scholarly journals Usage Effects on the Cognitive Routinization of Chinese Resultative Verbs

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Pin-Yun Wang
Keyword(s):  
Specific Class ◽  
High Type ◽  
Actual Usage ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
Linguistic Representations ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Complex Verbs ◽  
The Continuum

The present study adopts a corpus-oriented usage-based approach to the grammar of Chinese resultative verbs. Zooming in on a specific class of V-kai constructions, this paper aims to elucidate the effect of frequency in actual usage events on shaping the linguistic representations of resultative verbs. Specifically, it will be argued that while high token frequency results in more lexicalized V-kai complex verbs, high type frequency gives rise to more schematized V-kai constructions. The routinized patterns pertinent to V-kai resultative verbs varying in their extent of specificity and generality accordingly serve as a representative illustration of the continuum between lexicon and grammar that characterizes a usage-based conception of language.

Structure of child and adult past counterfactuals, and implications for acquisition of the construction

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 438-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALISON CRUTCHLEY
Keyword(s):  
High Type ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Production Errors ◽  
National Corpus ◽  
Aged Eleven

ABSTRACTChildren start producing if p, q conditionals relatively late. Past counterfactuals (PCFs), for example ‘If she had shut the cage, the rabbit wouldn't have escaped’, are particularly problematic for children; despite evidence of comprehension in the preschool years, children aged eleven are still making production errors in PCF structure (Crutchley, 2004). Working within a usage-based framework, the present study explores whether PCFs in the conversational component of the British National Corpus show structural similarities to the set of PCF structures produced by six- to eleven-year-old children in an elicitation task. Adult PCFs are found to be both rare in spontaneous conversation and very varied in structure. Low token frequency and high type frequency are hypothesized to account partly for children's late acquisition of the PCF construction. However, regularities in the use of subjects and verbs in adult PCFs are hypothesized to assist children's acquisition of the construction.

Nerdalicious scientainment: A network analysis of English libfixes

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muriel Norde ◽  
Sarah Sippach
Keyword(s):  
Network Analysis ◽  
Network Model ◽  
Phonological Similarity ◽  
High Type ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Semantic Properties

Libfixes are parts of words that share properties with both blends, compounds and affixes. They are deliberate formations, often with a jocular character, e.g. nerdalicious ‘delicious for nerds’, or scientainment ‘scientific entertainment’. These are not one-off formations – some libfixes have become very productive, as evidenced by high type frequency in a single corpus. Libfix constructions are particularly interesting for a network analysis for three reasons: they do not always have discrete morpheme boundaries, they feature a wide variety of bases (including phrases, as in give-me-a-break-o-meter), and they may be the source of back formations such as infotain. In this paper, we present a corpus-based analysis of eight English libfixes (cracy, fection, flation, gasm, licious, (o-)meter, tainment, and tastic), detailing their formal and semantic properties, as well as their differences and similarities. We argue that libfixes are most fruitfully analysed in a Bybeean network model, in which nodes are connected on the basis of phonological similarity, which allows for both fully compositional and non-compositional constructions to be linked without an exhaustive analysis into morphemes.

scholarly journals Measuring analyticity and syntheticity in creoles

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Siegel ◽  
Benedikt Szmrecsanyi ◽  
Bernd Kortmann
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
American English ◽  
The Other ◽  
Word Class ◽  
Language Varieties ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
Quantitative Results ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Hong Kong English

Creoles (here including expanded pidgins) are commonly viewed as being more analytic than their lexifiers and other languages in terms of grammatical marking. The purpose of the study reported in this article was to examine the validity of this view by measuring the frequency of analytic (and synthetic) markers in corpora of two different English-lexified creoles — Tok Pisin and Hawai‘i Creole — and comparing the quantitative results with those for other language varieties. To measure token frequency, 1,000 randomly selected words in each creole corpus were tagged with regard to word class, and categorized as being analytic, synthetic, both analytic and synthetic, or purely lexical. On this basis, an Analyticity Index and a Syntheticity Index were calculated. These were first compared to indices for other languages and then to L1 varieties of English (e.g. standard British and American English and British dialects) and L2 varieties (e.g. Singapore English and Hong Kong English). Type frequency was determined by the size of the inventories of analytic and synthetic markers used in the corpora, and similar comparisons were made. The results show that in terms of both token and type frequency of grammatical markers, the creoles are not more analytic than the other varieties. However, they are significantly less synthetic, resulting in much higher ratios of analytic to synthetic marking. An explanation for this finding relates to the particular strategy for grammatical expansion used by individuals when the creoles were developing.

