This chapter reports on the results of a corpus-based study of lexical substitution, which is one... more This chapter reports on the results of a corpus-based study of lexical substitution, which is one type of idiomatic creativity, examining which terms are utilized by speakers as creative substitutes for the lexemes heart in English idioms and kokoro and shin in Japanese idioms. I attempt to motivate the choice of these particular terms, to establish what their use reveals about the meaning of HEART in these idioms, and to develop a preliminary taxonomy of the range of semantic categories of lexical substitution in idioms (in which I argue that there are five categories of lexical substitution based on the semantic relationship between the original lexeme and the lexeme that replaced it, and label these categories synonymy, antonymy, analogy, providing an alternative, and assigning a cause). Additionally, I show that the specific meaning of an idiom employed with a lexical substitute is determined by three factors: the semantics contributed by the substituted term in the context of the idiom; the relationship of form and meaning in the idiom (based on the typology given in Nunberg et al., 1994), and the specific context of use. Finally, I note that the English results were plentiful, but the Japanese results were not, and ask why this may be the case, testing the hypothesis that HEART forms a core element in the idioms in Japanese, and therefore is not easily replaced. Results provide limited support for this hypothesis.
This lexical semantic and sociopragmatic analysis of terms for genitalia in Japanese aims to cont... more This lexical semantic and sociopragmatic analysis of terms for genitalia in Japanese aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of cognitive sociolinguistics as well as to the studies of language and gender and language and taboo (e.g. Allan and Burridge 2006, Jay 2000). Its purpose is to elucidate broader, cultural patterns of expression (and, presumably, thought) relating to these taboo body parts, with the goal of better understanding the larger metaphors, stereotypes and biases regarding men, women, and sexuality in Japanese culture. To date, the data employed derive primarily from the jpTenTen11 corpus, a web-based corpus with 8 billion words. The lexical collocates of three terms for male genitals (chinko, chin-chin, and chinpo, all roughly “penis”) and one for female genitals (manko, roughly “vulva” or “vagina”) were investigated within a wide range of syntactic environments. The results successfully distinguished the three terms used for males: speaking broadly, chinko is a general term (like “penis”), while the euphemism chin-chin ranges from cute (like “pecker”) to playfully sexual (possibly like “dick”), and the dysphemism chimpo is extremely dirty and sexual (like “cock”). All three attract many words describing the physical appearance of the organ, attesting to speakers’ deep concern with its size and shape, as well as the power of their imagination (as words such as dekai “large” and futoi “thick” are strong collocates, but, unrealistically, words of opposing polarity such as chisai “small” and hosoi “thin” are generally not collocates). The patterning of data for the three terms for males shows that eroticism and cuteness are mutually exclusive, but eroticism and dirtiness occur together. In other words, the way it patterns in our data, sexuality for males is either cute (with chin-chin, which collocates with words for cuteness as well as a range of reduplicated onomatopoeic terms describing sexual acts) or both erotic and dirty (with chinpo, which collocates strongly with a range of terms for eroticism and physical (etc.) dirtiness, and to a lesser degree, chinko, which participates in a limited way in a subset of the collocations). As for the term for female genitals (manko), it collocates strongly with terms describing eroticism such as ero-ero and eroi (both “erotic”), in many constructions – far more so than chinpo, let alone the other terms for men’s genitals. Most strikingly, however, manko, but none of the terms for males, collocates strongly with many lexemes describing a “pure” version of this organ, like uiuisii “innocent”, itaike “innocent, helpless”, and osanai “immature, young” as well as those describing the corrupt or dirty version of the organ such as darashinai "slovenly, loose, easy", hashitanai "shameless, loose”, fushidara “loose, sluttish”, and midara “sluttish, promiscuous, dirty”. These and other data suggest that, for women, there are moral consequences to sexual experience, though no such pattern is seen for men. The patterns of language use observed reveal an underlying narrative: sexual activity makes a woman(‘s genitals) dirty. Unlike men, women lose their purity by engaging in sex. To phrase this in terms of the theory of conceptual metaphor (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1999), I will argue that the metaphor LACK OF SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS PURITY (or SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS POLLUTION) applies exclusively or primarily to women.
Embodiment in Cross-Linguistic Studies: The Heart, 2023
This chapter reports on the results of a corpus-based study of lexical substitution, which is one... more This chapter reports on the results of a corpus-based study of lexical substitution, which is one type of idiomatic creativity, examining which terms are utilized by speakers as creative substitutes for the lexemes heart in English idioms and kokoro and shin in Japanese idioms. I attempt to motivate the choice of these particular terms, to establish what their use reveals about the meaning of HEART in these idioms, and to develop a preliminary taxonomy of the range of semantic categories of lexical substitution in idioms (in which I argue that there are five categories of lexical substitution based on the semantic relationship between the original lexeme and the lexeme that replaced it, and label these categories synonymy, antonymy, analogy, providing an alternative, and assigning a cause).
Additionally, I show that the specific meaning of an idiom employed with a lexical substitute is determined by three factors: the semantics contributed by the substituted term in the context of the idiom; the relationship of form and meaning in the idiom (based on the typology given in Nunberg et al., 1994), and the specific context of use. Finally, I note that the English results were plentiful, but the Japanese results were not, and ask why this may be the case, testing the hypothesis that HEART forms a core element in the idioms in Japanese, and therefore is not easily replaced. Results provide limited support for this hypothesis.
Proceedings of the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association, 2020
In this paper, I describe a conceptual skeleton or ur-joke (Hofsteader and Gabora 1989) that, in ... more In this paper, I describe a conceptual skeleton or ur-joke (Hofsteader and Gabora 1989) that, in its two variations, can be used to describe and (at least partially) motivate many of the cartoons in the Far Side, a comic strip by Gary Larson which ran in more than 1,900 daily newspapers from 1980 until 1995.
This involves a specific pattern of conceptual blending (Coulson 2001, Fauconnier and Turner 2002), including a blend that is created unequally, with one input (humans) assuming the major role in the blend, and the other (animals) a minor role. The blended being is usually able to fully grasp human language and possesses other human characteristics, from self-awareness to culture, but inherits at least two characteristics from the minor input. The first is its physical form, and the second is what I will refer to as a [fatal flaw\ in the blend: a prototypical, salient aspect of the minor member.s physical form or behavior that is incongruous with its otherwise human (or animal) qualities, or with the specifically human (or animal) context involved.
This "collision of incompatible matrices" (Koestler 1964:92) or clash of frames, or script opposition (Attardo 2001), which is the key to the humor, involves the juxtaposition of and contrast between these aspects, which exist simultaneously in a single being, or simply the fact that the fatal flaw has been mapped into the blend, especially as it is at odds with the given context. In one variation of the conceptual skeleton, as an emergent meaning, an analogy is implied based on the presence of the fatal flaw, and this inevitably results in absurdity (i.e. these employ the logical mechanism of "false analogy"; Attardo et al. 2002). In another variation, there is no emergent meaning or analogy implied, and the mere presence of the fatal flaw in the blended space is humorous (these rely on [quirky logic\; Parington 2006:48). In a few cases, a third variation was observed, involving a frame blend, in which frames from both the human and the animal inputs were mapped into the blended space of the cartoon. I have analyzed all 200 cartoons comprising Larson 1986 and I will argue that this basic analysis applies to approximately half of the cartoons therein.
(This is just the abstract - the publisher has requested that we do not release our actual papers... more (This is just the abstract - the publisher has requested that we do not release our actual papers publicly for two years.)
This lexical semantic and sociopragmatic analysis of terms for genitalia in Japanese aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of cognitive sociolinguistics (e.g. Geeraertz et al 2010, Pütz et al 2014) as well as to the studies of language and gender (e.g. Lakoff 1975/2004, Takemaru 2010) and language and taboo (e.g. Allan and Burridge 2006, Jay 2000). Its purpose is to elucidate broader, cultural patterns of expression (and, presumably, thought) relating to these taboo body parts, with the goal of better understanding the larger metaphors, stereotypes and biases regarding men, women, and sexuality in Japanese culture.
To date, the data employed derive primarily from the jpTenTen11 corpus, a web-based corpus with 8 billion words (Srdanović et al. 2013). The lexical collocates of three terms for male genitals (chinko, chin-chin, and chinpo, all roughly "penis") and one for female genitals (manko, roughly "vulva" or "vagina") were investigated within a wide range of syntactic environments. The corpus was selected in part because other corpora investigated suffered from data sparsity, which is not surprising considering the highly taboo nature of the terms investigated. The jpTenTen11 corpus contains more than 50,000 tokens of all four terms, permitting confidence in the statistical methods used, but at a price: while I seek to study the relevant metaphors in Japanese culture in general, these data may only provide insight into language use on the internet, and conclusions may not generalize to the broader culture.
