[Lexicog] Draining corpora

[Lexicography List Facilitator]

Forward from Rudy Troike, who is having some email difficulties:

I agree with John Roberts that every lexicographer should have a copy of
Beth
Levin's book for reference. It is certainly the most exhaustive
categorization
of English verbs available, based on the transformational and
argument-changing
"diatheses" (a word not found in many dictionaries), or alternations, such
as
he illustrated (these are the famous "spray/load"-type alternation known
since
Jespersen, and made more current by Charles Fillmore).

But her approach, like most others in lexical semantics, assumes the verb as
basic and the associated arguments as satellites. However, although she
argues
for a semantically-based approach, it remains verb-centered. Fillmore,
however,
suggested an alternative way of looking at matters, by considering (1) the
entities (represented linguistically as arguments, either NPs or PPs)
involved
in an event or situation, and (2) the perspective from which these were to
be
viewed/reported by the speaker. This view takes the verb as secondary, or at
least not the primary determinant. Thus if I see two individuals engaged in
an
exchange transaction, with one giving over a book or some vegetables to the
other, and the second person returning some money or some other item of
value,
I can report this as "A sold a book to B", or as "B bought a book from A".
In
English, the difference in perspective determines which one is foregrounded
and
which backgrounded; the backgrounded one takes a preposition identifying its
semantic (participant/theta) role, the foregrounded one is subjectivized,
and
so loses its semantic marker. But the choice of the verb in English is
forced
by the decision as to which argument/NP to promote and which to demote,
since
the English verb lexicalizes the _direction_ of the transaction. In other
languages the change in direction is, as Patrick pointed out, often
indicated
by the use of a causative or passive (often the same) suffix. Instructive in
this regard is the English verb "rent", which is ambiguous as to
directionality, which can only be determined by the choice of preposition
marking the backgrounded participant.

     A somewhat different example would be a scene (actual or painting) in
which
a tiger is depicted in the foreground running in the direction of some
people
in the background, who are running in the same direction. One could
foreground
the people, and say that they are running (away) from the tiger, or one
could
foreground the tiger, and say that it was chasing the people. Levin's book
is
an excellent guide to many of the possible alternations that can occur when
the
verb remains the same, but it does not always capture the alternations,
which
are central to discourse and textual analysis, which occur as a result of
shifts in perspective reporting on the same event. This type of
frame-focused
analysis can show up connections across different lexical verbs in a
language
such as English, where differences in directionality are lexicalized, and
can
provide a useful basis for comparing across different languages, where the
same
lexical verbal stem may be used, with other semantic information such as
directionality, or agentivity of the subject, etc., expressed in affixes. As
many on this list are so deeply aware, information may be packaged in
different
ways, and different aspects of scenes may be obligatorily expressed
lexically
or morphologically, so that it may be necessary in a bilingual dictionary to
"unpack" the information encoded in lexical units in one language and
indicate
how the information is to be repackaged in the second language.
Cross-indexing
to different lexical verbs which are used in different perspectives on the
same
situation would be one useful way to guide/educate a user. Fillmore's famous
dictum that "meanings are relativized to scenes" is relevant here.

     Rudy Troike




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