A Corpus Investigation of English Cognition Verbsand their Effect on the Incipient Epistemization of Physical Activity Verbs

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A Corpus Investigation of English Cognition Verbsand their Effect on the Incipient Epistemization of Physical Activity Verbs

Sally Rice¹ and John Newman^1,2

'University of Alberta

^{2Monash University, Australia}

Abstract

verbs cognition physical activity lexica syntactic

In the spirit of NSM accounts that attempt to build up a language's full expressivity from a small set of lexical primitives, we have investigated the usage in English of basic verbs of ideation (think, know) and physical activity (strike, hit, go, run) as they take on new epistemic meanings and functions, all the while calcifying in their inflectional range. It is well known that certain verbs of cognition in English such as remember, forget, and think are grammaticalizing into pragmatic particles of epistemic stance and, consequently, 1^st person singular (lsg) forms account for the majority of usages. Likewise, we have carried out systematic queries and hand-tagging of corpus returns and have found that many verbs and phrasal expressions, ideational or not, seem to be associated with rather narrow collocational patterning, argument structure, and inflectional marking in almost idiom-like and constructional fashion. Moreover, we find that expressions associated with lsg and 2^nd person “cognizers” are, to a large extent, in complementary distribution, giving rise to fairly strong semantic differences in how I and you “ideate”. In this study, we demonstrate the extent of inflectional and collocational specificity for verbs of cognition and physical activity and discuss implications this lexico-syntactic idiosyncracy has for cognitive linguistics.

Keywords: cognition, corpus methods, collocation, lexico-syntax, inflectional categories, epistemization

Корпусное исследование английских глаголов мышления и их влияния на начальную эпистемизацию глаголов физического действия

Сэлли Райс¹ и Джон Ньюман^1,2

'Университет Альберты, Канада

²Университет Монаш, Австралия

Аннотация

С позиций подхода ЕСМ, который стремится представить всю экспрессивность языка с помощью небольшого набора лексических примитивов, мы исследовали употребление английских базовых глаголов мышления (think, know) и глаголов физического действия (strike, hit, go, run), которые принимают новые эпистемические значения и функции. Хорошо известно, что определенные глаголы мышления в английском языке, такие как remember, forget, think, могут использоваться в роли прагматических частиц эпистемического содержания и, как следствие этого, форма 1 лица единственного числа является наиболее употребимой. В результате проведения систематических исследований ручной аннотации корпуса мы обнаружили, что для многих глаголов, как и фразовых выражений, характерна достаточно узкая сочетаемость, аргументативная структура и некоторые черты идиоматичности. Более того, нами обнаружено, что в выражениях, где глаголы мышления употребляются с первым и вторым лицом, в значительной степени в дополнительной дистрибуции, наблюдаются достаточно сильные семантические различия. В данной работе мы демонстрируем специфичность коллокаций глаголов мышления и глаголов физического действия и обсуждаем значение лексико-синтаксической идиосинкразии для когнитивной лингвистики.

Ключевые слова: мышление, корпусные методы, коллокация, лексико-синтаксический анализ, инфлекционные категории, эпистемизация

INTRODUCTION

We begin our discussion with the distinct frequency profiles of inflected forms of think and know in spoken English (here, in their simple present tense forms) with different agreement patterns as measured by their co-occurrence with the different subject personal pronouns. As we will argue in §5, these distributional differences have had a concomitant effect on the recruitment of non-ideational predicates and constructions to take on epistemic meanings in the language. We queried COCA_sp for all subject pronouns (except it) occurring with base or present-tense forms of think and know, using the POS (part of speech) tags, vv0, vvz, and compared those frequencies with all other lexical verbs in the spoken sub-corpus occurring with the same set of pronouns. Table 2a gives the raw (observed) frequencies for think(s) with a pronominal subject while Table 2b gives the standardized residuals when compared with the raw frequencies for all other verbs.

Table 2

(a) Observed frequencies for think [pro + think.vvO | vvz] compared to frequencies of all other lexical verbs (base or 3sg present-tense forms) in the spoken subcorpus of COCA.