The results successfully distinguished the three terms used for males: speaking broadly, chinko is a general term (like "penis"), while the euphemism chin-chin ranges from cute (like "pecker") to playfully sexual (possibly like "dick"), and the dysphemism chimpo is extremely dirty and sexual (like "cock"). All three attract many words describing the physical appearance of the organ, attesting to speakers' deep concern with its size and shape, as well as the power of their imagination (as words such as dekai "large" and futoi "thick" are strong collocates, but, unrealistically, words of opposing polarity such as chisai "small" and hosoi "thin" are generally not collocates). The patterning of data for the three terms for males shows that eroticism and cuteness are mutually exclusive, but eroticism and dirtiness occur together. In other words, the way it patterns in our data, sexuality for males is either cute (with chin-chin, which collocates with words for cuteness as well as a range of reduplicated onomatopoeic terms describing sexual acts) or both erotic and dirty (with chinpo, which collocates strongly with a range of terms for eroticism and physical (etc.) dirtiness, and to a lesser degree, chinko, which participates in a limited way in a subset of the collocations).
As for the term for female genitals (manko), it collocates strongly with terms describing eroticism such as ero-ero and eroi (both "erotic"), in many constructions-far more so than chinpo, let alone the other terms for men's genitals. Most strikingly, however, manko, but none of the terms for males, collocates strongly with many lexemes describing a "pure" version of this organ, like uiuisii "innocent", itaike "innocent, helpless", and osanai "immature, young" as well as those describing the corrupt or dirty version of the organ such as darashinai "slovenly, loose, easy", hashitanai "shameless, loose", fushidara "loose, sluttish", and midara "sluttish, promiscuous, dirty". These and other data suggest that, for women, there are moral consequences to sexual experience, though no such pattern is seen for men.
The patterns of language use observed reveal an underlying narrative: sexual activity makes a woman('s genitals) dirty. Unlike men, women lose their purity by engaging in sex. Eroticism and dirtiness are not distinguished in terms for men's or women's genitalia. However, only the women seem to suffer the consequences of engaging in sexuality. To phrase this in terms of the theory of conceptual metaphor (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1999), I will argue that the metaphor LACK OF SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS PURITY (or SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS POLLUTION) applies exclusively or primarily to women.
Work Cited Allan, Keith and Kate Burridge. 2006. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Gitte Kristiansen, and Yves Peirsman (eds.). 2010. Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Berlin/New York, De Gruyter Mouton.
Jay, Timothy. 2000. Why We Curse: A Neural-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech. Philadelphia / Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy In the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, Robin. 1975/2006. Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Pütz, Martin, Justyna A. Robinson, and Monika Reif (eds.). 2014. Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Social and cultural variation in cognition and language use. Philadelphia / Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Srdanović, Irena, Vit Suchomel, Toshinobu Ogiso, and Adam Kilgarriff. 2013. 百億語のコーパスを用いた日本語の語彙・文法情報のプロファイリング (Japanese Language Lexical and Grammatical Profiling Using the Web Corpus jpTenTen). Proceedings of the 3rd Japanese corpus linguistics workshop, Department of Corpus Studies/Center for Corpus Development, NINJAL, 2013, 229-238.
Takemaru, Naoko. 2010. Women in the Language and Society of Japan: The Linguistic Roots of Bias. Jefferson, North Carolina and London, McFarland & Company.
In his officially released standup comedy, Mitch Hedberg included two jokes based largely on the ... more In his officially released standup comedy, Mitch Hedberg included two jokes based largely on the word "fake". Coulson and Fauconnier (1999; Coulson 2001) analyze the contribution of "fake" in the collocation "fake gun", offering an analysis that "fake" prompts the creation of a blended space in which fakeness arises from the actor’s knowledge but the property of being a gun is inherited from the victim’s belief space. Here, to test their analysis, and claims of the significance of blending in humor in general, I treat the jokes using a minimal pair of analyses, including and excluding blending.
I show that the two jokes make use of five distinct blends involving falsity, including multiple instances of the comedian erroneously mapping from the observer’s (less-privileged) belief space to the blended space. Furthermore, I argue that we laugh at his (ostensible) understanding of, and false beliefs surrounding, falsity itself. Blending motivates the data naturally, but I argue that its role as an analytical tool needs to be distinguished from its application as a cognitive process. Overall, the results support Coulson and Fauconnier’s analysis of "fake" and add to the growing literature documenting and elucidating the essential role of conceptual blending in humor.
The correctness fallacy is the assumption that there is always exactly one correct answer to any ... more The correctness fallacy is the assumption that there is always exactly one correct answer to any question asked. It is part of a folk model of logic, philosophy, and science that linguists naturally inherit, but this paper argues that it leads to untenable assumptions in linguistics, focusing on the field of lexical semantics. In order to exemplify the problems resulting from adherence to the correctness fallacy, three studies are described. The first investigates the frequent assumption that each token of a polysemous item is motivated by exactly one of the item’s senses. The results of qualitative and quantitative studies argue that, for some tokens, none of the item’s senses is – or multiple senses are - invoked by the language user. The second study examines the common assumption that force dynamics is an all-or-none property of a lexeme, arguing instead that there is a gradation of strength-of-association of force dynamic properties. The third study is an investigation of collostructional analysis, a statistically sophisticated methodology used in cognitive-oriented corpus linguistics, and will argue that even this advanced methodology can suffer from an implicit acceptance of the correctness fallacy. Taken together, the results serve as a cautionary note to lexical semanticists and argue against the overly simplistic approach to lexical semantics – and linguistics in general - that can result from an acceptance of the correctness fallacy.
Force Dynamics (e.g., Talmy 1988, 2000) is a basic cognitive category describing how entities int... more Force Dynamics (e.g., Talmy 1988, 2000) is a basic cognitive category describing how entities interact with respect to force. It is fundamental to the conceptual structure of language, and appears to be universal. Despite developments in the literature on Force Dynamics over the last decades, many researchers assume that Force Dynamics is an all- or-none property of a form, rather than allowing that a form may be more- or less-closely associated with a Force Dynamic pattern. The hypothesis tested here is that there is a gradation of strength with which a form may be associated with a Force Dynamic property, and that English through is an instance of a form associated with a Force Dynamic pattern to a non-trivial and non-maximal extent. In order to argue that THROUGH has a strong affinity for the Force Dynamic configuration of resistance, though it does not denote resistance, the behavior of THROUGH in two corpora is compared to that of its lexical alternatives in environments including and lacking resistance. The results of quantitative analysis, including collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003, 2005), support the argument that there is a gradation of strength with which a form may be associated with a Force Dynamic property.
This paper examines Saussure’s claim that “[C]oncepts... are defined not positively, in terms of ... more This paper examines Saussure’s claim that “[C]oncepts... are defined not positively, in terms of their content, but negatively by contrast with other items in the same system. What characterizes each most exactly is being whatever the others are not.” (1916 [1983]:115). Here, I investigate the distribution of meaning in a system, and ask this question: To what extent are forms defined by or sensitive to other forms, as Saussure claimed? To do so, I consider the system of describing separation events in Japanese, focusing on the lexical competitors nukeru, toreru, and hazureru, which could all be translated into English as “come out/off”. Specifically, I ask what categories of meaning are relevant to the three verbs, and how they are distributed in the system. To what extent is there real overlap, and not merely apparent overlap (e.g. due to the translation)? Is there any evidence that the forms are sensitive to each other, or that they are defined negatively, as “whatever the others are not”? In-depth interviews with native speakers helped lead to the formation of hypotheses, which were tested by giving surveys to seventy native speaking-subjects. Quantitative analysis of their responses reveals profound overlap and variation in the system, as well as the unique specialization of each verb and the great extent to which subjects’ intuitions depended on their judgments of lexical competitors in the same situation.
Here, I ask the question “How can we tell if linguists are employing in their analyses of polysem... more Here, I ask the question “How can we tell if linguists are employing in their analyses of polysemy the same senses that language users employ in their cognitive behavior?”. My primary purpose is to demonstrate an empirically responsible lexical semantic analysis of polysemy within the framework of cognitive linguistics, grounded in empiricism and explicit, clear definitions, with the purpose of ensuring that languages users are actually employing the senses described in the analysis. To do this, I take an approach to polysemy that resolves the age-old issues plaguing polysemy research, employing it to good effect in the analysis of THROUGH.
I take polysemy to refer to a lexeme or construction with multiple senses which are differentiable syntactically as well as semantically, with a constrained number and variety of potential relationships holding between the senses. Because my definition of polysemy is grounded in syntax, the senses described in the analysis can be assumed to be cognitively ‘real’ to language users, as they actually employ these senses. Furthermore, my analysis is grounded in corpus data.
The analysis involves providing both syntactic and semantic evidence for the independence of each sense, as well as describing a plausible motivation for the synchronic relations between the senses.
The success of the approach can be seen in part as an argument against overly simplistic analyses of polysemy. Even syntactically differentiable senses, which are presumably more deeply incorporated into speakers’ linguistic routines than those that show no syntactic distinctions, exhibited a high degree of syntactic and semantic overlap and ambiguity.
This monograph contributes to the study of polysemy by resolving some long-running methodological issues hindering polysemy research, including ensuring that the linguist and the language-user are working with the same sense categories.
There is a cross-linguistic continuum, or implicational scale, of languages' terms covering the s... more There is a cross-linguistic continuum, or implicational scale, of languages' terms covering the spatial relations from containment (IN) to support (ON), discovered by Bowerman and Pederson (1992, ms; see also Bowerman 1996, Bowerman and Choi 2001, Feist 2000, Feist and Genter 1998, 2001, 2003, Levinson and Meira 2003). The results of their research, covering more than forty languages from twenty-five different language families, show that it is possible to rank pictured situations defining spatial relations between two stationary objects on a continuum. Where each language in their research divided IN and ON varied, with some languages, such as Dutch, making more than two distinctions (with op, aan, and in), and others, such as Spanish, having a single term (en) that covered the entire continuum. Still other patterns were seen in as well, with Berber having two terms (di and x) that overlap, rather than having a clean boundary between them. However, significantly, no language in their research defied the continuum by grouping discontinuous situations.
