1,720,994 research outputs found
Constructional associations trump lexical associations in processing valency coercion
Full text linkThe paper investigates the interaction of lexical and constructional meaning in valency coercion processing, and the effect of (in)compatibility between verb and construction for its successful resolution (Perek, Florent & Martin Hilpert. 2014. Constructional tolerance: Cross-linguistic differences in the acceptability of non-conventional uses of constructions. Constructions and Frames 6(2). 266–304; Yoon, Soyeon. 2019. Coercion and language change: A usage-based approach. Linguistic Research 36(1). 111–139). We present an online experiment on valency coercion (the first one on Italian), by means of a semantic priming protocol inspired by Johnson, Matt A. & Adele E. Goldberg. 2013. Evidence for automatic accessing of constructional meaning: Jabberwocky sentences prime associated verbs. Language & Cognitive Processes 28(10). 1439–1452. We test priming effects with a lexical decision task which presents different target verbs preceded by coercion instances of four Italian argument structure constructions, which serve as primes. Three types of verbs serve as target: lexical associate (LA), construction associate (CA), and unrelated (U) verbs. LAs are semantically similar to the main verb of the prime sentence, whereas CAs are prototypical verbs associated to the prime construction. U verbs serve as a mean of comparison for the two categories of interest. Results confirm that processing of valency coercion requires an integration of both lexical and constructional semantics. Moreover, compatibility is also found to influence coercion resolution. Specifically, constructional priming is primary and independent from compatibility. A secondary priming effect for LA verbs is also found, which suggests a contribution of lexical semantics in coercion resolution – especially for low-compatibility coercion coinages
Valency coercion in Italian
Full text linkThe paper investigates valency coercion effects in Italian by means of anacceptability rating task on nine argument structure constructions. Theexperimental design followsPerek & Hilpert (2014)in presenting threeconditions: grammatical, impossible and coercion stimuli. This designallows us to test several factors: the acceptability of creative coercedstructures, the role of age and– most importantly– the influence of theconstruction itself. Results overall confirm our hypotheses: valencycoercion is identified as an intermediate level between grammaticality andungrammaticality, with varying degrees of “coercibility” acrossconstructions. An influence of age is not in evidence for coercion sentences,suggesting that the systematic variation in acceptability is due to theinfluence of different constructions. We propose that coercion resolutionresults from the interaction of constructional and lexical semantics
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Coercing Italian: Valency Coercion in a Romance Language
No full textValency coercion phenomena arise when constructions and verbs are combined in novel and flexible ways. This flexibility is one of the main supporting of argument constructions as structural units of language, with abstract and independent semantics that dynamically interact with the semantics of the main verb (Goldberg, 1995; Michaelis, 2005; Pustejovsky et al., 2010; Lauwers and Willems, 2011; Perek, 2015). Despite the pivotal role of coercion in construction grammar, however, little research has been done outside the domain of English (Gonzalvez-Garcia, 2007; Boas and Gonzalvez-Garcıa, 2014; Booji and Audring, 2015), and – to our knowledge – no attempt has been previously made to analyse constructional flexibility in Italian.
We propose the results of an empirical study on Italian valency coercion, which aims to contribute both to a still lacking constructionist description of Italian and to a cross-linguistic debate on the cognitive reality of constructions. The first part of the research was carried out by means of an acceptability rating test based on Perek and Hilpert (2014): the experiment is structured around 9 argument structure constructions of Italian; a set of 21 sentences was created for each construction, divided in 3 experimental conditions: grammatical, coercion, impossible. Between conditions, sentences differ only in their verb, to insert as little variation as possible.
1) a. Gianni ha detto che verrà domani (Gianni said that he will come tomorrow)
b. Gianni ha fischiettato che verrà domani (Gianni whistled that he will come tomorrow)
c. Gianni ha cucinato che verrà domani (Gianni cooked that he will come tomorrow)
120 Italian native speakers from three age groups were tested: adolescents, young adults (18 - 35 years old), and adults (over 40). The data was analysed both with statistical tests and with linear mixed effect modelling. Results show coercion as an “intermediate” condition, significantly different from both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Moreover, the recognition of coercion appears to vary with age, as older speakers tended to polarise their answers towards the extremities of the scale (1 or 7).
The data also showed inter-construction variability. Constructions appeared to have different degrees of flexibility, that we are addressing in the second part of the study. We are constructing a corpus-based distributional model to operationalize the notion of (partial) productivity of constructions (Barðdal, 2008; Zeschel, 2015). Our assumption is that coercion mechanisms are influenced both by the productivity of the construction and by the distance between source and target meaning of the verb embedded in the creative structure (Barak and Goldberg, 2017; Perek and Goldberg, 2017). We measure the latter by representing construction meaning with distributional vectors trained on a large Italian corpus, following the approach in Lebani and Lenci (2017). As data, we matched syntactic frames automatically extracted from the Universal Dependency Italian treebank (Rambelli et al., 2016) to our constructions and identified the more frequent verbs. The results of the second part of the study, which are still being processed, will provide distributional evidence to shed new light on Italian constructions’ flexibility
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Using distributional semantics to study syntactic productivity in diachrony: A case study
Full text linkThis paper investigates syntactic productivity in diachrony with a data-drivenapproach. Previous research indicates that syntactic productivity (the property of grammatical constructions to attract new lexical fillers) is largely driven by semantics, which calls for an operationalization of lexical meaning in the context of empirical studies. It is suggested that distributional semantics can fulfill this role by providing a measure of semantic similarity between words that is derived from lexical co-occurrences in large text corpora. On the basis of a case study of the construction “V the hell out of NP”, e.g., You scared the hell out of me, it is shown that distributional semantics not only appropriately captures how the verbs in the distribution of the construction are related, but also enables the use of visualization techniques and statistical modeling to analyze the semantic development of a construction over time and identify the determinants of syntactic productivity in naturally occurring data
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