(b) Standardized residuals for think frequencies compared to frequencies of all other lexical verbs

Figure 1 shows the association plot for the distribution of pro x think In the association plots shown here, black rectangles above a dashed line correspond to cases where the observed frequency is greater than the expected frequency; white rectangles below a dashed line correspond to cases where the observed frequency is less than the expected frequency. The area of a box in such plots is proportional to the difference in observed and expected frequencies; the width of the rectangle is proportional to the square root of the expected frequency; the height of the rectangle is proportional to the standardized residual.. For present purposes, it is the relative height of the boxes, reflecting the values of the standardized residuals, that is most relevant. The black rectangles in Figure 1 show the overuse of subject pronouns with present-tense forms of verbs in a more immediate and more striking way than by inspecting numerical tables. 1sg, while hugely overrepresented with think, is greatly underrepresented across the rest of the verbal lexicon, on average.

other

Figure 1. Association plot of pro x THINK compared to other verbs in COCA_sp

The pro x think distributions compared to pro x other verbs distributions for think are but half of the story. When we look at the distributional frequencies for know, we start to get a picture of the differential behaviour and distinct epistemizational attraction to concepts of first person singular ideation versus second person ideation. Table 3 gives the raw (observed) frequencies for know(s) with a pronominal subject as well as the standardized residuals when compared with the raw frequencies for all other verbs. Figure 2 shows the association plot corresponding to the distribution of pronouns given in Table 3. Comparing Figures 1 and 2, we see how know is the converse of THINK.

Table 3

(a) Observed frequencies for know [pro + know.vv01 vvz] compared to frequencies of all other lexical verbs (base or present-tense forms) in COCA_sp.

(b) Standardized residuals for know frequencies compared to frequencies of all other lexical verbs

Figure 2. Association plot of pro x KNOW compared to other verbs in COCA_sp

Our main purpose in this section is to establish, statistically, the attraction that think and KNOW have for particular inflectional forms of the subject pronouns, especially 1sg and 2 person subjects, rather than explore the particular constructions in which these combinations occur. The syntactic, semantic, and pragmatics of the individual uses of these verbs is beyond the scope of the present study. Even so, it is of interest to note the co-occurrence, indeed the juxtaposition, of I think and you know in examples such as (1a-b). In these examples, illustrating the two possible orders I think + you know and you know +1 think, we see think used with a clause complement while you know appears as a complement-less pragmatic marker (cf. §2).

(1) a. I think, you know, everything changes in politics, but I've, I've... (SPOK: NBC_MeetPress, 2007)

b. You know, I think we will see that eventually. (SPOK: NPR_ATCW, 2006)

Although we are relying on the standardized residuals to establish the statistical significance of the overrepresentation of I think and you know in the corpus, it is still instructive to consider some relevant raw frequencies related to the use of subject pronouns and lexical verbs in the present tense in the corpus. Table 4 lists the 20 most frequent base forms ([vv0]) occurring immediately to the right of I and you, respectively. In this table, we can readily see the overall preference for verbs of cognition (think, mean, know, want, guess, remember, understand, etc.) in this construction with I. think is not just the top-ranked verb in the first column of this table, it enjoys nearly two and a half times the frequency of the second-ranked verb, mean (707,880 vs. 284,116). The fourth column lists the results for the 20 most frequent base forms co-occurring with you. One sees in these results a greater variation in the semantics than with the I-verbs, with non-cognition verbs such as GO, look, say, talk, come, find, etc. making a conspicuous appearance in the list. Here, know is far and away the most frequent verb (320,202), well ahead (at 12 times the frequency!) of the second-ranked verb, want (26,762). In other words, the particular preferences for I think and you know that we see in Figures 1 and 2 do not tell the whole story about the attraction of these verbs to 1sg and 2^nd person subjects, respectively; these preferences are evident in a striking way even when all present tense verbs are considered. Nevertheless, as the two most frequent [PRO-verb.PRES] bigrams in COCA_sp, we have to acknowledge that I think and you know are, individually, huge constructional magnets for other expressions. It is incumbent, then, that we come to understand the particular semantic associations and connotations that imbue I think and you know since we find equally skewed distributions (by subject, object, or possessive pronoun agreement) with non-ideational expressions that have come to have epistemic force in the language, even though they were originally verbs of perception or physical action. Happily, corpus analysis can help us do this.

Table 4

The 20 most frequent sequences of I vs. you, respectively, with present tense lexical verbs (queried as [vv0]) in COCA_sp

Miscellaneous activity verbs and constructions

Having established (i) that the basic verbs think and know have highly skewed inflectional profiles and (ii) that I think and you know are uniquely privileged uses of think and KNOW and wildly dominant inflectionally speaking, we now turn to a range of verbal constructions that, when taken literally, have nothing to do with ideation, but which clearly have undergone epistemization processes in the language. That is, certain verbal constructions are turning into expressions about ideation or knowledge validation and they are turning up with highly skewed inflectional profiles of their own.