However, in some languages, including Japanese, the IN/ON continuum appears not to be very relevant, based on their research, and the question of if (or to what extent) it is universal arises. In this paper, I ask whether the IN/ON continuum is truly germane in Japanese, a language for which it seems somewhat tangential based on analysis of postpositions and relator nouns. The results show that the continuum is relevant elsewhere in Japanese, supporting the idea that the IN/ON continuum may potentially be relevant in all languages, as long as one knows where to look.
References
Bowerman, M. 1996. The Origins of Children’s Spatial Semantic Categories: Cognitive Versus Linguistic Determinants. In J. Gumperz. and S. Levinson, eds., Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 145-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowerman, M., and S. Choi. 2001. Shaping Meanings for Language: Universal and Language-Specific in the Acquisition of Spatial Semantic Categories. In M. Bowerman and S. Levinson, eds., Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, 475-511. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowerman, M. and E. Pederson. 1992. Crosslinguistic perspectives on topological spatial relations. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, December.
Bowerman, M. and E. Pederson. ms. INwards from ON and ONwards from IN: The crosslinguistic categorization of topological spatial relationships.
Feist, M. I. 2000. On in and on: An investigation into the linguistic encoding of spatial scenes. Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 1998. On plates, bowls, and dishes: Factors in the use of English IN and ON. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 345-349.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 2001. An influence of spatial language on recognition memory for spatial scenes. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 279-284.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 2003. Factors involved in the use of in and on. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Accessed 1/2007 at http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~mif8232/FeistGentner03.pdf.
Levinson, S. C., & Meira, S. 2003. 'Natural concepts' in the spatial topological domain - adpositional meanings in crosslinguistic perspective: An exercise in semantic typology. Language, 79(3), 485-516.
Here, I ask two questions.
a) To what extent does a translation preserve or relinquish the choice... more Here, I ask two questions. a) To what extent does a translation preserve or relinquish the choices made when the event was originally encoded? b) To what extent does a translation force the translator to make new choices?
Attempting to translate English THROUGH into Japanese, I examine the factors, both geometric and otherwise, that distinguish the English term from various possible translation equivalents in Japanese. I show that translations can both a) cause the translator to relinquish significant information originally encoded and b) force the translator to make significant new choices.
The Corpus of Standup Comedy
What is "the language of humor"? What rules and statistical tendenc... more The Corpus of Standup Comedy
What is "the language of humor"? What rules and statistical tendencies mark the expression of humor in a language, distinguishing it from non-humorous language? We can most easily address these questions by building a corpus of humorous language use. The choice of standup comedy as the data source assures us that essentially all linguistic expression within the corpus is designed to be humorous, and permits us to ask further questions such as "What are the specific linguistic characteristics defining standup comedy as a genre?” and "How are the individual linguistic styles of various comedians manifested?”
In order to begin to approach the question for a single language (English), a pilot study was undertaken, employing the Sketch Engine website to create the Corpus of Standup Comedy (CSC), a small (125,000 word) corpus of 16 stand-up performances by five comedians (George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, and Louis CK), representing 15 hours of data.
To test the corpus, a comparative analysis of the use of (English) taboo words in three corpora is in progress. Preliminary results suggest that, in standup comedy, taboo words are employed primarily in order to achieve solidarity with the audience, whereas results from the other corpora suggest that the words are most frequently used to refer to taboo topics.
As a further test, in order to contrast the comedians' individual styles, frequency of use statistics as well as collocational evidence for the usage type of taboo words were collected. Preliminary results show marked differences in the individual styles of the comedians.
Within the context of the study of language and gender, I wish to ask the following question: "Ho... more Within the context of the study of language and gender, I wish to ask the following question: "How do we talk about married men and women in various languages?" As a first approach, a contrastive analysis of several English and Japanese translational equivalents for husband (otto, shujin, danna) and wife (okusan, tsuma, kanai, and nyoubou) was undertaken based on data collected from two comparable corpora created by crawling the Web: the enTenTen12, an English corpus containing 11 billion words (Jakubíček et al. 2013), and the jpTenTen11, a Japanese corpus with 8 billion words (Srdanović et al. 2103). The specific questions addressed are:
1) How do speakers refer to married men and women? 2) In what ways do we describe them? 3) What are they most frequently said to do, and what is most often done to them? 4) The way we talk about it, what do we give them, and what do they give us? 5) The way we talk about it, what do we do together with them?
In an attempt to address these five questions, I examined the lexical collocates of each term within a range of syntactic constructions used to refer, modify, express agentivity, and so on. Overall results show that, in both Japanese and English, collocates of terms for married women primarily pertain to the semantic fields of physical appearance and sexuality, the capacity for childbearing, and subservience, while the results for married men are more varied, with trends involving the semantic fields of power, personality traits, physical appearance, and virility/sexuality. Results for the Japanese terms distinguish tsuma (for which collocates relate to sexuality and subservience) from kanai (lit. “in the house”; many collocates refer to subservience or obedience but none to sexuality). Similarly, Otto and danna, but not shujin, are used to describe a powerful, sexual, and often unfaithful husband. Shujin (lit. “master”) conveys respect and formality, and does not collocate with words for sexuality.
These results are argued to contradict Ide’s (e.g. 2004) argument that women are not subordinate to men in Japanese society, but that men and women simply play distinct, complementary roles necessary to achieve balance. Instead, I will argue that these results suggest that the two gender roles, as expressed in Japanese, may be complementary, but that they are not valued equally.
This chapter reports on the results of a corpus-based study of lexical substitution, which is one... more This chapter reports on the results of a corpus-based study of lexical substitution, which is one type of idiomatic creativity, examining which terms are utilized by speakers as creative substitutes for the lexemes heart in English idioms and kokoro and shin in Japanese idioms. I attempt to motivate the choice of these particular terms, to establish what their use reveals about the meaning of HEART in these idioms, and to develop a preliminary taxonomy of the range of semantic categories of lexical substitution in idioms (in which I argue that there are five categories of lexical substitution based on the semantic relationship between the original lexeme and the lexeme that replaced it, and label these categories synonymy, antonymy, analogy, providing an alternative, and assigning a cause). Additionally, I show that the specific meaning of an idiom employed with a lexical substitute is determined by three factors: the semantics contributed by the substituted term in the context of the idiom; the relationship of form and meaning in the idiom (based on the typology given in Nunberg et al., 1994), and the specific context of use. Finally, I note that the English results were plentiful, but the Japanese results were not, and ask why this may be the case, testing the hypothesis that HEART forms a core element in the idioms in Japanese, and therefore is not easily replaced. Results provide limited support for this hypothesis.
This lexical semantic and sociopragmatic analysis of terms for genitalia in Japanese aims to cont... more This lexical semantic and sociopragmatic analysis of terms for genitalia in Japanese aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of cognitive sociolinguistics as well as to the studies of language and gender and language and taboo (e.g. Allan and Burridge 2006, Jay 2000). Its purpose is to elucidate broader, cultural patterns of expression (and, presumably, thought) relating to these taboo body parts, with the goal of better understanding the larger metaphors, stereotypes and biases regarding men, women, and sexuality in Japanese culture. To date, the data employed derive primarily from the jpTenTen11 corpus, a web-based corpus with 8 billion words. The lexical collocates of three terms for male genitals (chinko, chin-chin, and chinpo, all roughly “penis”) and one for female genitals (manko, roughly “vulva” or “vagina”) were investigated within a wide range of syntactic environments. The results successfully distinguished the three terms used for males: speaking broadly, chinko is a general term (like “penis”), while the euphemism chin-chin ranges from cute (like “pecker”) to playfully sexual (possibly like “dick”), and the dysphemism chimpo is extremely dirty and sexual (like “cock”). All three attract many words describing the physical appearance of the organ, attesting to speakers’ deep concern with its size and shape, as well as the power of their imagination (as words such as dekai “large” and futoi “thick” are strong collocates, but, unrealistically, words of opposing polarity such as chisai “small” and hosoi “thin” are generally not collocates). The patterning of data for the three terms for males shows that eroticism and cuteness are mutually exclusive, but eroticism and dirtiness occur together. In other words, the way it patterns in our data, sexuality for males is either cute (with chin-chin, which collocates with words for cuteness as well as a range of reduplicated onomatopoeic terms describing sexual acts) or both erotic and dirty (with chinpo, which collocates strongly with a range of terms for eroticism and physical (etc.) dirtiness, and to a lesser degree, chinko, which participates in a limited way in a subset of the collocations). As for the term for female genitals (manko), it collocates strongly with terms describing eroticism such as ero-ero and eroi (both “erotic”), in many constructions – far more so than chinpo, let alone the other terms for men’s genitals. Most strikingly, however, manko, but none of the terms for males, collocates strongly with many lexemes describing a “pure” version of this organ, like uiuisii “innocent”, itaike “innocent, helpless”, and osanai “immature, young” as well as those describing the corrupt or dirty version of the organ such as darashinai "slovenly, loose, easy", hashitanai "shameless, loose”, fushidara “loose, sluttish”, and midara “sluttish, promiscuous, dirty”. These and other data suggest that, for women, there are moral consequences to sexual experience, though no such pattern is seen for men. The patterns of language use observed reveal an underlying narrative: sexual activity makes a woman(‘s genitals) dirty. Unlike men, women lose their purity by engaging in sex. To phrase this in terms of the theory of conceptual metaphor (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1999), I will argue that the metaphor LACK OF SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS PURITY (or SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS POLLUTION) applies exclusively or primarily to women.
