Development of Adjectival Use and Meaning Structures in Swedish Students' Written production

This thesis is about the development of adjective use and meaning structures examined from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Adjectives modify nominal meanings and it is in context, in the interaction with the noun that the adjective meaning and configuration is determined. Nearly 13,000 adjective-noun combinations from texts written by Swedish students in grades 3, 5, 9, and 11/12 were analysed according to the LOC model (Ontologies and Construals in Lexical Semantics, Paradis, 2005) with regard to domains, noun ontology, adjective gradability, adjective position, and adjective function. Furthermore, the use of figurative language was studied. The results show a development from adjectives predominantly modifying concrete nouns to increasingly abstract meanings from a broad range of adjective and noun domains. The younger students use adjectives predominantly in the predicative position but there is a gradual shift towards attributive use, and attributive uses are the most common in the highest grade. Adjectives are primarily used in a descriptive function, but in the highest grade approximately one third of all adjectives are used in a classifying function. Scalar adjective construal is the most common in all grades, but the proportion of scalar uses decreases in favour of an increase in non-gradable uses. Figurative language is rare in all grades, but there is an increase in metaphorical language over the school years

Quantifying Semantic Linguistic Maturity in Children

We propose a method to quantify semantic linguistic maturity (SELMA) based on a high dimensional semantic representation ofwords created from the co-occurrence of words in a large text corpus. The method was applied to oral narratives from 108 children aged 4;0–12;10. By comparing the SELMA measure with maturity ratings made by human raters we found that SELMA predicted the rating of semantic maturity made by human raters over and above the prediction made using a child’s age and number of words produced. We conclude that the semantic content of narratives changes in a predictable pattern with children’s age and argue that SELMA is a measure quantifying semantic linguistic maturity. The study opens up the possibility of using quantitative measures for studying the development of semantic representation in children’s narratives, and emphasizes the importance of word co-occurrences for understanding the development of meaning

Semantic profiles of antonymic adjectives in discourse

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

Hur går det till när barn lär sig färger? : En studie om hur barn lär sig kopplingen mellan färger och färgtermer

Forskare, föräldrar och förskolepersonal har sedan länge lagt märke till att inlärningen av färger och deras beteckningar skiljer sig från inlärningen av andra adjektiv och från substantiv. En undersökning har genomförts med syftet att komma närmare svaret på frågan: hur går det till när barn lär sig kopplingen mellan färg och färgterm? Ett trettiotal barn i åldern två till fyra år har deltagit i ett test med tre delmoment. Analysen har utgått från tre frågeställningar: Hur ter sig kopplingen mellan färg och färgterm i olika åldrar? Finns det någon skillnad mellan enspråkiga och tvåspråkiga barn? Följer barns inlärningsmönster den av Berlin och Kay (1969) föreslagna implikationsordningen? Undersökningsresultaten visar att redan barn som är två år kan göra en korrekt koppling mellan färg och färgterm. Den intensivaste utvecklingsfasen verkar dock vara i tre till fyraårsåldern och inlärningsprocessen av de olika färgerna verkar följa en något svagare variant av den av Berlin och Kay föreslagna implikationsordningen. Det går i denna undersökning inte att påvisa någon skillnad mellan de enspråkiga och tvåspråkiga barnen

What is a domain? Dimensional structures versus meronomic relations

Within cognitive linguistics, the notion of domain is central. In the literature, the notion of domain has been interpreted in an all-encompassing way, which has led to conceptual confusion. The article proposes to distinguish between a more psychologically oriented description of domains based on dimensional structures, on the one hand; and meronomic relations, on the other. It is shown how Langacker's notion of a configurational domain can be analyzed as higher-level dimensional structures. An added benefit of the distinction between dimensional domains and meronomic relations is that it generates a natural account of the difference between metaphors and metonymies

Quantifying aspects of antonym canonicity in English and Swedish: textual and experimental

This paper highlights the potential usefulness of combining corpus methods and experimental methods to gain new theoretical insights into the role of antonymy as an organizing lexicosemantic principle in human thinking and languages ’ vocabularies. We are intrigued by what distinguishes so-called canonical antonyms such as good-bad, long-short, thin-thick from other types of contrasts such as cold-scorching, pale-dark and speedy-slow. There are probably various converging reasons for perceptions of ‘goodness of antonymy’, e.g. frequency of co-occurrence, co-occurrence in certain constructions, e.g. whether slow or fast, stylistic co-occurrence preferences and pairwise acquisition (e.g. Muehleisen 1997, Willners 2001, Jones 2002, Murphy 2003). The research reported in this paper forms part of an international collaborative project on antonymy in discourse. 1 This paper proposes (i) a principled method for creating a foundation for cross-linguistic comparisons of adjectival antonym pairings, using corpus methods and (ii) subsequently using the corpus data for the design of experiments on antonym canonicity. Since our investigations concern the nature of antonymy as a semantic relation and the patterns of lexicalization in English and Swedish, it is important to make sure that there is