CORPUS STUDY OF THE MEANING POTENTIAL OF ENGLISH VERBS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/folium/2023.3.6Keywords:
verb, meaning potential, behavioral profile, corpus, patternAbstract
The article discusses and tests a methodology of constructing behavioral profiles of English verbs based on corpus data. The theoretical basis of the described methodology is the concept of the meaning potential, introduced into linguistic circulation by the representatives of Systemic Functional Grammar (M. Halliday) and developed by their followers, in particular, by modern corpus and cognitive linguists. Meaning potential is understood as “is all theinformation that the word has been used to convey either by a singleindividual or, on the social level, by the language community” (Allwood, 2003: 16). Previous attempts to elaborate and apply the methodology of behavioral profiles based on corpus data have been made by P. Hanks, S. Gries, D. Divjak, D. Glynn, L. Fontaine, and others. The methodology for constructing behavioral profiles of English verbs consists of several stages: 1) the retreaval of all instances of word’s lemma from a corpus, 2) comprehensive analysis of the properties of the word forms, 3) the generation of a co-occurence table (collostructional analysis), 4)the evaluation of the findings by means of exploratory and statisticaltechniques. In accordance with the objectives set forth, the article substantiates the theoretical and methodological prerequisites of the study, makes an attempt to build a behavioral profile of the English verb “sweep” on the basis of corpus data, and identifies the advantages of the proposed approach to the study of verb semantics. The peculiarity of the study of the meaning potential and the construction of verb behavioral profiles is the need to identify the totality of the complementation patterns and establish their significance using statistical techniques. The empirical analysis of verbs consists in identifying their typical subjects, objects, and adverbials and grouping lexical items into appropriate sets in accordance with these roles. Corpus data enable determining which patterns of use correspond to the norm, are prototypical (central, typical, and most frequent), and which are atypical “exploitations”. Thus, the corpus analysis of verb use allows tracing the contextually determined cognitive activation of their meaning potential.
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