Embodiment in Cross-Linguistic Studies: The Heart, 2023
This chapter reports on the results of a corpus-based study of lexical substitution, which is one... more This chapter reports on the results of a corpus-based study of lexical substitution, which is one type of idiomatic creativity, examining which terms are utilized by speakers as creative substitutes for the lexemes heart in English idioms and kokoro and shin in Japanese idioms. I attempt to motivate the choice of these particular terms, to establish what their use reveals about the meaning of HEART in these idioms, and to develop a preliminary taxonomy of the range of semantic categories of lexical substitution in idioms (in which I argue that there are five categories of lexical substitution based on the semantic relationship between the original lexeme and the lexeme that replaced it, and label these categories synonymy, antonymy, analogy, providing an alternative, and assigning a cause).
Additionally, I show that the specific meaning of an idiom employed with a lexical substitute is determined by three factors: the semantics contributed by the substituted term in the context of the idiom; the relationship of form and meaning in the idiom (based on the typology given in Nunberg et al., 1994), and the specific context of use. Finally, I note that the English results were plentiful, but the Japanese results were not, and ask why this may be the case, testing the hypothesis that HEART forms a core element in the idioms in Japanese, and therefore is not easily replaced. Results provide limited support for this hypothesis.
Proceedings of the Japanese Cognitive Linguistics Association, 2020
In this paper, I describe a conceptual skeleton or ur-joke (Hofsteader and Gabora 1989) that, in ... more In this paper, I describe a conceptual skeleton or ur-joke (Hofsteader and Gabora 1989) that, in its two variations, can be used to describe and (at least partially) motivate many of the cartoons in the Far Side, a comic strip by Gary Larson which ran in more than 1,900 daily newspapers from 1980 until 1995.
This involves a specific pattern of conceptual blending (Coulson 2001, Fauconnier and Turner 2002), including a blend that is created unequally, with one input (humans) assuming the major role in the blend, and the other (animals) a minor role. The blended being is usually able to fully grasp human language and possesses other human characteristics, from self-awareness to culture, but inherits at least two characteristics from the minor input. The first is its physical form, and the second is what I will refer to as a [fatal flaw\ in the blend: a prototypical, salient aspect of the minor member.s physical form or behavior that is incongruous with its otherwise human (or animal) qualities, or with the specifically human (or animal) context involved.
This "collision of incompatible matrices" (Koestler 1964:92) or clash of frames, or script opposition (Attardo 2001), which is the key to the humor, involves the juxtaposition of and contrast between these aspects, which exist simultaneously in a single being, or simply the fact that the fatal flaw has been mapped into the blend, especially as it is at odds with the given context. In one variation of the conceptual skeleton, as an emergent meaning, an analogy is implied based on the presence of the fatal flaw, and this inevitably results in absurdity (i.e. these employ the logical mechanism of "false analogy"; Attardo et al. 2002). In another variation, there is no emergent meaning or analogy implied, and the mere presence of the fatal flaw in the blended space is humorous (these rely on [quirky logic\; Parington 2006:48). In a few cases, a third variation was observed, involving a frame blend, in which frames from both the human and the animal inputs were mapped into the blended space of the cartoon. I have analyzed all 200 cartoons comprising Larson 1986 and I will argue that this basic analysis applies to approximately half of the cartoons therein.
(This is just the abstract - the publisher has requested that we do not release our actual papers... more (This is just the abstract - the publisher has requested that we do not release our actual papers publicly for two years.)
This lexical semantic and sociopragmatic analysis of terms for genitalia in Japanese aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of cognitive sociolinguistics (e.g. Geeraertz et al 2010, Pütz et al 2014) as well as to the studies of language and gender (e.g. Lakoff 1975/2004, Takemaru 2010) and language and taboo (e.g. Allan and Burridge 2006, Jay 2000). Its purpose is to elucidate broader, cultural patterns of expression (and, presumably, thought) relating to these taboo body parts, with the goal of better understanding the larger metaphors, stereotypes and biases regarding men, women, and sexuality in Japanese culture.
To date, the data employed derive primarily from the jpTenTen11 corpus, a web-based corpus with 8 billion words (Srdanović et al. 2013). The lexical collocates of three terms for male genitals (chinko, chin-chin, and chinpo, all roughly "penis") and one for female genitals (manko, roughly "vulva" or "vagina") were investigated within a wide range of syntactic environments. The corpus was selected in part because other corpora investigated suffered from data sparsity, which is not surprising considering the highly taboo nature of the terms investigated. The jpTenTen11 corpus contains more than 50,000 tokens of all four terms, permitting confidence in the statistical methods used, but at a price: while I seek to study the relevant metaphors in Japanese culture in general, these data may only provide insight into language use on the internet, and conclusions may not generalize to the broader culture.
The results successfully distinguished the three terms used for males: speaking broadly, chinko is a general term (like "penis"), while the euphemism chin-chin ranges from cute (like "pecker") to playfully sexual (possibly like "dick"), and the dysphemism chimpo is extremely dirty and sexual (like "cock"). All three attract many words describing the physical appearance of the organ, attesting to speakers' deep concern with its size and shape, as well as the power of their imagination (as words such as dekai "large" and futoi "thick" are strong collocates, but, unrealistically, words of opposing polarity such as chisai "small" and hosoi "thin" are generally not collocates). The patterning of data for the three terms for males shows that eroticism and cuteness are mutually exclusive, but eroticism and dirtiness occur together. In other words, the way it patterns in our data, sexuality for males is either cute (with chin-chin, which collocates with words for cuteness as well as a range of reduplicated onomatopoeic terms describing sexual acts) or both erotic and dirty (with chinpo, which collocates strongly with a range of terms for eroticism and physical (etc.) dirtiness, and to a lesser degree, chinko, which participates in a limited way in a subset of the collocations).
As for the term for female genitals (manko), it collocates strongly with terms describing eroticism such as ero-ero and eroi (both "erotic"), in many constructions-far more so than chinpo, let alone the other terms for men's genitals. Most strikingly, however, manko, but none of the terms for males, collocates strongly with many lexemes describing a "pure" version of this organ, like uiuisii "innocent", itaike "innocent, helpless", and osanai "immature, young" as well as those describing the corrupt or dirty version of the organ such as darashinai "slovenly, loose, easy", hashitanai "shameless, loose", fushidara "loose, sluttish", and midara "sluttish, promiscuous, dirty". These and other data suggest that, for women, there are moral consequences to sexual experience, though no such pattern is seen for men.
The patterns of language use observed reveal an underlying narrative: sexual activity makes a woman('s genitals) dirty. Unlike men, women lose their purity by engaging in sex. Eroticism and dirtiness are not distinguished in terms for men's or women's genitalia. However, only the women seem to suffer the consequences of engaging in sexuality. To phrase this in terms of the theory of conceptual metaphor (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1999), I will argue that the metaphor LACK OF SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS PURITY (or SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS POLLUTION) applies exclusively or primarily to women.
Work Cited Allan, Keith and Kate Burridge. 2006. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Gitte Kristiansen, and Yves Peirsman (eds.). 2010. Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Berlin/New York, De Gruyter Mouton.
Jay, Timothy. 2000. Why We Curse: A Neural-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech. Philadelphia / Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy In the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, Robin. 1975/2006. Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Pütz, Martin, Justyna A. Robinson, and Monika Reif (eds.). 2014. Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Social and cultural variation in cognition and language use. Philadelphia / Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Srdanović, Irena, Vit Suchomel, Toshinobu Ogiso, and Adam Kilgarriff. 2013. 百億語のコーパスを用いた日本語の語彙・文法情報のプロファイリング (Japanese Language Lexical and Grammatical Profiling Using the Web Corpus jpTenTen). Proceedings of the 3rd Japanese corpus linguistics workshop, Department of Corpus Studies/Center for Corpus Development, NINJAL, 2013, 229-238.
Takemaru, Naoko. 2010. Women in the Language and Society of Japan: The Linguistic Roots of Bias. Jefferson, North Carolina and London, McFarland & Company.
In his officially released standup comedy, Mitch Hedberg included two jokes based largely on the ... more In his officially released standup comedy, Mitch Hedberg included two jokes based largely on the word "fake". Coulson and Fauconnier (1999; Coulson 2001) analyze the contribution of "fake" in the collocation "fake gun", offering an analysis that "fake" prompts the creation of a blended space in which fakeness arises from the actor’s knowledge but the property of being a gun is inherited from the victim’s belief space. Here, to test their analysis, and claims of the significance of blending in humor in general, I treat the jokes using a minimal pair of analyses, including and excluding blending.
