[Corpora-List] My semantic prosody questionnaire

Sun Jan 23 12:51:57 UTC 2005

[Apologies if this has reached the list before, the reply from
MAILER-DAEMON at clic.fil.ub.es makes me suspect it has not]

Irena,

3 reactions on my mind as I read your story:

1) isolated, de-contextualised citations (sentences) do not necessarily
need to as strongly reflect the prosodic tendencies operating in natural
discourse. Your informants may have lacked wider context and co-text to
judge each instance optimally. You might try to repeat your experiment
with longer individual citations to find out if this variable matters.

2) Who were your informants? Age, education, regional accent etc etc -
do they not all come from the same "population" niche? What is their
level of linguistic awareness?

3) It would be clearer if you quoted at least one full entry from your
questionnaire plus your instructions - some clues to your results are
likely to lie there.

Interesting findings, though.

Regards,

Przemek Kaszubski

Irena Shuke wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I just received a questionnaire I had sent to England to be filled out
> by native speakers to see their awareness of semantic prosody. I knew
> (AND had been told) that it was best to just observe it in a corpus,
> but my aim was to see (compare) the difference between native and
> non-native speakers with respect to this. To test the intuitions of
> the both sides, so to say. (Well, I guess I did always want to see
> with my own eyes how native speakers would circle the "correct"
> sentence, such as 'She caused me a lot of trouble', and leave one like
> 'She caused me a lot of joy' alone.) Anyway, I thought a questionnaire
> given to both native and non-native speakers would show clearly the
> difference. First, I got them filled out by some of my fellow MA
> students (Linguistics, English Literature & ELT Methodology) who were
> all non-native speakers of English. Only one person scored enough for
> me to see she was showing consistent awareness of this phenomenon, but
> then, she and I had been discussing this, so I guess that doesn't
> count, although she had only been given one particular example
> ("cause") earlier in our discussions. (By "scored enough" I do not
> mean any particular percentage since I still have to decide how to
> best display my clever "findings".) A LOT of other respondents ticked
> off "Engineering of these goods will favourably affect the market" and
> "She caused me a lot of joy" as correct (acceptable, not "correct",
> but for some reason I tend to use the words "right/correct" and
> "wrong" when I think of it), or both the sentence that contained
> "caused me joy" and the one with "caused me trouble" in the same set,
> or ticked off "positively affect" and "favourably affect" but left out
> "seriously affect" and "badly affect" as unlikely. I decided to wait
> for the same questionnaire to come back from England where it would be
> administered to native speakers. I have to say that most of the
> sentences were either taken from a corpus AND modified or plain
> invented by me (esp. the provocative ones with the "unacceptable"
> collocations), because I didn't really want to underline the
> collocations that were to be thought about - so I decided to try to
> make all the sentences in one set look similar in form, so that only
> THE collocation would stand out in each of them by being the only
> different element. I did suspect that the respondents, esp. native
> speakers, might be put off by just any wrong collocation in a sentence
> before they even got to rejecting the sentence due to the clash of
> semantic prosodies. I also stated in the instructions that all of the
> sentences are correct grammatically. And before administering it to
> anyone at all, I had also shown the questionnaire to a tutor of mine
> just to make sure in general (she is a non-native speaker too).
> So I waited.
>
> Well, today I got 15 precious questionnaires from England. (Obviously
> it was not possible to get more in, but even these do illustrate
> something.)
>
> I looked at some of them and then double-checked the last "question"
> on each of them, i.e. 'Is English your mother tongue?' All said yes.
> Anyway, here are the results. 'She caused me a lot of trouble', 'She
> caused me a lot of misery', 'She caused me a lot of happiness', 'She
> caused me a lot of joy' are all ticked off as "likely to be used" in
> quite a few(!) people's responses. 'Engineering of these goods will
> favourably affect the market' - just fine in someone else's work.
> 'Caused me a lot of joy' - OK, but 'caused me a lot of happiness' -
> left out as "unlikely". I really don't know what to think. In some
> cases it might have been even ambiguity that I myself hadn't noticed,
> as in "Engineering of these goods will positively affect the market',
> which possibly might have been interpreted as "definitely". Yet, that
> is still not the only case. I myself really liked "cause" because it
> just seems very diagnostic to me, so I was hoping to see some
> consistency there. Alas.
>
> I am thinking now that perhaps it would make sense to put together a
> corpus of non-native students' works (for example) and see how they do
> or do not distinguish any semantic prosody patterns there, and of
> course there are a lot of corpora for researching native speakers'
> language.
>
> I really apologize if this seems outrageous, I do not mean to upset or
> disgust anyone. I guess I just had slightly different expectations (or
> hopes) of this experiment.
> I would be thankful for any opinions and input.
>
> Irena
> (MA Student of Linguistics, University of Latvia)
>
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