Transcript Norms and Exploitations

Corpus Pattern Analysis:
new light on words and
meanings
Patrick Hanks
Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics,
Charles University in Prague
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Talk Outline
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Collocations: the work of J. M. Sinclair
Phraseology and terminology in dictionaries:
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Creativity in language: exploiting norms
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Terminological words need to be defined in relation to the world
and other related terms (and etymology)
Everyday words need to be explained in relation to the different
patterns of use in which they are found
exploitations are different in kind from normal uses
Collocations and phraseology: neglected in dictionaries
A Pattern Dictionary
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John Sinclair (1933-2007)
Collocations:
• “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.”
—J. M. Sinclair 1998, ‘The Lexical Item’ in E. Weigand (ed.)
Contrastive Lexical Semantics. Benjamins.
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Idiomaticity vs. Open Choice
• “The principle of idiom is that a language user has available to him
or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute
single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into
segments.”
—Sinclair 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, p. 110
• “Tending towards open choice is what we can dub the
terminological tendency, which is the tendency for a word to have a
fixed meaning in reference to the world. ... tending towards
idiomaticity is the phraseological tendency, where words tend to go
together and make meanings by their combinations.”
—Sinclair 2004. Trust the Text, p. 29
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The terminological extreme:
strobilation
“Jellies live their lives in two body forms or stages. There is a polyp or
attached stage which resembles tiny sea anemones ... and a medusa or
free-swimming stage. The trick to getting jellies to go through their life
cycle (both stages) is to get the attached polyps to begin to strobilate,
or bud off new juvenile jellies. ...
“Head Curator Lisa Scott (class of 2007) designed and built a Moon Jelly
Strobilation display for her Senior Project. She was able to
successfully strobilate jellies which will ensure that we have a steady
supply of adult jellies for our popular kreisel, or jelly display. So next
time you stop by the Aquarium make sure to check out Lisa Scott’s
juvenile jellies in the new Moon Jelly Strobilation Display.”
—from the Cabrillo High School Aquarium project, California,
http://www.cabrilloaquarium.org/aqurium-exhibits/moon-jelly-strobilation.html
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How is strobilation treated in
English dictionaries? (1)
• (N)ODE (1998): It’s not in.
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How is strobilation treated in
English dictionaries? (2)
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Merriam Webster's Online Dictionary:
Main Entry: stro·bi·la·tion ...
Etymology: New Latin strobila
: asexual reproduction (as in various coelenterates and
tapeworms) by transverse division of the body into
segments which develop into separate individuals,
zooids, or proglottids.
Does the etymology tell the reader anything?
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How is strobilation treated in
English dictionaries? (3)
Collins English Dictionary (1979):
• strobilation ... asexual reproduction by division into
segments, as in tapeworms and jellyfishes.
• strobilaceous Botany. relating to a cone or cones.
• strobila ... the body of a tapeworm, consisting of a string
of similar segments (proglottides) ... [C19: from Greek
strobilē plug of lint twisted into a cone shape, from
strobilos a fir cone]
• strobilus ... Botany. the technical name for a cone (sense
3). [C18: via Late Latin from Greek strobilos a fir cone]
Collins English Dictionary On Line offers no etymologies, but at
strobilation adds “see also strobile, strobilus, stroboscope”. What is
the reader to make of this?
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strobilation in Wikipedia
“Strobilation or transverse fission is a form of asexual
reproduction consisting of the spontaneous transverse
segmentation of the body. It is observed in certain
cnidarians and helminths. This mode of reproduction is
characterized by high offspring output, which, in the case
of the parasitic tapeworms, is of great significance.”
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Why etymology matters to
terminology
(N)ODE does not have an entry at all.
Merriam Webster mentions NL strobila without gloss or
explanation
Collins (printed book) has a good cluster of related strob- entries,
with informative etymologies.
None of the sources cited mention that the New Latin term strobila
is based on Greek strobilē ‘an act or state of twisting or
whirling’ [not just a piece of twisted lint]. This is related to
strobilos ‘pine cone’ (ultimately a derivative of strephein ‘to
twist or whirl’).
This information is essential to understand the connections –
mentioned by Collins On Line – to strobilus (a pine cone) and
stroboscope (which gave us strobe lighting).
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The phraseological extreme: blow
• collocational preferences: wind, gale, sand, snow, ship; fire,
nose, bubble; building, house, window, fuse.
• 3 core meanings:
– what the wind does
– what a human does when exhaling (e.g. blow a whistle, blow smoke over
other people, blow bubbles, blow one’s nose)
– what an explosion does (e.g. blow a hole in a wall).
• Alternations: active/passive, causative/inchoative, conative,
resultative
• 6 phrasal verbs (blow apart, blow away, blow down, blow off,
blow over, blow up) with more or less independent meanings,
some with more than one pattern (e.g. blow up a balloon vs.
blow up a building).
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The phraseology of blow (ctd.)
• 17 or more idiomatic or figurative expressions, including:
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blow [a project] off course
blow the cobwebs away [= introduce fresh thinking]
blow one's own trumpet [= boast]
blow the whistle on someone or something [= expose wrongdoing]
blow one's brains out [= kill]
blow hot and cold [= vacillate]
blow a fuse [= lose one's temper]
blow the gaff [= expose a secret]
blow a raspberry [= make a rude, derisive noise]
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Exploiting phraseological norms
• Blow up a balloon is a norm for the phrasal verb blow up.