I show that the two jokes make use of five distinct blends involving falsity, including multiple instances of the comedian erroneously mapping from the observer’s (less-privileged) belief space to the blended space. Furthermore, I argue that we laugh at his (ostensible) understanding of, and false beliefs surrounding, falsity itself. Blending motivates the data naturally, but I argue that its role as an analytical tool needs to be distinguished from its application as a cognitive process. Overall, the results support Coulson and Fauconnier’s analysis of "fake" and add to the growing literature documenting and elucidating the essential role of conceptual blending in humor.
The correctness fallacy is the assumption that there is always exactly one correct answer to any ... more The correctness fallacy is the assumption that there is always exactly one correct answer to any question asked. It is part of a folk model of logic, philosophy, and science that linguists naturally inherit, but this paper argues that it leads to untenable assumptions in linguistics, focusing on the field of lexical semantics. In order to exemplify the problems resulting from adherence to the correctness fallacy, three studies are described. The first investigates the frequent assumption that each token of a polysemous item is motivated by exactly one of the item’s senses. The results of qualitative and quantitative studies argue that, for some tokens, none of the item’s senses is – or multiple senses are - invoked by the language user. The second study examines the common assumption that force dynamics is an all-or-none property of a lexeme, arguing instead that there is a gradation of strength-of-association of force dynamic properties. The third study is an investigation of collostructional analysis, a statistically sophisticated methodology used in cognitive-oriented corpus linguistics, and will argue that even this advanced methodology can suffer from an implicit acceptance of the correctness fallacy. Taken together, the results serve as a cautionary note to lexical semanticists and argue against the overly simplistic approach to lexical semantics – and linguistics in general - that can result from an acceptance of the correctness fallacy.
Force Dynamics (e.g., Talmy 1988, 2000) is a basic cognitive category describing how entities int... more Force Dynamics (e.g., Talmy 1988, 2000) is a basic cognitive category describing how entities interact with respect to force. It is fundamental to the conceptual structure of language, and appears to be universal. Despite developments in the literature on Force Dynamics over the last decades, many researchers assume that Force Dynamics is an all- or-none property of a form, rather than allowing that a form may be more- or less-closely associated with a Force Dynamic pattern. The hypothesis tested here is that there is a gradation of strength with which a form may be associated with a Force Dynamic property, and that English through is an instance of a form associated with a Force Dynamic pattern to a non-trivial and non-maximal extent. In order to argue that THROUGH has a strong affinity for the Force Dynamic configuration of resistance, though it does not denote resistance, the behavior of THROUGH in two corpora is compared to that of its lexical alternatives in environments including and lacking resistance. The results of quantitative analysis, including collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003, 2005), support the argument that there is a gradation of strength with which a form may be associated with a Force Dynamic property.
This paper examines Saussure’s claim that “[C]oncepts... are defined not positively, in terms of ... more This paper examines Saussure’s claim that “[C]oncepts... are defined not positively, in terms of their content, but negatively by contrast with other items in the same system. What characterizes each most exactly is being whatever the others are not.” (1916 [1983]:115). Here, I investigate the distribution of meaning in a system, and ask this question: To what extent are forms defined by or sensitive to other forms, as Saussure claimed? To do so, I consider the system of describing separation events in Japanese, focusing on the lexical competitors nukeru, toreru, and hazureru, which could all be translated into English as “come out/off”. Specifically, I ask what categories of meaning are relevant to the three verbs, and how they are distributed in the system. To what extent is there real overlap, and not merely apparent overlap (e.g. due to the translation)? Is there any evidence that the forms are sensitive to each other, or that they are defined negatively, as “whatever the others are not”? In-depth interviews with native speakers helped lead to the formation of hypotheses, which were tested by giving surveys to seventy native speaking-subjects. Quantitative analysis of their responses reveals profound overlap and variation in the system, as well as the unique specialization of each verb and the great extent to which subjects’ intuitions depended on their judgments of lexical competitors in the same situation.
Here, I ask the question “How can we tell if linguists are employing in their analyses of polysem... more Here, I ask the question “How can we tell if linguists are employing in their analyses of polysemy the same senses that language users employ in their cognitive behavior?”. My primary purpose is to demonstrate an empirically responsible lexical semantic analysis of polysemy within the framework of cognitive linguistics, grounded in empiricism and explicit, clear definitions, with the purpose of ensuring that languages users are actually employing the senses described in the analysis. To do this, I take an approach to polysemy that resolves the age-old issues plaguing polysemy research, employing it to good effect in the analysis of THROUGH.
I take polysemy to refer to a lexeme or construction with multiple senses which are differentiable syntactically as well as semantically, with a constrained number and variety of potential relationships holding between the senses. Because my definition of polysemy is grounded in syntax, the senses described in the analysis can be assumed to be cognitively ‘real’ to language users, as they actually employ these senses. Furthermore, my analysis is grounded in corpus data.
The analysis involves providing both syntactic and semantic evidence for the independence of each sense, as well as describing a plausible motivation for the synchronic relations between the senses.
The success of the approach can be seen in part as an argument against overly simplistic analyses of polysemy. Even syntactically differentiable senses, which are presumably more deeply incorporated into speakers’ linguistic routines than those that show no syntactic distinctions, exhibited a high degree of syntactic and semantic overlap and ambiguity.
This monograph contributes to the study of polysemy by resolving some long-running methodological issues hindering polysemy research, including ensuring that the linguist and the language-user are working with the same sense categories.
There is a cross-linguistic continuum, or implicational scale, of languages' terms covering the s... more There is a cross-linguistic continuum, or implicational scale, of languages' terms covering the spatial relations from containment (IN) to support (ON), discovered by Bowerman and Pederson (1992, ms; see also Bowerman 1996, Bowerman and Choi 2001, Feist 2000, Feist and Genter 1998, 2001, 2003, Levinson and Meira 2003). The results of their research, covering more than forty languages from twenty-five different language families, show that it is possible to rank pictured situations defining spatial relations between two stationary objects on a continuum. Where each language in their research divided IN and ON varied, with some languages, such as Dutch, making more than two distinctions (with op, aan, and in), and others, such as Spanish, having a single term (en) that covered the entire continuum. Still other patterns were seen in as well, with Berber having two terms (di and x) that overlap, rather than having a clean boundary between them. However, significantly, no language in their research defied the continuum by grouping discontinuous situations.
However, in some languages, including Japanese, the IN/ON continuum appears not to be very relevant, based on their research, and the question of if (or to what extent) it is universal arises. In this paper, I ask whether the IN/ON continuum is truly germane in Japanese, a language for which it seems somewhat tangential based on analysis of postpositions and relator nouns. The results show that the continuum is relevant elsewhere in Japanese, supporting the idea that the IN/ON continuum may potentially be relevant in all languages, as long as one knows where to look.
References
Bowerman, M. 1996. The Origins of Children’s Spatial Semantic Categories: Cognitive Versus Linguistic Determinants. In J. Gumperz. and S. Levinson, eds., Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 145-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowerman, M., and S. Choi. 2001. Shaping Meanings for Language: Universal and Language-Specific in the Acquisition of Spatial Semantic Categories. In M. Bowerman and S. Levinson, eds., Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, 475-511. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowerman, M. and E. Pederson. 1992. Crosslinguistic perspectives on topological spatial relations. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, December.
Bowerman, M. and E. Pederson. ms. INwards from ON and ONwards from IN: The crosslinguistic categorization of topological spatial relationships.
Feist, M. I. 2000. On in and on: An investigation into the linguistic encoding of spatial scenes. Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 1998. On plates, bowls, and dishes: Factors in the use of English IN and ON. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 345-349.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 2001. An influence of spatial language on recognition memory for spatial scenes. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 279-284.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 2003. Factors involved in the use of in and on. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Accessed 1/2007 at http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~mif8232/FeistGentner03.pdf.
Levinson, S. C., & Meira, S. 2003. 'Natural concepts' in the spatial topological domain - adpositional meanings in crosslinguistic perspective: An exercise in semantic typology. Language, 79(3), 485-516.
Here, I ask two questions.
a) To what extent does a translation preserve or relinquish the choice... more Here, I ask two questions. a) To what extent does a translation preserve or relinquish the choices made when the event was originally encoded? b) To what extent does a translation force the translator to make new choices?
Attempting to translate English THROUGH into Japanese, I examine the factors, both geometric and otherwise, that distinguish the English term from various possible translation equivalents in Japanese. I show that translations can both a) cause the translator to relinquish significant information originally encoded and b) force the translator to make significant new choices.
The Corpus of Standup Comedy
What is "the language of humor"? What rules and statistical tendenc... more The Corpus of Standup Comedy
What is "the language of humor"? What rules and statistical tendencies mark the expression of humor in a language, distinguishing it from non-humorous language? We can most easily address these questions by building a corpus of humorous language use. The choice of standup comedy as the data source assures us that essentially all linguistic expression within the corpus is designed to be humorous, and permits us to ask further questions such as "What are the specific linguistic characteristics defining standup comedy as a genre?” and "How are the individual linguistic styles of various comedians manifested?”
In order to begin to approach the question for a single language (English), a pilot study was undertaken, employing the Sketch Engine website to create the Corpus of Standup Comedy (CSC), a small (125,000 word) corpus of 16 stand-up performances by five comedians (George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, and Louis CK), representing 15 hours of data.
