human language is a system of rule-governed
behaviour
– But not one, monolithic rule system.
• Rather, it is two interlinked systems of rules:
– 1) Rules governing normal usage
– 2) Rules governing exploitation of norms.
• The two systems interact, producing new norms:
– Today’s exploitation may be tomorrow’s norm.
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