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

mind/head, over my head, and the like.

Of the 24 figurative examples with lightbulb in COCA_sp indicating that ideation or realization is happening in or above someone's head are no less than 11 separate constructions. Nevertheless, there is very interesting patterning by agreement, as shown in Table 10. One could even say that there's a complementary distribution holding for the dative-like readings (in which a lightbulb goes on/off for me, but not for others), as well as expressions in which the lightbulb is explicitly located in my head, as opposed to being implicitly located in someone's head).

Table 10

Observed frequencies for figurative uses of lightbulb in COCA_sp. We list the full range of ideational constructions-by-agreement patterns (where cognizer might be the subject (nominative), possessor (genitive) or beneficiary (dative) of the idea-emitting lightbulb. Although the frequencies are quite low, the inflectional skewing is quite pronounced

Finally, we make mention of an idiomatic expression about sudden realization more prevalent in British English than in North American: the penny dropped. A search of the GLoWbE corpus (Corpus of Global Web-Based English) available through the BYU website (https://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/) gives the following raw frequencies for the expression by country, where N > 5: Great Britain (111), Ireland (32), Australia (32), USA (13), New Zealand (8), and Canada (5). There are only 2 examples in COCA_sp, but both make clear that the cognizer is 1SG, as shown in (8):

(8) a. I found the neurophysiology and the neuroanatomy the most interesting part of my studies, although it took a while before the penny dropped and I fell off my donkey and decided I was going to become a neurosurgeon ”. (SPOK: NPR_Fresh Air, 2015)

b. Det-CHAMBERS: I didn't know how David Coffin had died. No one knew. Ms-LEE: And that was the first time the penny dropped, and I went, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God”. (SPOK: CBS_48Hours, 2007)

In the concluding section, we take stock of the semantic associations that tend to inhere in the verbal expressions about ideation surveyed here that disproportionately favour first person singular as opposed to second or third person cognizers.

DISCUSSION

Inspired by Sinclair 1991, Scheibman 2001, and other corpus linguists and gram- maticalization scholars who advocate the importance of drilling down and examining the inflectional, agreement, and collocational preferences of individual verbs and verbal constructions, we have noted that 1sg and 2^nd person ideation in English, prototypically associated with I think and you know, are each drawing in different kinds of expressions to do epistemic work in the language. Because the two prototypes are effectively functioning as pragmatic markers rather than complement-taking ideational verbs, at least in spoken varieties of the language, a host of other expressions from very different semantic fields are undergoing epistemization processes and entering into constructions about cognition. Not so surprisingly, those epistemizing expressions exhibiting a 1sg bias share many attributes not enjoyed, necessarily, by those expressions showing a bias towards 2^nd person, much like think and know have clearly gravitated in separate directions in terms of their agreement patterns. These differences lead us to conclude that 1sg and 2^nd person (and possibly, 3^rd as well) represent distinct styles of ideation and, consequently, have attracted and will continue to attract different kinds of novel expressions in their wake.

To put it in terms reminiscent of Spivey 2008 and contemporary cognitive scientists describing fluid models of categorization, high frequency of occurrence -- be it in conceptualization pathways or motor routines -- can be construed as “attractor basins” that act as centres of gravity for similar concepts or behaviours. Bybee (2010: 76--96) has similarly argued that forces of semantic change are affected by high-frequency items with heavy semantic pull. We, too, have applied this metaphor in an earlier presentation of this research, associating the Latin for `I think', cogito, and the Latin for `you know', scis (2sg) or scitis (2pl), with different cognitive models of ideation as if they were different craters on the moon. Admittedly, think and know in the abstract both have an unbounded (in the sense of Langacker 1991: 85--91), atelic, and imperfective quality to them as event types describing cognition (compare them to realize or learn). Nevertheless, we suggest that 1sg ideation, typified by I think, means something like `I (suddenly) realize something', invoking semantic properties generally associated with prototypical transitive events, such as change of state, being telic and force-dynamic, and having a more compressed and punctual temporal profile. on the other hand, second person ideation, in the guise of you know, means something more stative like `you have a thought' or `you (continuously) ponder/consider something'. Thus, its connotations could be characterized as less transitive, more atelic, more durative, and less likely to involve change over time. As high-frequency attractor basins representing the semantic field of cognition, I think and you know -- or more succinctly, 1sg.ideate and 2.ideate -- recruit different kinds of expressions to do epistemic work. Expressions examined above in COCA_sp like what struck PRO about, it hit PRO that, a lightbulb went off in PRO's head, it raced through PRO's mind, the penny dropped (for PRO), show an undeniable preference for 1sg as PRO. These expressions overwhelmingly suggest a tight temporal profile and a discernable change of state or outcome; in short, a flash of realization. In a nutshell, when I think, my brain storms (it struck me like a bolt of lightning, it came to me in a flash); when you think, your brain waves (something's going on in your mind, you seem to be in the know).

We would like to end with a caveat about the wider interpretation of our findings. Our study has limited itself to English data and, even then, the study has been largely limited to the usage of think and know in the simple present tense and only in a conversational genre. Clearly, we are not in a position to make empirically justified claims about comparable behaviour of the counterparts to these verbs in other languages, or indeed other genres or tense/aspect categories in English. The SG/pl ambiguity associated with English you also invites further research into the preferences for 2sg and 2pl subject preferences for these verbs in other languages. There remains then the question of how specific to English our findings are and whether comparable preferences for subjects of think and know occur sometimes, frequently, very frequently, or always in other languages. We believe these are questions that can and should be further explored.

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