To test the corpus, a comparative analysis of the use of (English) taboo words in three corpora is in progress. Preliminary results suggest that, in standup comedy, taboo words are employed primarily in order to achieve solidarity with the audience, whereas results from the other corpora suggest that the words are most frequently used to refer to taboo topics.
As a further test, in order to contrast the comedians' individual styles, frequency of use statistics as well as collocational evidence for the usage type of taboo words were collected. Preliminary results show marked differences in the individual styles of the comedians.
Within the context of the study of language and gender, I wish to ask the following question: "Ho... more Within the context of the study of language and gender, I wish to ask the following question: "How do we talk about married men and women in various languages?" As a first approach, a contrastive analysis of several English and Japanese translational equivalents for husband (otto, shujin, danna) and wife (okusan, tsuma, kanai, and nyoubou) was undertaken based on data collected from two comparable corpora created by crawling the Web: the enTenTen12, an English corpus containing 11 billion words (Jakubíček et al. 2013), and the jpTenTen11, a Japanese corpus with 8 billion words (Srdanović et al. 2103). The specific questions addressed are:
1) How do speakers refer to married men and women? 2) In what ways do we describe them? 3) What are they most frequently said to do, and what is most often done to them? 4) The way we talk about it, what do we give them, and what do they give us? 5) The way we talk about it, what do we do together with them?
In an attempt to address these five questions, I examined the lexical collocates of each term within a range of syntactic constructions used to refer, modify, express agentivity, and so on. Overall results show that, in both Japanese and English, collocates of terms for married women primarily pertain to the semantic fields of physical appearance and sexuality, the capacity for childbearing, and subservience, while the results for married men are more varied, with trends involving the semantic fields of power, personality traits, physical appearance, and virility/sexuality. Results for the Japanese terms distinguish tsuma (for which collocates relate to sexuality and subservience) from kanai (lit. “in the house”; many collocates refer to subservience or obedience but none to sexuality). Similarly, Otto and danna, but not shujin, are used to describe a powerful, sexual, and often unfaithful husband. Shujin (lit. “master”) conveys respect and formality, and does not collocate with words for sexuality.
These results are argued to contradict Ide’s (e.g. 2004) argument that women are not subordinate to men in Japanese society, but that men and women simply play distinct, complementary roles necessary to achieve balance. Instead, I will argue that these results suggest that the two gender roles, as expressed in Japanese, may be complementary, but that they are not valued equally.
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Additionally, I show that the specific meaning of an idiom employed with a lexical substitute is determined by three factors: the semantics contributed by the substituted term in the context of the idiom; the relationship of form and meaning in the idiom (based on the typology given in Nunberg et al., 1994), and the specific context of use. Finally, I note that the English results were plentiful, but the Japanese results were not, and ask why this may be the case, testing the hypothesis that HEART forms a core element in the idioms in Japanese, and therefore is not easily replaced. Results provide limited support for this hypothesis.
This involves a specific pattern of conceptual blending (Coulson 2001, Fauconnier and Turner 2002), including a blend that is created unequally, with one input (humans) assuming the major role in the blend, and the other (animals) a minor role. The blended being is usually able to fully grasp human language and possesses other human characteristics, from self-awareness to culture, but inherits at least two characteristics from the minor input. The first is its physical form, and the second is what I will refer to as a [fatal flaw\ in the blend: a prototypical, salient aspect of the minor member.s physical form or behavior that is incongruous with its otherwise human (or animal) qualities, or with the specifically human (or animal) context involved.
This "collision of incompatible matrices" (Koestler 1964:92) or clash of frames, or script opposition (Attardo 2001), which is the key to the humor, involves the juxtaposition of and contrast between these aspects, which exist simultaneously in a single being, or simply the fact that the fatal flaw has been mapped into the blend, especially as it is at odds with the given context. In one variation of the conceptual skeleton, as an emergent meaning, an analogy is implied based on the presence of the fatal flaw, and this inevitably results in absurdity (i.e. these employ the logical mechanism of "false analogy"; Attardo et al. 2002). In another variation, there is no emergent meaning or analogy implied, and the mere presence of the fatal flaw in the blended space is humorous (these rely on [quirky logic\; Parington 2006:48). In a few cases, a third variation was observed, involving a frame blend, in which frames from both the human and the animal inputs were mapped into the blended space of the cartoon. I have analyzed all 200 cartoons comprising Larson 1986 and I will argue that this basic analysis applies to approximately half of the cartoons therein.
This lexical semantic and sociopragmatic analysis of terms for genitalia in Japanese aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of cognitive sociolinguistics (e.g. Geeraertz et al 2010, Pütz et al 2014) as well as to the studies of language and gender (e.g. Lakoff 1975/2004, Takemaru 2010) and language and taboo (e.g. Allan and Burridge 2006, Jay 2000). Its purpose is to elucidate broader, cultural patterns of expression (and, presumably, thought) relating to these taboo body parts, with the goal of better understanding the larger metaphors, stereotypes and biases regarding men, women, and sexuality in Japanese culture.
To date, the data employed derive primarily from the jpTenTen11 corpus, a web-based corpus with 8 billion words (Srdanović et al. 2013). The lexical collocates of three terms for male genitals (chinko, chin-chin, and chinpo, all roughly "penis") and one for female genitals (manko, roughly "vulva" or "vagina") were investigated within a wide range of syntactic environments. The corpus was selected in part because other corpora investigated suffered from data sparsity, which is not surprising considering the highly taboo nature of the terms investigated. The jpTenTen11 corpus contains more than 50,000 tokens of all four terms, permitting confidence in the statistical methods used, but at a price: while I seek to study the relevant metaphors in Japanese culture in general, these data may only provide insight into language use on the internet, and conclusions may not generalize to the broader culture.
The results successfully distinguished the three terms used for males: speaking broadly, chinko is a general term (like "penis"), while the euphemism chin-chin ranges from cute (like "pecker") to playfully sexual (possibly like "dick"), and the dysphemism chimpo is extremely dirty and sexual (like "cock"). All three attract many words describing the physical appearance of the organ, attesting to speakers' deep concern with its size and shape, as well as the power of their imagination (as words such as dekai "large" and futoi "thick" are strong collocates, but, unrealistically, words of opposing polarity such as chisai "small" and hosoi "thin" are generally not collocates). The patterning of data for the three terms for males shows that eroticism and cuteness are mutually exclusive, but eroticism and dirtiness occur together. In other words, the way it patterns in our data, sexuality for males is either cute (with chin-chin, which collocates with words for cuteness as well as a range of reduplicated onomatopoeic terms describing sexual acts) or both erotic and dirty (with chinpo, which collocates strongly with a range of terms for eroticism and physical (etc.) dirtiness, and to a lesser degree, chinko, which participates in a limited way in a subset of the collocations).
As for the term for female genitals (manko), it collocates strongly with terms describing eroticism such as ero-ero and eroi (both "erotic"), in many constructions-far more so than chinpo, let alone the other terms for men's genitals. Most strikingly, however, manko, but none of the terms for males, collocates strongly with many lexemes describing a "pure" version of this organ, like uiuisii "innocent", itaike "innocent, helpless", and osanai "immature, young" as well as those describing the corrupt or dirty version of the organ such as darashinai "slovenly, loose, easy", hashitanai "shameless, loose", fushidara "loose, sluttish", and midara "sluttish, promiscuous, dirty". These and other data suggest that, for women, there are moral consequences to sexual experience, though no such pattern is seen for men.
The patterns of language use observed reveal an underlying narrative: sexual activity makes a woman('s genitals) dirty. Unlike men, women lose their purity by engaging in sex. Eroticism and dirtiness are not distinguished in terms for men's or women's genitalia. However, only the women seem to suffer the consequences of engaging in sexuality. To phrase this in terms of the theory of conceptual metaphor (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1999), I will argue that the metaphor LACK OF SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS PURITY (or SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS POLLUTION) applies exclusively or primarily to women.
Work Cited
Allan, Keith and Kate Burridge. 2006. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Gitte Kristiansen, and Yves Peirsman (eds.). 2010. Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Berlin/New York, De Gruyter Mouton.
Jay, Timothy. 2000. Why We Curse: A Neural-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech. Philadelphia / Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy In the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, Robin. 1975/2006. Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Pütz, Martin, Justyna A. Robinson, and Monika Reif (eds.). 2014. Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Social and cultural variation in cognition and language use. Philadelphia / Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Srdanović, Irena, Vit Suchomel, Toshinobu Ogiso, and Adam Kilgarriff. 2013. 百億語のコーパスを用いた日本語の語彙・文法情報のプロファイリング (Japanese Language Lexical and Grammatical Profiling Using the Web Corpus jpTenTen). Proceedings of the 3rd Japanese corpus linguistics workshop, Department of Corpus Studies/Center for Corpus Development, NINJAL, 2013, 229-238.
Takemaru, Naoko. 2010. Women in the Language and Society of Japan: The Linguistic Roots of Bias. Jefferson, North Carolina and London, McFarland & Company.
I show that the two jokes make use of five distinct blends involving falsity, including multiple instances of the comedian erroneously mapping from the observer’s (less-privileged) belief space to the blended space. Furthermore, I argue that we laugh at his (ostensible) understanding of, and false beliefs surrounding, falsity itself. Blending motivates the data naturally, but I argue that its role as an analytical tool needs to be distinguished from its application as a cognitive process. Overall, the results support Coulson and Fauconnier’s analysis of "fake" and add to the growing literature documenting and elucidating the essential role of conceptual blending in humor.