The locative alternation in verb-framed vs. satellite-framed languages

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 864-895 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wojciech Lewandowski
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Argument Structure ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
Locative Alternation ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Verb Meaning

I propose a comparative analysis of the locative alternation in Polish and Spanish. I adopt a constructional theory of argument structure (Goldberg (1995)), according to which the locative alternation is an epiphenomenon of the compatibility of a single verb meaning with two different constructions: the caused-motion construction and the causative + with adjunct construction. As claimed by Pinker (1989), a verb must specify a manner of motion from which a particular change of state can be obtained in order to be able to appear in both constructional schemas. However, I show through a corpus study that the compatibility between verbal and constructional meaning is further restricted by Talmy’s (1985, 1991, 2000) distinction between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. In particular, Talmy’s lexicalization patterns theory systematically explains why both the token frequency and the type frequency of the alternating verbs are considerably higher in Polish than in Spanish.

PROMPT-TYPE FREQUENCY, AUDITORY PATTERN DISCRIMINATION, AND EFL LEARNERS’ PRODUCTION OFWH-QUESTIONS

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim McDonough ◽  
Jindarat De Vleeschauwer
Keyword(s):  
Positive Impact ◽  
Pattern Discrimination ◽  
Syntactic Priming ◽  
Auditory Pattern ◽  
High Type ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
L2 Development ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
The Relationship

Recently researchers have suggested that syntactic priming may facilitate the production ofwh-questions with obligatory auxiliary verbs, particularly when learners are prompted to produce those questions with a wide variety of lexical items (McDonough & Kim, 2009; McDonough & Mackey, 2008). However, learners’ ability to benefit from syntactic priming materials with prompt-type frequency may be mediated by their ability to recognize patterns in aural input. The purpose of this replication study is to confirm the positive impact of prompt-type frequency on learners’ production ofwh-questions reported by McDonough and Kim (2009), and to investigate whether its impact is mediated by learners’ auditory pattern-discrimination abilities. Thai learners (n= 43) of English as a foreign language (EFL) carried out three oral tests, two sets of syntactic priming activities, and an auditory pattern-discrimination test over a 4-week period. Half of the learners carried out the syntactic priming activities with low-type-frequency prompts, whereas the other learners received high-type-frequency prompts. The results revealed a significant interaction between Type Frequency × Auditory Pattern Discrimination on the immediate and delayed posttests. The findings are discussed in terms of the potential role of individual cognitive factors in mediating the relationship between syntactic priming and second language (L2) development.

scholarly journals Contributions of phonetic token variability and word-type frequency to phonological representations

2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 951-978 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER RICHTSMEIER ◽  
LOUANN GERKEN ◽  
DIANE OHALA
Keyword(s):  
Word Type ◽  
Talker Variability ◽  
Phonological Representations ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
Abstract Entities ◽  
Ambient Language ◽  
Language Frequency ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Phonotactic Learning

ABSTRACTThe experiments here build on the widely reported finding that children are most accurate when producing phonotactic sequences with high ambient-language frequency. What remains controversial is a description of the input that children must be tracking for this effect to arise. We present a series of experiments that compare two ambient-language properties, token and type frequency, as they contribute to phonotactic learning. Token frequency is the raw number of exposures children have to a particular pattern; type frequency refers to a count of abstract entities, such as unique words. Our results suggest that children's production accuracy is most sensitive to a combination of type and token frequency: children were able to generalize a target phonotactic sequence to a new word when familiarized with multiple word-types across tokens from multiple talkers, but not when presented with either word-types with no talker variability or multiple talker-tokens of a single word.

scholarly journals Bilingual children's production of regular and irregular past tense morphology

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUDITH RISPENS ◽  
ELISE DE BREE
Keyword(s):  
Learning Strategy ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
The Past ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Past Tenses