While we find these expressions interesting as cognitive linguists because they have taken on meanings beyond the literal and the physical, they prove to be especially fascinating to us as corpus linguists because they display similar inflectional skewing as we find with the two basic cognition verbs explored in §4.1. Moreover, through an examination of their frequencies by agreement and TAM, we can gain insight into how first person singular ideation is construed in English, compared to ideation affecting second persons. If language change or semantic shift is driven in part by analogy, then a better understanding of the different semantic associations affecting verbal expressions by person helps us make the larger point advocated by Sinclair and others that the inflected lexical form is the proper starting point for lexico-syntactic analysis, not the idealized lemmatized form. In this section, because the frequency counts are relatively low, we will only report raw frequency with no further statistical analysis. It is worth noting that the cognizer in the following constructions are not encoded as the subject of the verb, but as a down-stream thematic participant, construed as a patient or as the object of a preposition. The subject is generally a pleonastic, it, or the headless relative pronoun, what.

It/What strike/hit PRO

The two physical verbs that have re-lexicalized or, actually, constructionalized into verbs of ideation the most are strike and hit. Indeed, the participial adjective, striking, collocates most frequently with nouns that are associated with epistemic realization or discernment, such as thing, resemblance, contrast, example, difference, and similarity. With strike and hit, the cognizer presents as the direct object, as in it struck me or what hit him or as the prepositional object with progressive forms of strike, as in it was striking to me; therefore, our COCA_sp searches involved variants of these search strings: [what^t [strikejhit] (p*)] or [what [be] striking (to) (p*)]. Tables 5 and 6 summarize the returns for strike and hit, respectively, by TAM and construction (cognizer is a pronominal DO or X). Corpus examples follow in (2) and (3).

Table 5

Observed frequencies for [what/it strike (to) pro] in COCA^.

[*All 44 instances of what struck you are questions, with the what functioning as a bona fide question word, as opposed to the function of what to introduce a pseudo-cleft as in (2a).]

(2) a. He can be personable, but he also can be very serious. Now what is striking to me is that he still seems removed from who he's working for. I mean, he was clearly referencing Harvey Weinstein in respect for women, or that would be the best guess (SPOK: CNN_Anderson Cooper, 2017).

b. It's odd that he--well, it strikes me as a little bit odd that he continually talks about his struggle to get there, the reasons behind it, struggle, it's well established, it's done. I have a feeling he should stop talking like that if there's any possibility that he's going to get in this thing... (SPOK: CBS_FaceTheNation, 2015).

c. Before this kind of gradual, almost indistinguishable, process of- of corruption. You know, it struck me again, in- in- in going back through it, how much it really is a parable of the dark side of the moon of the democratic proposition... (SPOK: NPR_Weekend, 1996).

Table 6

Observed frequencies for [what/it hit pro] in COCA_sp. Note the pseudo-cleft uses of what in (3a-b). The relatively high values for it hit/hits you shouldn't be taken at face value.

Nearly all of them are used generically or refer back to the 1sg speaker, as in (3d)

(3) a. Well, I think that-what hits me about this ethics stuff, Robert, is that I'm surprised that the Democrats don't see an opening with campaign finance reform. (SPOK: NPR_ATC, 1995)

b. One of the lawyers for detainees approached me and said, I want my clients' art to be exhibited. I said, what do you mean? There's art made at Guantanamo. What hit me at first was how normal they seem. Shouldn't their drawings be so much more angry? (SPOK: PBS_Newshour, 2017)

c. Every once in a while it hits me. I'll be driving along or whatever, just by myself, and start to think about it, and it was really close. I mean any -- a foot either way, an inch either way, it would have been over for me. (SPOK: ABC_Primetime, 1994)

d. You know, after the firefight 's over and the adrenaline rush is over and you started -- you know, you're all soaking wet and just feel like your legs won't hold you, you know, it hits you. I just took a life. (SPOK: Dateline_NBC, 2008)

It is apparent from the counts, the examples, and the brief commentary in this section that strike and hit, when used to convey mental (not physical) force, have an overwhelming preference for 1sg objects construed as the target of sudden realization. More than three-quarters of the returns in COCA_sp for this family of [what/it strike/hit PRO] constructions are about 1sg ideation. Obviously, strike and hit bring many semantic associations from the physical world when used figuratively. They both suggest punctual, telic, and dynamic action, which, we argue, carries over into how 1SG ideation is construed more generally. We return to this point in §5.

It dawn on PRO

For it to dawn on someone is a particularly nice figurative expression in English to describe epistemic realization. The various TAM-inflected forms of what is otherwise a concrete verb, dawn, describing the path of the sun and the return of daylight (widely associated with consciousness and understanding), show an overwhelming preference for 1sg prepositional objects, the nominal relation that encodes the cognizer in this construction. Table 7 shows the raw frequencies from COCA_sp by TAM and person of the prepositional object. We have broadened the searches to also include the adverbs which collocate with it dawns/dawned on. We provide some actual corpus returns in (4).

