[Lexicog] Draining corpora

[Patrick Hanks]

Hello Wayne, 

How reliable are our intuitions? There's nothing odd about English "drain into".

How reliable is corpus data?

I work with two corpora  -- the British National Corpus (100 million words)
and Associated Press 1991-92 (150 million words). 

There are 1651 occurrences of the verb drain in BNC, which include:

47   "drain into".
11   "drain out". (Surprisingly, no occurrences of "drain out of".)
161 "drain from".

In AP there are 1318 occurrences of the verb drain, which include:

53  "drain into".
43  "drain out (of)".

The meaning seems to be affected by the choice of preposition -- 
"tributaries draining into the Colorado River" --  but "the blood drained 
from his face".  (Where did it drain into - his boots? Wrong question!)

FrameNet has this verb in the Removing and Emptying frames. Both 
frames specify frame elements Source - Path - Goal. 

It may be more accurate to say that in draining we conceptualize the 
flow from source to goal and that either source or goal or both may be 
thematized explicitly.


Patrick


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Wayne Leman" <wayne_leman at sil.org>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2004 2:56 AM
Subject: [Lexicog] lexicography can be draining


> 
> Today's fun discovery in our Cheyenne lexical work was that the verb stem 
> for 'drain' has a specific morpheme meaning 'into.' As far as I know, 
> speakers of English conceptualize draining as something which liquid does 
> "out of" some container. Cheyennes apparently view the process differently. 
> I would guess that they perceive of the liquid going from one container 
> "into" another or into another space, such as into the drain pipe. The 
> difference between how English 'drain' and Cheyenne 'drain' are lexicalized 
> reminds me of the interesting diagrams that Prof. Langacre of UCSD has 
> promoted which display semantic conceptualizations.
> 
> Have any of the rest of you found interesting lexical differences like this 
> in languages you work with, demonstrating different conceptual points of 
> view?
> 
> Wayne
> -----
> Wayne Leman
> Cheyenne website: http://www.geocities.com/cheyenne_language
> 
> 
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>  
> Yahoo! Groups Links
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> 
> 
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