This study examined the production of the Dutch past tense in Dutch–Hebrew bilingual children and investigated the effect of type of past tense allomorph (de versus te) and token frequency on productions of the past tense. Seven-year-old bilingual children (n=11) were compared with monolingual children: age-matched (n=30) and younger vocabulary-matched (n=21). Accuracy of regular and novel past tense was similar for the bilingual and monolingual groups, but the former group was worse on irregular past tense than the age-matched monolingual peers. All three groups showed effects of type frequency: te past tenses were more accurate than de. The difference between the bilingual and monolingual children surfaces in the extent of the effect: for the bilingual children it was most pronounced in verbs with low token frequency and novel verbs. Results are interpreted as stemming from a learning strategy or from phonological transfer from the Hebrew morphosyntactic system.

scholarly journals A Corpus-based Case Study on the POS Tagging of Self-referential Lexemes in the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 879
Author(s):  
Jun Zhang ◽  
Heng Zhang
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Word Class ◽  
Pos Tagging ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
Categorization Theory ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Contemporary Chinese ◽  
Grammatical Functions

The POS tagging in the 5th edition of the CCD has been revised in the 6th and the 7th editions. The noun POS of most sports and science lexemes are deleted, and their senses of noun (self-referential senses) are included into verbs. However, most of these lexemes can be used as nouns intuitively, and their noun POS and senses should exist. Based on the grammatical functions of words (Xv & Tang, 2006) and the two-level word class categorization theory (Wang, 2014), this study conducts a corpus-based case study of a science lexeme “guina”. The result shows that “guina” not only has self-referential usage, but has high token frequency, with 133 occurrences accounting for 42.8% of the total usages, and rich type frequency widely distributed in “guina + (of) + NP “,” NP + (of) + guina” and “VP + guina”, which conforms to the criterion of conventionalization. Therefore, it is necessary to tag the noun POS and to set up the self-referential sense for “guina”. This research has an implication for solving the POS tagging problem of self-referential lexemes in the CCD.

ANGER metaphors in American English and Kabyle

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-252
Author(s):  
Sadia Belkhir
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
American English ◽  
Prototype Model ◽  
Sociocultural Influences ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
Language Variety ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Human Thinking ◽  
And Control ◽  
Domain Concept

The position standardly held in cognitive linguistics is that anger is an emotion concept that communicates about human thinking and which is instantiated in language in ways that are often metaphorically, systematically, and conceptually structured. The container metaphor is claimed to be near-universal (Kövecses 2000), but also subject to variation (Kövecses 2005). Variation in metaphor frequencies across languages has also been investigated (Boers & Demecheleer 1997; Boers 1999; Deignan 2003; Kövecses et al. 2015). This article reports a corpus-based contrastive investigation of anger metaphors in American English and Kabyle — a Tamazight language variety spoken in the northern part of Algeria. Its main objective is to contrast these metaphors and try to find out the most used ones in these languages through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the token frequency of linguistic expressions belonging to each of the conceptual metaphors, the type frequency of their linguistic realizations, and the number of their mappings. Aspects of the anger scenario are also studied and contrasted. The findings indicate similarities and differences in the use of anger metaphors in the two languages. The three most frequently used metaphors in American English involve the container, possessed object and opponent source domains while the most frequently used ones in Kabyle involve the fire, container and possessed object source domains. These results confirm the near-universality of the container metaphor. However, the most frequently used metaphorical source domain concept is different in the two languages due to sociocultural influences. In addition, the findings relating to aspects of the anger scenario (intensity and control) support Lakoff and Kövecses’ (1987) prototype model of anger, although it is found to be influenced by sociocultural specificities in American English and Kabyle.

scholarly journals Polish children's productivity with case marking: the role of regularity, type frequency, and phonological diversity

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
EWA DĄBROWSKA ◽  
MARCIN SZCZERBIŃSKI
Keyword(s):  
Age Groups ◽  
The Other ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Mechanism Model ◽  
Token Frequency ◽  
Poor Predictor ◽  
Overall Performance ◽  
Type Frequency ◽  
Dual Mechanism

57 Polish-speaking children aged from 2;4, to 4;8 and 16 adult controls participated in a nonce-word inflection experiment testing their ability to use the genitive, dative and accusative inflections productively. Results show that this ability develops early: the majority of two-year-olds were already productive with all inflections apart from dative neuter; and the overall performance of the four-year-olds was very similar to that of adults. All age groups were more productive with inflections that apply to large and/or phonologically diverse classes, although class size and token frequency appeared to be more important for younger children (two- and three-year-olds) and phonological diversity for older children and adults. Regularity, on the other hand, was a very poor predictor of productivity. The results support usage-based models of language acquisition and are problematic for the dual mechanism model.

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