[Lexicog] Draining corpora

[Fritz Goerling]

What happens when brain drain occurs?

Fritz Goerling



  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

  >
  >

    a..


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