[Lexicog] Interesting lexical discoveries

[Patrick Hanks]

In reply to Marco --

I think cognitive salience is of great interest.  Here's a little thought
experiment that I do with groups of native speakers of English: I ask them
to write down a natural, normal sentence of English using TOTAL as a verb.

Always, the majority (over 50% - sometimes 90%) write down something like
"My sister totaled the car" -- i.e. [[Person]] total [[Vehicle]]
(Meaning: my sister wrecked the car so badly that the insurers had to write
it off.)

Some thoughtful souls write down something like
"The accountant totaled the column of figures"
-- i.e. [[Person]] total [[Quantity]]

No one ever writes down an example of the most common use in both the
British National Corpus -- [[Abstract Entity]] total {QUANT [[Numerical
Value]]}, e.g.

"Foreign investment totalled $708m. in 1989"
"jail sentences totalling 19 years"

This latter pattern is even more common in the AP newswire corpus 1992-3,
which I am also using (over 90%), but it is not cognitvely salient.

Why is this? Various hypotheses, among them:

1. Human beings are anthropocentric: we will always think first of a human
subject doing something, rather than an abstract entity.  But that does not
explain why, with "X treated Y" (with no adverbial -- "treating someone
well" is different), the rare interpretation "X was giving something to Y or
paying for something for Y" prevails over the more common use "X was in the
role of doctor and Y was in the role of patient".

2. Human beings are designed to register (and recall) the comparatively new,
while burying the familiar deep in the subconscious -- not available for
easy recall.

There are several other verbs with which the experiment can be repeated,
with similar results.  I have not done it with nouns.

Something to think about ....


Patrick

   Dr Patrick Hanks
    Berater, Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache,
    Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften,
    Jägerstrasse 22-23,
    Berlin 10117,
    Germany.
    Phone: + 49 30 20370 539
    Fax:  + 49 30 20370 214

----- Original Message -----
From: "Marco Baroni" <baroni at sslmit.unibo.it>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2004 11:38 AM
Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Interesting lexical discoveries


> This is a very interesting message, and it is quite inspirational as I am
> preparing a lecture on collocations... ;-)
>
> Just one small note:
>
> > 3. Collocational patterns seem obvious when pointed out, but are not
easily
> > called to mind. From this I conclude that social salience (what we
actually
> > do with language) and cognitive salience (what we think and say that we
do)
> > are independent variables.  If this is right, introspection is a flawed
> > research technique -- downright misleading, in fact.
>
> Introspection is a flawed technique IF you are researching social
> salience, but that doesn't mean that cognitive salience is not an
> interesting topic by itself, does it? (Although probably not one that
> would be of interest to lexicographers...)
>
> Regards,
>
> Marco
>
> Marco Baroni
> SSLMIT, University of Bologna
> http://sslmit.unibo.it/~baroni





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