Carita Paradis

Adjectives and boundedness

Abstract This article examines the significance of the schematic domain of boundedness in adjectives. It is proposed that boundedness in adjectives is a fundamental characteristic associated with gradability. Cross-categorial correspondences are made to nouns and verbs, where boundedness is a feature of countability and aktionsart respectively. Two basic types of gradable adjectives are distinguished: those which are associated with a boundary and those which are not. It is also shown that it is possible to change the configuration of adjectives in terms of boundedness through contextual modulation. Finally, it is demonstrated that the configuration of adjectives in terms of boundaries may dominate their interpretation at the expense of the content proper, and the adjectives become more like function words than content words.

Configurations, construals and change: Expressions of DEGREE

This article challenges the widespread view that DEGREE is a grammatical phenomenon characteristic of certain types of word classes and, instead, argues that DEGREE is pervasive in language and may be associated with most meanings. The main aim of the article is to discuss the results of a number of corpus investigations and experiments of DEGREE meanings in general and of the modification of DEGREE in particular, and to accommodate these results in a general and dynamic model of Lexical Meaning as Ontologies and Construals (LOC; Paradis 2005). The claims are that (i) DEGREE is a BOUNDEDNESS configuration in conceptual space; (ii) DEGREE modifiers operate on the DEGREE structure of the meanings to which they apply through a construal of contextually motivated zone activation within conventionalized senses; (iii) nonconventionalized DEGREE readings of form–meaning pairings are invoked through implication by means of construals of metonymization between senses; and (iv) this process ofmetonymization is the mechanism through which change may or may not take place. (Less)

Where Does Metonymy Stop? Senses, Facets, and Active Zones

The purpose of this article is to propose a constrained lexical semantic definition of referential metonymy within a model of meaning as ontology and construal. Due to their various types of lexical-referential pairings, 3 types of construals that are frequently referred to as metonymy in the cognitive literature are distinguished as metonymization, facetization, and zone activation. Metonymization involves the use of a lexical item to evoke the sense of something that is not conventionally linked to that particular lexical item. It is argued that metonymy is a contingent relation that stops at the sense level. Facetization and zone activation both involve the use of conventional pairings of lexical items and contextual readings. Facetization takes place within senses at the level of qualia structure and zone activation takes place within qualia structure. Zone activation is a ubiquitous phenomenon that concerns all readings, senses as well facets.

Describing Sensory Experience: The Genre of Wine Reviews

The purpose of the article is to shed light on how experiences of sensory perceptions in the domains of vision, smell, taste, and touch are recast into text and discourse in the genre of wine reviews. Because of the alleged paucity of sensory vocabularies, in particular in the olfactory domain, it is of particular interest to investigate what resources language has to offer in order to describe those experiences. We show that the main resources are, on the one hand, words evoking properties that are applicable cross-modally and properties of objects that range over more than one domain, and on the other, vivid imagery that compares the characteristics of the wine with people, buildings, animals, and the hustle and bustle of market places and other events. The second goal is to account for the construals of the meanings of the expressions used in the recontextualization into written discourse in the light of their apparent flexibility across the descriptions of the sensory experiences. In contrast to a large body of the literature on sensory meanings in language, we argue that the descriptors of properties such as sharp, soft, lemon, and cherry used to describe a wines qualities across the sensory domains are not polysemous synesthetic metaphors, but monosemous synesthetic metonymizations, more precisely zone activations. With regard to the imagery used, the construals represented cover both similes, metaphorizations and metonymizations proper.

“This beauty should drink well for 10–12 years”: a note on recommendations as semantic middles

Abstract This paper capitalizes on the types of portrayal of the event in recommendations of prime drinking time using data from wine tasting notes. It argues that the weakly deontic nature of recommendation fosters semantic middles; not only the middle construction proper such as This beauty should drink well for 10–12 years, but recommendation as such is characterized by a mid-degree of transfer of action in the utterances. In spite of the fact that the event expressed in recommendations involves highly transitive structures, i.e., an actor, an undergoer, and a dynamic event, the actual staging of the recommendations at the time of use is similar to the staging of the middle construction. The various formal differences between the recommendations are examined in terms of the relative salience of the roles played by the semantic participants and the dynamicity of the event. The upshot of the study is that the middle quality is directly derived from the discourse function of recommendation.

The State of the Art in Sentiment Visualization

Visualization of sentiments and opinions extracted from or annotated in texts has become a prominent topic of research over the last decade. From basic pie and bar charts used to illustrate customer reviews to extensive visual analytics systems involving novel representations, sentiment visualization techniques have evolved to deal with complex multidimensional data sets, including temporal, relational and geospatial aspects. This contribution presents a survey of sentiment visualization techniques based on a detailed categorization. We describe the background of sentiment analysis, introduce a categorization for sentiment visualization techniques that includes 7 groups with 35 categories in total, and discuss 132 techniques from peer‐reviewed publications together with an interactive web‐based survey browser. Finally, we discuss insights and opportunities for further research in sentiment visualization. We expect this survey to be useful for visualization researchers whose interests include sentiment or other aspects of text data as well as researchers and practitioners from other disciplines in search of efficient visualization techniques applicable to their tasks and data.

