[Lexicog] Draining corpora

[Wayne Leman]

Hello, Patrick. I was referring to the shorter English verb, "drain". Obviously, I need to fieldtest it, but I *think* English speakers conceptualize "drain" as when liquid flows from, rather than into. Of course, if we add the word "into", then we change the conceptualization to be the same as Cheyenne -estovaotse which would be glossed in English as 'drain.'

Thanks for your comments,
Wayne
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Wayne Leman
Cheyenne website: http://www.geocities.com/cheyenne_language

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Patrick Hanks 
  To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com 
  Cc: Varvara Karzi ; arum at brandeis.edu 
  Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2004 9:21 AM
  Subject: [Lexicog] Draining corpora


  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
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