Especialització i reinterpretació en les expressions idiomàtiques

It can be shown that the semantic specialization of idioms is a matter of degree, and that semantic interpretation is not just a question of bottom-up compositionality or literal-to-figurative transfer: the reinterpretation processes that can be observed in idioms point to the existence of top-down and figurative-to-literal interpretati

A statistical method for the identification and aggregation of regional linguistic variation

This paper introduces a method for the analysis of regional linguistic variation. The method identifies individual and common patterns of spatial clustering in a set of linguistic variables measured over a set of locations based on a combination of three statistical techniques: spatial autocorrelation, factor analysis, and cluster analysis. To demonstrate how to apply this method, it is used to analyze regional variation in the values of 40 continuously measured, high-frequency lexical alternation variables in a 26-million-word corpus of letters to the editor representing 206 cities from across the United States

Luisteren schrijvers naar hun innerlijke stem. De invloed van ritmische factoren op de woordvolgorde in werkwoordelijke eindgroepen

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Er als accessibility marker: on- en offline evidentie voor een procedurele duiding van presentatieve zinnen

This paper elaborates on offline and online research into linguistic status of non-anaphoric 'er' "there" in presentive sentences with a preposed adjunct (e.g. Op de hoek van de straat is (er) een winkel). In a first study (Grondelaers & Brysbaert 1996), we used corpus materials and self-paced reading data to demonstrate that there is a positive correlation between the presence of 'er' in adjunct sentences and the spatial and discursive situating potential of the preposed locative adjunct: the preference for 'er' in such sentences increases as the locative search precision of the adjunct and the topicality of the adjunct referent decrease. Building on additional corpus data and a new self-paced reading experiment, the present paper goes beyond the observation of correlations, and concentrates on 'er's' exact linguistic function. The cumulative empirical evidence suggests that 'er' is an acciessibility marker in the sense of Ariel (1990): 'er' is not - as is generally assumed - an optional dummy element, but a discourse particle inserted to inform the hearer how important the subject to be created is from a communicative point of view, how inferrable it is from the foregoing context, and how much effort the hearer should invest in its creation

Can social psychological attitude measures be used to study language attitudes? - A case study exploring the Personalized Implicit Association Test

In the field of social psychology, a wide range of implicit attitude measures have recently been developed. These measures have hardly been used in linguistic attitude research so far. This paper presents a case study exploring the potential of one of these social psychological measures, the Personalized Implicit Association Test, in order to find out whether it can be useful for the study of language attitudes. In the case study, the Personalized Implicit Association Test is applied to measure attitudes towards regional varieties of Dutch in Belgium and Standard Belgian Dutch

The influence of semantic features on lexical geographical variation

In this paper, we investigate the influence of semantic concept features on lexical geographical variation. More specifically, we take an onomasiological approach to inquire into the effect of concept vagueness, salience, affect and semantic field. We use quantitative operationalizations of these features as predictors in a linear regression analysis. Our response variable is a composite variable that takes into account the number of variants per concept and the degree to which the concepts are scattered across geographical space in a heterogeneous way. Our model reveals that vaguer, less salient and non-neutral concepts show significantly more variation and that the lexical variants for these concepts are scattered across geographical space in a less homogeneous way. We also find differences between semantic fields