I take polysemy to refer to a lexeme or construction with multiple senses which are differentiable syntactically as well as semantically, with a constrained number and variety of potential relationships holding between the senses. Because my definition of polysemy is grounded in syntax, the senses described in the analysis can be assumed to be cognitively ‘real’ to language users, as they actually employ these senses. Furthermore, my analysis is grounded in corpus data.
The analysis involves providing both syntactic and semantic evidence for the independence of each sense, as well as describing a plausible motivation for the synchronic relations between the senses.
The success of the approach can be seen in part as an argument against overly simplistic analyses of polysemy. Even syntactically differentiable senses, which are presumably more deeply incorporated into speakers’ linguistic routines than those that show no syntactic distinctions, exhibited a high degree of syntactic and semantic overlap and ambiguity.
This monograph contributes to the study of polysemy by resolving some long-running methodological issues hindering polysemy research, including ensuring that the linguist and the language-user are working with the same sense categories.
However, in some languages, including Japanese, the IN/ON continuum appears not to be very relevant, based on their research, and the question of if (or to what extent) it is universal arises. In this paper, I ask whether the IN/ON continuum is truly germane in Japanese, a language for which it seems somewhat tangential based on analysis of postpositions and relator nouns. The results show that the continuum is relevant elsewhere in Japanese, supporting the idea that the IN/ON continuum may potentially be relevant in all languages, as long as one knows where to look.
References
Bowerman, M. 1996. The Origins of Children’s Spatial Semantic Categories: Cognitive Versus Linguistic Determinants. In J. Gumperz. and S. Levinson, eds., Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 145-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowerman, M., and S. Choi. 2001. Shaping Meanings for Language: Universal and Language-Specific in the Acquisition of Spatial Semantic Categories. In M. Bowerman and S. Levinson, eds., Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, 475-511. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowerman, M. and E. Pederson. 1992. Crosslinguistic perspectives on topological spatial relations. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, December.
Bowerman, M. and E. Pederson. ms. INwards from ON and ONwards from IN: The crosslinguistic categorization of topological spatial relationships.
Feist, M. I. 2000. On in and on: An investigation into the linguistic encoding of spatial scenes. Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 1998. On plates, bowls, and dishes: Factors in the use of English IN and ON. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 345-349.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 2001. An influence of spatial language on recognition memory for spatial scenes. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 279-284.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 2003. Factors involved in the use of in and on. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Accessed 1/2007 at http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~mif8232/FeistGentner03.pdf.
Levinson, S. C., & Meira, S. 2003. 'Natural concepts' in the spatial topological domain - adpositional meanings in crosslinguistic perspective: An exercise in semantic typology. Language, 79(3), 485-516.
a) To what extent does a translation preserve or relinquish the choices made when the event was originally encoded?
b) To what extent does a translation force the translator to make new choices?
Attempting to translate English THROUGH into Japanese, I examine the factors, both geometric and otherwise, that distinguish the English term from various possible translation equivalents in Japanese. I show that translations can both a) cause the translator to relinquish significant information originally encoded and b) force the translator to make significant new choices.
What is "the language of humor"? What rules and statistical tendencies mark the expression of humor in a language, distinguishing it from non-humorous language? We can most easily address these questions by building a corpus of humorous language use. The choice of standup comedy as the data source assures us that essentially all linguistic expression within the corpus is designed to be humorous, and permits us to ask further questions such as "What are the specific linguistic characteristics defining standup comedy as a genre?” and "How are the individual linguistic styles of various comedians manifested?”
In order to begin to approach the question for a single language (English), a pilot study was undertaken, employing the Sketch Engine website to create the Corpus of Standup Comedy (CSC), a small (125,000 word) corpus of 16 stand-up performances by five comedians (George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, and Louis CK), representing 15 hours of data.
To test the corpus, a comparative analysis of the use of (English) taboo words in three corpora is in progress. Preliminary results suggest that, in standup comedy, taboo words are employed primarily in order to achieve solidarity with the audience, whereas results from the other corpora suggest that the words are most frequently used to refer to taboo topics.
As a further test, in order to contrast the comedians' individual styles, frequency of use statistics as well as collocational evidence for the usage type of taboo words were collected. Preliminary results show marked differences in the individual styles of the comedians.
View the presentation at
https://prezi.com/uin4k4_x_ybq/the-corpus-of-standup-comedy/
1) How do speakers refer to married men and women?
2) In what ways do we describe them?
3) What are they most frequently said to do, and what is most often done to them?
4) The way we talk about it, what do we give them, and what do they give us?
5) The way we talk about it, what do we do together with them?
In an attempt to address these five questions, I examined the lexical collocates of each term within a range of syntactic constructions used to refer, modify, express agentivity, and so on. Overall results show that, in both Japanese and English, collocates of terms for married women primarily pertain to the semantic fields of physical appearance and sexuality, the capacity for childbearing, and subservience, while the results for married men are more varied, with trends involving the semantic fields of power, personality traits, physical appearance, and virility/sexuality. Results for the Japanese terms distinguish tsuma (for which collocates relate to sexuality and subservience) from kanai (lit. “in the house”; many collocates refer to subservience or obedience but none to sexuality). Similarly, Otto and danna, but not shujin, are used to describe a powerful, sexual, and often unfaithful husband. Shujin (lit. “master”) conveys respect and formality, and does not collocate with words for sexuality.
These results are argued to contradict Ide’s (e.g. 2004) argument that women are not subordinate to men in Japanese society, but that men and women simply play distinct, complementary roles necessary to achieve balance. Instead, I will argue that these results suggest that the two gender roles, as expressed in Japanese, may be complementary, but that they are not valued equally.
Additionally, I show that the specific meaning of an idiom employed with a lexical substitute is determined by three factors: the semantics contributed by the substituted term in the context of the idiom; the relationship of form and meaning in the idiom (based on the typology given in Nunberg et al., 1994), and the specific context of use. Finally, I note that the English results were plentiful, but the Japanese results were not, and ask why this may be the case, testing the hypothesis that HEART forms a core element in the idioms in Japanese, and therefore is not easily replaced. Results provide limited support for this hypothesis.
This involves a specific pattern of conceptual blending (Coulson 2001, Fauconnier and Turner 2002), including a blend that is created unequally, with one input (humans) assuming the major role in the blend, and the other (animals) a minor role. The blended being is usually able to fully grasp human language and possesses other human characteristics, from self-awareness to culture, but inherits at least two characteristics from the minor input. The first is its physical form, and the second is what I will refer to as a [fatal flaw\ in the blend: a prototypical, salient aspect of the minor member.s physical form or behavior that is incongruous with its otherwise human (or animal) qualities, or with the specifically human (or animal) context involved.
This "collision of incompatible matrices" (Koestler 1964:92) or clash of frames, or script opposition (Attardo 2001), which is the key to the humor, involves the juxtaposition of and contrast between these aspects, which exist simultaneously in a single being, or simply the fact that the fatal flaw has been mapped into the blend, especially as it is at odds with the given context. In one variation of the conceptual skeleton, as an emergent meaning, an analogy is implied based on the presence of the fatal flaw, and this inevitably results in absurdity (i.e. these employ the logical mechanism of "false analogy"; Attardo et al. 2002). In another variation, there is no emergent meaning or analogy implied, and the mere presence of the fatal flaw in the blended space is humorous (these rely on [quirky logic\; Parington 2006:48). In a few cases, a third variation was observed, involving a frame blend, in which frames from both the human and the animal inputs were mapped into the blended space of the cartoon. I have analyzed all 200 cartoons comprising Larson 1986 and I will argue that this basic analysis applies to approximately half of the cartoons therein.
This lexical semantic and sociopragmatic analysis of terms for genitalia in Japanese aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of cognitive sociolinguistics (e.g. Geeraertz et al 2010, Pütz et al 2014) as well as to the studies of language and gender (e.g. Lakoff 1975/2004, Takemaru 2010) and language and taboo (e.g. Allan and Burridge 2006, Jay 2000). Its purpose is to elucidate broader, cultural patterns of expression (and, presumably, thought) relating to these taboo body parts, with the goal of better understanding the larger metaphors, stereotypes and biases regarding men, women, and sexuality in Japanese culture.
To date, the data employed derive primarily from the jpTenTen11 corpus, a web-based corpus with 8 billion words (Srdanović et al. 2013). The lexical collocates of three terms for male genitals (chinko, chin-chin, and chinpo, all roughly "penis") and one for female genitals (manko, roughly "vulva" or "vagina") were investigated within a wide range of syntactic environments. The corpus was selected in part because other corpora investigated suffered from data sparsity, which is not surprising considering the highly taboo nature of the terms investigated. The jpTenTen11 corpus contains more than 50,000 tokens of all four terms, permitting confidence in the statistical methods used, but at a price: while I seek to study the relevant metaphors in Japanese culture in general, these data may only provide insight into language use on the internet, and conclusions may not generalize to the broader culture.
