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Correia Saavedra, David
Nom
Correia Saavedra, David
Affiliation principale
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Doctorant
Email
david.correiasaavedra@unine.ch
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Voici les éléments 1 - 5 sur 5
- PublicationAccès libreMeaning differences between English clippings and their source words: A corpus-based study(2023)
; ; Jennifer RainsThis paper uses corpus data and methods of distributional semantics in order to study English clippings such as dorm (< dormitory), memo (< memorandum), or quake (< earthquake). We investigate whether systematic meaning differences between clippings and their source words can be detected. The analysis is based on a sample of 50 English clippings. Each of the clippings is represented by a concordance of 100 examples in context that were gathered from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. We compare clippings and their source words both at the aggregate level and in terms of comparisons between individual clippings and their source words. The data show that clippings tend to be used in contexts that represent involved text production, which aligns with the idea that clipped words signal familiarity with their referents. It is further observed that individual clippings and their source words partly diverge in their distributional profiles, reflecting both overlap and differences with regard to their meanings. We interpret these findings against the theoretical background of Construction Grammar and specifically the Principle of No Synonymy. - PublicationAccès libreThe unidirectionality of semantic changes in grammaticalization: an experimental approach to the asymmetric priming hypothesis(2018)
; Why is semantic change in grammaticalization typically unidirectional? It is a well-established finding that in grammaticalizing constructions, more concrete meanings tend to evolve into more schematic meanings. Jäger & Rosenbach (2008) appeal to the psychological phenomenon of asymmetric priming in order to explain this tendency. This article aims to evaluate their proposal on the basis of experimental psycholinguistic evidence. Asymmetric priming is a pattern of cognitive association in which one idea strongly evokes another (i.e. paddle strongly evokes water), while that second idea does not evoke the first one with the same force (water only weakly evokes paddle). Asymmetric priming would elegantly explain why semantic change in grammaticalization tends to be unidirectional, as in the case of English be going to, which has evolved out of the lexical verb go. As yet, empirical engagement with Jäger & Rosenbach's hypothesis has been limited. We present experimental evidence from a maze task (Forster et al. 2009), in which we test whether asymmetric priming obtains between lexical forms (such as go) and their grammaticalized counterparts (be going to). On the asymmetric priming hypothesis, the former should prime the latter, but not vice versa. Contrary to the hypothesis, we observe a negative priming effect: speakers who have recently been exposed to a lexical element are significantly slower to process its grammaticalized variant. We interpret this observation as a horror aequi phenomenon (Rohdenburg & Mondorf 2003). - PublicationAccès libreWhy are grammatical elements more evenly dispersed than lexical elements? Assessing the roles of text frequency and semantic generality(2017)
; Grammatical elements such as determiners, conjunctions or pronouns are very evenly dispersed across natural language data. By contrast, the uses of lexical elements have a stronger tendency to occur in bursts that are interspersed by long lulls. This paper considers two alternative explanations for this difference. First, it could be hypothesised that the more even distribution of grammatical elements is merely an effect of an element’s high text frequency. Alternatively, it could be argued that a more even distribution is a symptom of greater generality in meaning. In order to assess the impact of both frequency and semantic generality, we conducted a corpus-based study that contrasts lexical and grammatical elements in Present-Day English. Our results suggest that evenness of dispersion is chiefly an effect of high frequency. - PublicationAccès libreUsing token-based semantic vector spaces for corpus-linguistic analyses: From practical applications to tests of theoretical claims(2017)
; This paper presents token-based semantic vector spaces as a tool that can be applied in corpus-linguistic analyses such as word sense comparisons, comparisons of synonymous lexical items, and matching of concordance lines with a given text. We demonstrate how token-based semantic vector spaces are created, and we illustrate the kinds of result that can be obtained with this approach. Our main argument is that token-based semantic vector spaces are not only useful for practical corpus-linguistic applications but also for the investigation of theory-driven questions. We illustrate this point with a discussion of the asymmetric priming hypothesis (Jäger and Rosenbach 2008). The asymmetric priming hypothesis, which states that grammaticalizing constructions will be primed by their lexical sources but not vice versa, makes a number of empirically testable predictions. We operationalize and test these predictions, concluding that token-based semantic vector spaces yield conclusions that are relevant for linguistic theory-building.