1 Complex phenomena deserve complex explanations – choosing how to think in Finnish
Antti Arppe University of Helsinki QITL2, Osnabrück, 2.6.2006
Overview
- Introduction & Background aka ’Theory’
- Goals, Corpora, & ’Quantitative’ Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Conclusions
Theory and concepts
- contextuality of usage and meaning: ”You shall know a word by the
company that it keeps!” (J. R. Firth) – words are in a structural and semantic relationship with others in their context – the choice (i.e. usage) and meaning of words is interconnected with their context – in a language with a free word order such Finnish, (functional) dependency grammar (Tesnière) is a practical way to explore such strucural relationships
- non-modularity of language – constructionality
– regularities in co-occurrence and structure can be observed at a continuum of levels from individual words and synonym groups to general semantic groupings
- r parts-of-speech -> Construction Grammar
- synonymy
– some word pairs or groups have relatively similar meanings – in some contexts such words can be interchanged with each other without an essential change in the meaning of the entire utterance
Introduction – Modelling of lexical choice in computational theory
- In the case of semantically similar words,
especially near-synonyms, at least three levels have been suggested (Edmonds and Hirst 2002)
1) conceptual-semantic level 2) subconceptual/stylistic-semantic level, and 3) syntactic-semantic level
Factors influencing lexical choice
- n the syntactic-semantic level
- (mainly) lexicographically motivated corpus-based studies show
differences in the use of semantically similar words, i.e. synonyms, in e.g. their: 1) lexical context
- e.g. English powerful vs. strong in Biber et al. 1998
2) syntactic structures of which they form part of
- e.g. English begin vs. start in Biber et al. 1998
3) semantic classification of some particular argument
- e.g. English shake verbs in Atkins & Levin 1996
4) style-associated text type, in which they are used
- e.g Biber 1998
- while the above studies have focused on English, with minimal
morphology, it has also been shown in languages with extensive morphology such as Finnish that similar differentiation is evident 5) wrt the inflectional forms and the associated morphosyntactic features in which synonyms are used
- Finnish miettiä and pohtia ‘think, ponder, reflect, consider’ in Arppe and Arppe &
Järvikivi 2002
- tärkeä vs. keskeinen ‘important, central’ in Jantunen 2002
Critical assessment of these results – monocausality
- The mentioned studies are typically
monofactorial/monocausal, focusing on one linguistic category or one feature within a category (at a time)
– HOWEVER Jantunen (2002) does go through a wide range of categories, but does not quantitatively evaluate their interactions – With justification, Gries (2003) has argued convincingly for a holistic approach using multifactorial (i.e. multivariate) statistical methods
- HOWEVERm these multivariate methods build upon
univariate and bivariate analysis