The construal of spatial meaning : Windows into conceptual space

This book provides important insights into the domain of interactions between language and cognition, focusing on SPACE and expressions of SPACE. Both literal and metaphorical forms of expression are included. The research reported is carried out within the broad framework of Cognitive Linguistics, which encompasses a wide variety of empirical methods and research topics. Our approach to the construal of spatial meaning is inclusive rather than restricted in that we take linguistics to encompass both verbal and non-verbal communication systems. The various authors draw on new developments and new knowledge, available partly thanks to theoretical development in the area of language and cognition, and partly due to the development of new empirical techniques and computational facilities. As the title of the volume suggests, the centre of gravity is at this interface between theoretical and empirical development and progress. The contributions also reflect the multidisciplinary character of the study of space. At the heart of them all is the relation between physical space and mental space as expressed in human communication. The techniques used include various types of experiments (such as eye-tracking) as well as video analysis and corpus investigation. The structure of the book reflects a spatial metaphor of a window through which we as analysts are able to get a glimpse of inner space through the investigation of eye movement, pointing, gesture, drawing, speech and writing. (Less)

Antonym canonicity: Temporal and contextual manipulations

Previous research on antonyms has shown that some pairings form more felicitous couplings than others. Following up on that research, we conducted two semantic categorization experiments using Event Related Potentials to establish whether there are neurophysiological differences related to levels of antonym canonicity. In Experiment 1, the members of canonical antonym pairs (e.g. black-white), non-canonical antonym pairs (e.g. white-dark) and unrelated word pairs (e.g. bumpy-small) were presented in isolation separated either by a short (200 ms) or a long (800 ms) time interval. The canonical antonyms gave rise to significantly lower N400 amplitudes than both non-canonical antonyms and unrelated pairs, but no significant difference in N400 amplitudes for non-canonical and unrelated pairs was found. In Experiment 2, the same pairs were presented in a congruent context. Significant differences in N400 amplitudes across all three conditions were found, also between non-canonical antonyms and unrelated word pairs.

Semantic profiles of antonymic adjectives in discourse

Abstract This study has two goals: First, to give an account of the semantic organization of individually used antonymic adjectives in discourse and second, based on those findings and previous work on antonymic meanings, to contribute to a comprehensive theoretical account of their representation within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The hypothesis is that the members of the pairs are used in the same contexts and in the same type of constructions, not only when they co-occur and are used to express binary opposition as shown in previous studies, but also when they do not. The manually coded corpus data from the BNC are analyzed along four semantic parameters: (i) the configuration of the adjectives in terms of gradability, (ii) the way they modify the nominal meanings, i.e., attributively or predicatively (iii) the meaning type of the modified nouns, and (iv) the status of the constructions with respect to whether their meanings are what we refer to as “basic”, metaphorical or metonymical. Correspondence analysis technique is used to identify similarities and differences on the basis of the totality of the data. As predicted, our findings confirm a high degree of pairwise similarity – but also some differences. On the basis of these results, it can be argued that the long-standing controversy within Structuralism between proponents of the co-occurrence hypothesis and the substitutability hypothesis in antonym research is a non-issue.

Conceptual Spaces at Work in Sensory Cognition Domains, dimensions and distances

This chapter makes use of two data sources, terminological schemas for wine descriptions and actual wine reviews, for the investigation of how experiences of sensory perceptions of vision, smell, taste and touch are described. In spite of all the great challenges involved in describing perceptions, professional wine reviewers are expected to be able to give an understandable account of their experiences. The reviews are explored with focus on the different types of descriptors and the ways their meanings are construed. It gives an account of the use of both property expressions, such as soft, sharp, sweet and dry and object descriptors, such as blueberry, apple and honey. It pays particular attention to the apparent cross-sensory use of descriptors, such as white aromas and soft smell, arguing that the ontological cross-over of sensory modalities are to be considered as symptoms of ‘synesthesia’ in the wine-tasting practice and monosemy at the conceptual level. In contrast to the standard view of the meanings of words for sensory perceptions, the contention is that it is not the case that, for instance, sharp in sharp smell primarily evokes a notion of touch; rather the sensory experiences are strongly interrelated in cognition. When instantiated in, say smell, soft spans the closely related sense domains, and the lexical syncretism is taken to be grounded in the workings of human sensory cognition.