Table 7

Observed frequencies for [it (adv) dawn on pro] in COCA^

(4) a. I was meeting people and talking to them, and while talking to them, it dawned on me -- oh, my God, Nick, you're talking about something I've heard of. I know this song. (SPOK: NPR_Fresh Air, 2015)

b. I don't know how we were lucky enough to figure that out, but -- and it suddenly dawned on me what I truly have in common with everybody else is this one man's vision affected all of us. (SPOK: NPR_Sunday, 2000)

A brief final point about the [it DAWN on PRO] construction and the collocating adverbs listed in Table 7. For the most part, the rather absolute and categorical never, just, finally, and fully, along with the intensified really and suddenly show a marked preference for 1sg, as does the construction as a whole. We do not regard it as incidental that the less forceful or dynamic adverbs slowly and gradually, or the indeterminate probably, show a slight preference for non-1sg cognizers. A point we make in §5 is that a range of somewhat covert semantic notions like these seem to be attached to the way 1^st person singular ideation is construed. These are not necessarily associations evident in I think, but which nevertheless guide the non-ideational expressions that come to take on epistemic force towards or away from 1sg.

V_stasis in/on PRO's mind

A thought, idea, or bit of knowledge can be in or on one's mind in English. Such expressions suggest simple, stative locative constructions, far from the dynamic construals afforded by the likes of it struck someone, it hit someone, or it dawned on someone examined previously. Nevertheless, the fact that these expressions are based on a spatial metaphor and metonymy [viz. the place (mind) is the locus of activity (thinking) happening in that place]. While 1SG cognizers were prevalent in those other constructions, the more static, in/on one's mind, show only modest preferences for 1^st person. Table 8 presents the returns from COCA_sp for in PRO's mind and on PRO's mind, respectively. A handful of actual returns from the corpus follow in (5).

Fewer than half of the examples in COCA_sp of the [in/on PRO mind] construction involve a 1sg cognizer (in the form of the possessor of mind). Indeed, these constructions seem to be better distributed across all the potential sentient players: 1sg (47%), 2 (30%), 3sgm/f (17%), 1pl (3%), 3pl (3%), in proportions far closer to those “background” frequency distributions reported in Table 1 for all lexical verbs, as represented in COCA_sp. The rank order is nearly the same, for example: 1SG (#1), 2 (#2), and then the rest at a distance. The lack of overwhelming attraction to 1SG suggests that the semantic properties associated with the fairly stative and locative [in/on PRO mind] construction are fairly neutral, person-wise. As we'll see below, the more active and dynamic the figurative expression, the more it displays an attraction to a 1sg cognizer.

Table 8

Observed frequencies for [in | on [app*] mind] in COCA_sp

(5) a. I mean -- I thought and, you know, knowing how I felt about him. I was angry, because in my mind he was doing that to--that was like his parting gift, right? (SPOK: CNN_The Lead with Jake Tapper, 2017)

b. You know, I found that some of them never even pulled a gun out. They shoot -- you know, they just reached down and grabbed the gun and twisted their holster and fired right through the holster. So in your mind, you think because we've always shown Westerns that they take it out and shoot -- some of them never took them out. (SPOK: NPR_Fresh Air, 2016)

c. you don't wake up in the morning and immediately start thinking about that. What's on people's minds is what's on your mind and my mind and everybody else's mind, and that is how am I going to provide for my family? (SPOK: CBS_ThisMorning, 2012)

d. That's why it's weighing very heavy. It's been weighing heavy for 37 years on his mind. I think he really wants to tell it. (SPOK: NBC_Dateline, 2005)

V_motion through PRO's mind

Similar to the in/on one's mind expressions just examined, an idea, thought, or realization can pass through one's mind, in a slightly more dynamic fashion. Because motion verbs are involved, we have naturally categorized these as activity expressions. Admittedly, the epistemic or ideational sense is brought about figuratively by the presence of the locative nominal, mind. However, the choice of verb is somewhat affected by the choice of possessive pronoun in ways reminiscent of the 1sg vs. 2 person differences noted above in other expressions. Far and away, the most frequent verb to enter into this construction is go, a nearly manner-less verb of motion. The more force-dynamic the verb, however, the more likely it is being used to express ideation in my mind/head. Table 9 gives the lemmatized frequencies for ideation constructed with verbs of motion through the mind or head. Some actual returns from COCA_sp are presented in (6).

Table 9

Observed frequencies for [vv0/vvz through [app*] mind] in COCA^. Here, we only present lemmatized results because we are specifically focusing on choice of verb with different prepositional objects, not TAM forms. The verbs are impressionistically arranged in order of increasing degree of energy, punctualness, or forcefulness, rather than frequency.

When the locus of motion is head, not mind, the counts are given
in parentheses. Aggregate counts are given in the row marked Total a. Give me more of what went through your mind as you read this thing, that made you say, "I have to have it”. (SPOK: CBS_SundayMorning, 1993)

b. A...