The results successfully distinguished the three terms used for males: speaking broadly, chinko is a general term (like "penis"), while the euphemism chin-chin ranges from cute (like "pecker") to playfully sexual (possibly like "dick"), and the dysphemism chimpo is extremely dirty and sexual (like "cock"). All three attract many words describing the physical appearance of the organ, attesting to speakers' deep concern with its size and shape, as well as the power of their imagination (as words such as dekai "large" and futoi "thick" are strong collocates, but, unrealistically, words of opposing polarity such as chisai "small" and hosoi "thin" are generally not collocates). The patterning of data for the three terms for males shows that eroticism and cuteness are mutually exclusive, but eroticism and dirtiness occur together. In other words, the way it patterns in our data, sexuality for males is either cute (with chin-chin, which collocates with words for cuteness as well as a range of reduplicated onomatopoeic terms describing sexual acts) or both erotic and dirty (with chinpo, which collocates strongly with a range of terms for eroticism and physical (etc.) dirtiness, and to a lesser degree, chinko, which participates in a limited way in a subset of the collocations).
As for the term for female genitals (manko), it collocates strongly with terms describing eroticism such as ero-ero and eroi (both "erotic"), in many constructions-far more so than chinpo, let alone the other terms for men's genitals. Most strikingly, however, manko, but none of the terms for males, collocates strongly with many lexemes describing a "pure" version of this organ, like uiuisii "innocent", itaike "innocent, helpless", and osanai "immature, young" as well as those describing the corrupt or dirty version of the organ such as darashinai "slovenly, loose, easy", hashitanai "shameless, loose", fushidara "loose, sluttish", and midara "sluttish, promiscuous, dirty". These and other data suggest that, for women, there are moral consequences to sexual experience, though no such pattern is seen for men.
The patterns of language use observed reveal an underlying narrative: sexual activity makes a woman('s genitals) dirty. Unlike men, women lose their purity by engaging in sex. Eroticism and dirtiness are not distinguished in terms for men's or women's genitalia. However, only the women seem to suffer the consequences of engaging in sexuality. To phrase this in terms of the theory of conceptual metaphor (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1999), I will argue that the metaphor LACK OF SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS PURITY (or SEXUAL EXPERIENCE IS POLLUTION) applies exclusively or primarily to women.
Work Cited
Allan, Keith and Kate Burridge. 2006. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Gitte Kristiansen, and Yves Peirsman (eds.). 2010. Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Berlin/New York, De Gruyter Mouton.
Jay, Timothy. 2000. Why We Curse: A Neural-Psycho-Social Theory of Speech. Philadelphia / Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy In the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, Robin. 1975/2006. Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Pütz, Martin, Justyna A. Robinson, and Monika Reif (eds.). 2014. Cognitive Sociolinguistics: Social and cultural variation in cognition and language use. Philadelphia / Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Srdanović, Irena, Vit Suchomel, Toshinobu Ogiso, and Adam Kilgarriff. 2013. 百億語のコーパスを用いた日本語の語彙・文法情報のプロファイリング (Japanese Language Lexical and Grammatical Profiling Using the Web Corpus jpTenTen). Proceedings of the 3rd Japanese corpus linguistics workshop, Department of Corpus Studies/Center for Corpus Development, NINJAL, 2013, 229-238.
Takemaru, Naoko. 2010. Women in the Language and Society of Japan: The Linguistic Roots of Bias. Jefferson, North Carolina and London, McFarland & Company.
I show that the two jokes make use of five distinct blends involving falsity, including multiple instances of the comedian erroneously mapping from the observer’s (less-privileged) belief space to the blended space. Furthermore, I argue that we laugh at his (ostensible) understanding of, and false beliefs surrounding, falsity itself. Blending motivates the data naturally, but I argue that its role as an analytical tool needs to be distinguished from its application as a cognitive process. Overall, the results support Coulson and Fauconnier’s analysis of "fake" and add to the growing literature documenting and elucidating the essential role of conceptual blending in humor.
I take polysemy to refer to a lexeme or construction with multiple senses which are differentiable syntactically as well as semantically, with a constrained number and variety of potential relationships holding between the senses. Because my definition of polysemy is grounded in syntax, the senses described in the analysis can be assumed to be cognitively ‘real’ to language users, as they actually employ these senses. Furthermore, my analysis is grounded in corpus data.
The analysis involves providing both syntactic and semantic evidence for the independence of each sense, as well as describing a plausible motivation for the synchronic relations between the senses.
The success of the approach can be seen in part as an argument against overly simplistic analyses of polysemy. Even syntactically differentiable senses, which are presumably more deeply incorporated into speakers’ linguistic routines than those that show no syntactic distinctions, exhibited a high degree of syntactic and semantic overlap and ambiguity.
This monograph contributes to the study of polysemy by resolving some long-running methodological issues hindering polysemy research, including ensuring that the linguist and the language-user are working with the same sense categories.
However, in some languages, including Japanese, the IN/ON continuum appears not to be very relevant, based on their research, and the question of if (or to what extent) it is universal arises. In this paper, I ask whether the IN/ON continuum is truly germane in Japanese, a language for which it seems somewhat tangential based on analysis of postpositions and relator nouns. The results show that the continuum is relevant elsewhere in Japanese, supporting the idea that the IN/ON continuum may potentially be relevant in all languages, as long as one knows where to look.
References
Bowerman, M. 1996. The Origins of Children’s Spatial Semantic Categories: Cognitive Versus Linguistic Determinants. In J. Gumperz. and S. Levinson, eds., Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 145-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowerman, M., and S. Choi. 2001. Shaping Meanings for Language: Universal and Language-Specific in the Acquisition of Spatial Semantic Categories. In M. Bowerman and S. Levinson, eds., Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, 475-511. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bowerman, M. and E. Pederson. 1992. Crosslinguistic perspectives on topological spatial relations. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, December.
Bowerman, M. and E. Pederson. ms. INwards from ON and ONwards from IN: The crosslinguistic categorization of topological spatial relationships.
Feist, M. I. 2000. On in and on: An investigation into the linguistic encoding of spatial scenes. Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 1998. On plates, bowls, and dishes: Factors in the use of English IN and ON. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 345-349.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 2001. An influence of spatial language on recognition memory for spatial scenes. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 279-284.
Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 2003. Factors involved in the use of in and on. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Accessed 1/2007 at http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~mif8232/FeistGentner03.pdf.
Levinson, S. C., & Meira, S. 2003. 'Natural concepts' in the spatial topological domain - adpositional meanings in crosslinguistic perspective: An exercise in semantic typology. Language, 79(3), 485-516.
a) To what extent does a translation preserve or relinquish the choices made when the event was originally encoded?
b) To what extent does a translation force the translator to make new choices?
Attempting to translate English THROUGH into Japanese, I examine the factors, both geometric and otherwise, that distinguish the English term from various possible translation equivalents in Japanese. I show that translations can both a) cause the translator to relinquish significant information originally encoded and b) force the translator to make significant new choices.
What is "the language of humor"? What rules and statistical tendencies mark the expression of humor in a language, distinguishing it from non-humorous language? We can most easily address these questions by building a corpus of humorous language use. The choice of standup comedy as the data source assures us that essentially all linguistic expression within the corpus is designed to be humorous, and permits us to ask further questions such as "What are the specific linguistic characteristics defining standup comedy as a genre?” and "How are the individual linguistic styles of various comedians manifested?”
In order to begin to approach the question for a single language (English), a pilot study was undertaken, employing the Sketch Engine website to create the Corpus of Standup Comedy (CSC), a small (125,000 word) corpus of 16 stand-up performances by five comedians (George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, and Louis CK), representing 15 hours of data.
To test the corpus, a comparative analysis of the use of (English) taboo words in three corpora is in progress. Preliminary results suggest that, in standup comedy, taboo words are employed primarily in order to achieve solidarity with the audience, whereas results from the other corpora suggest that the words are most frequently used to refer to taboo topics.
As a further test, in order to contrast the comedians' individual styles, frequency of use statistics as well as collocational evidence for the usage type of taboo words were collected. Preliminary results show marked differences in the individual styles of the comedians.
View the presentation at
https://prezi.com/uin4k4_x_ybq/the-corpus-of-standup-comedy/
1) How do speakers refer to married men and women?
2) In what ways do we describe them?
3) What are they most frequently said to do, and what is most often done to them?
4) The way we talk about it, what do we give them, and what do they give us?
5) The way we talk about it, what do we do together with them?
In an attempt to address these five questions, I examined the lexical collocates of each term within a range of syntactic constructions used to refer, modify, express agentivity, and so on. Overall results show that, in both Japanese and English, collocates of terms for married women primarily pertain to the semantic fields of physical appearance and sexuality, the capacity for childbearing, and subservience, while the results for married men are more varied, with trends involving the semantic fields of power, personality traits, physical appearance, and virility/sexuality. Results for the Japanese terms distinguish tsuma (for which collocates relate to sexuality and subservience) from kanai (lit. “in the house”; many collocates refer to subservience or obedience but none to sexuality). Similarly, Otto and danna, but not shujin, are used to describe a powerful, sexual, and often unfaithful husband. Shujin (lit. “master”) conveys respect and formality, and does not collocate with words for sexuality.
These results are argued to contradict Ide’s (e.g. 2004) argument that women are not subordinate to men in Japanese society, but that men and women simply play distinct, complementary roles necessary to achieve balance. Instead, I will argue that these results suggest that the two gender roles, as expressed in Japanese, may be complementary, but that they are not valued equally.