[Lexicog] Draining corpora

Tue Oct 19 23:53:10 UTC 2004

We may be trying to be a bit more specific with the meaning of 'drain' than
we should be. As with many words, 'drain' activates a prototypical scenario.
Various aspects of the scenario can be commented on:

1. The bathroom sink is draining slowly.
2. I think I've got the sink fixed. At least the water is draining now.
3. You forgot to drain the water in the sink.
4. This is the pipe that drains the sink.

In (1) the sink is draining, in (2) the water is draining, in (3) you are
draining, and in (4) the pipe is draining. But all four refer to water
running out of a sink under the influence of gravity, which my intuition
tells me is the prototypical scenario. (Or maybe it is just that I had to
fix a sink yesterday.) We understand each of the sentences, in spite of
their apparent contradictions, because we have activated the scenario.
Notice also that you can (3) drain water or (4) drain the sink.

This raises some very difficult issues for lexicography. Do we need four
definitions to handle the four example sentences? Up until recently I would
have said yes. But my understanding of schemas, scenarios, and scenes has
grown to the point where I think we need to be defining each schema,
scenario, and scene. In the 'drain' scenario there are several concepts that
are lexicalized, including the event 'drain.v', the 'hole' 'drain.n' or
'drainhole', the 'pipe' or 'drainpipe', the 'plug', the nominalized form of
the event 'drainage', the system of pipes 'drainage' or 'drains', what is
drained 'drainage', a basket or bowl with holes used to drain liquid from
objects 'drainer', and so on. Once we have defined the prototypical scenario
and its range of variations, we can much more easily define the lexical
items that are used to refer to various aspects of it.

I'm coming to the conclusion that many words can only be understood within
the context of a larger scenario. I read many definitions that would be
baffling without an understanding of the scenario to which they belong. It
would be rather difficult to define 'peace' without some reference to
'conflict', or to define 'knife' without reference to 'cut'.

It is curious that none of my dictionaries define (1), (2), or (4). The
default conceptualization, if we are to go by the definitions, is 'someone
drains liquid out of something'. But we can express the scenario from other
perspectives, "I drove over a rock, punched a hole in my transmission pan,
and all the transmission fluid drained out onto the ground." (This actually
happened to me.) The extended sentence contains elements of the scenario
that aren't in the 'drain' clause and that don't fit the default
conceptualization. For one thing the drainage was not deliberate, but the
result of an accident. So the American Heritage Dictionary definition, "To
cause liquid substance to go out from," doesn't fit. You can go back to the
first two clauses and look for a cause, but what we really have to do is to
mentally reconstruct the event on the basis of what we know about the
'drain' scenario. In this case we are dealing with a variation of the
scenario in which a container has a hole in it and the liquid contents drain
out through the hole. The sub-sub-scenario here is that the container
developed a hole through which the liquid drained. In another
sub-sub-scenario the container is designed with a hole and the container is
upended so that the liquid drains out. In another the plug develops a leak,
allowing the liquid to drain out. My point is that there is incredible
complexity in words and their scenarios. The mind goes to great lengths to
make sense out of a variety of expressions.

The variations in the examples above are by no means unusual. Fauconnier and
Turner, in their book "The Way We Think," give the example of 'safe': "The
child is safe," "The beach is safe," "The shovel is safe." The word 'safe'
activates the scenario of 'danger' along with the features of 'savior'
'save' 'victim' 'dangerous person/instrument/time/place' 'safety'. It isn't
that 'safe' has several meanings, or is modifying a person, place, or
instrument respectively, but that it activates the scenario.

Identifying the prototypical scenario is just the start. We have to
determine the possible variations in the scenario and decide how to indicate
them. How we indicate the range of possible expressions is also a challenge.
I don't know if we need to develop a better theory of semantics or if we
need to write definitions that can handle all the possible expressions. I
suspect that there are general rules that would at least partially govern
the types of expressions that are possible, such as what we see in (1-4) and
in the 'safe' examples. But I don't have a theory, let alone rules, that
enable me to avoid having to write at least four definitions for 'drain'. I
don't think we need to, but I don't know where in the 'grammar' this sort of
rule should be captured. Anybody have any ideas?

Ron Moe

  -----Original Message-----
  From: Wayne Leman [mailto:wayne_leman at sil.org]
  Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2004 9:42 AM
  To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
  Subject: Re: [Lexicog] Draining corpora

  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
  -----
  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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