• ‘balloon’ is not a necessary condition of this norm.
• Norms don’t have necessary conditions!
• You can exploit a norm with an anomalous argument, e.g.:
– “When a visiting paramedic distributed free condoms, the
children blew them up and played with them like balloons.”
—from a text on birth control education in Nepal.
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Terminological meaning and
phraseological meaning: discord
second, terminological definition stipulated as an SI unit (in
the Système international d'unités) by a committee of
scientists:
– “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corres- ponding to
the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the
caesium 133 atom.”
Some ordinary phraseology:
• After pausing for a second he must have relented.
• My darling John, our thoughts are with you every second.
• A bird the size of a sparrow beats its wings 14 times a second.
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Terminological and phraseological
meaning: polyphony
[[Human]] organize [[Eventuality]]
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[[He] had organized a mass rally in the city’s Cathedral Square.
• Attempts by the United States to organize a Middle East peace conference
remained deadlocked.
• Notation used in organizing books on shelves or files in a filing cabinet
• All the evidence has led us to organize this book with reference to different
kinds of places.
[[Entity]] {be organized} [Adv[Manner]]
• The brain is organized with a considerable amount of parallel wiring.
[[Human]] organize [[Human Group]]
• In about 1813-14 he organized in Bermondsey a society of workmen.
• Ticha ... helped organize women coffee harvesters.
• Inchoative alternation: Agricultural workers were still denied the right to
organize.
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Terminological meaning and
phraseological meaning: harmony
admit: terminological sense A) ‘say reluctantly’
• Richmond admitted driving a motor vehicle with excess alcohol in his blood.
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Mary Bryce admits a certain sympathy for Norman Lamont.
admit: terminological sense B) ‘allow to enter’:
• A sluice on the lock is opened to admit water.
• The skylights in the galleries admit light through angled screens.
• Each old person admitted to residential care should sign a contract relating to
the rights of residents.
• They [the Baltic nations] were admitted into the United Nations and other
international organizations.
• Joanna had dislocated her hip and was admitted to hospital.
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The lamentable condition of
European lexicography
• Great historical dictionaries (OED, Grimm)
– On 18th-century reductionist principles (Leibniz, Johnson)
• Useful practical handbooks (ODE/COD, Duden, Larousse)
– supplying users with “hints and associations” (Bolinger)
• Pedagogical dictionaries (OALD, LDOCE, Macmillan)
– On 18th-century principles with a bit of added phraseology
– No English dictionary offers a serious account of language use
based on the idiom principle
– Cobuild was at best a first attempt in this direction
• Some European dictionaries (e.g. WDG) attempted to
represent phraseology
– Without corpus evidence they were merely guessing.
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The even more lamentable condition
of American lexicography
• America’s favourite dictionary (Merriam Webster
Collegiate)
– theoretical foundations?? .... historical principles, Latin grammar
– takes no account of corpus evidence, constructions, phraseology, ...
– MW Learners’ Dictionary – a conservative copy of British models
• American Heritage Dictionary
– places the modern meaning first
– clear definitions
– takes no account of corpus evidence, constructions, phraseology, ...
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What about Chinese lexicography?
• Yihua Zhang and Hexian Xue (Historical Lexicography
Conference, Oxford 2010) report:
“Modern dictionaries for native Chinese speakers do not present
sufficient information about [idiomatic] expressions and their
cultural information. ... Without those pieces of information,
foreign learners of Chinese encounter great obstacles to
idiomaticity and fluency.”
• Zhang and Xue give examples of idiomatic uses of hóng ‘red’
implying 1) beauty, 2) vitality and success, 3) revolution and
power, ... etc.
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Why has phraseology been
neglected by dictionaries?
• Phraseology is hard to capture accurately
– Each element in a phrase offers many possible variations
– Meaning was assumed to be a property of words, not phrases
– Meaning in text was assumed to be built up compositionally
• The ‘Lego set’ theory of language
• Lack of a) evidence and b) analytic techniques
– Construction grammarians and systemic linguists agree meaning is a
property of phrases (or “constructions”) as well as words
– But without corpus evidence, systematic analysis was not possible
– Grammarians could give a few (more or less bizarre) examples
– Using evidence of introspection, the number of phraseological
variables associated with each word seemed to be vast and
unmanageable
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So what’s changed?
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In a word (or rather, in a multi-word expression):
Corpus Evidence
– Corpus evidence shows that systematic analysis of normal
phraseology, though difficult, is possible
– The variables can be tamed
– Normal phraseology can be distinguished from abnormal
variations
– Linguistic behaviour is highly patterned
– The patterns of lingusitic behaviour associated with each word –
and their meanings – can be captured, guided by prototype theory
and statistical analysis
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Conclusion
• Dictionaries of the future will devote serious attention
to analysis of words in constructions and collocations.
– For this, it will be necessary to distinguish patterns of
normal usage from creative exploitations of such patterns.
• Fillmore proposes a Constructicon in parallel to the
Lexicon
– http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/
• Hanks and Pustejovsky (2005) propose a Pattern
Dictionary
– http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projects/cpa/
• Are these proposals compatible?
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