Dirk Geeraerts

KU Leuven | ku leuven

For more than a decade, linguistics has moved increasingly away from evaluating language as an autonomous phenomenon, towards analysing it 'in use', and showing how its function within its social and interactional context plays an important role in shaping in its form. Bringing together state-of-the-art research from some of the most influential sc...

This chapter illustrates how the distributional semantic lectometric workflow can be applied to Spanish language data in a large-scale lectometric study of the pluricentricity of Spanish. Starting with a dataset of 142 concepts, the analysis explores the distances between Spanish in Spain, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. T...

The present chapter provides some background regarding distributional semantics and its methodological position in word meaning research. It provides an informal introduction to the token-based distributional technique and explains how the token-based distributional workflow illustrated in this monograph is a specific instantiation of a broader set...

Instead of treating polysemy or lexical variation as a variable dependent on lectal factors (as in the preceding chapters), this chapter switches the perspective: it treats variation in form-meaning pairings as an input variable for determining lectal structure. By focusing on formal onomasiological variation, lexical variation can be analysed as a...

The approach to lexical variation research demonstrated in this book rests crucially on the concept of an ‘onomasiological profile’, the set of synonymous names for a concept, differentiated by their relative frequency. This chapter introduces a workflow for the identification of onomasiological profiles that capitalizes on what was shown in Chapte...

This chapter focuses on the ‘semantics’ in ‘distributional semantics’: what do clusters in distributional models look like and what do they mean? Based on analyses performed on 32 Dutch nouns, adjectives, and verbs from a synchronic, semasiological perspective, the chapter shows that there is no parameter setting for distributional models that retu...

The modelling workflow described in Chapter 3 produces token-level distance matrices: one matrix per model, each indicating the pairwise dissimilarity between the occurrences of a certain word in a sample, according to that model. However, because of the large number of tokens in the sample and the diversity of models produced by multiple parameter...

As this monograph is situated at the crossroads of lexical variation research and distributional semantics, a double background has to be described. This chapter introduces the first of these two backdrops: what model of lexical variation do we start from, where do we situate our own research within that field, and how do we relate to previous rese...

Distributional semantics embodies the idea that the context in which a word occurs reveals the meaning of that word. In contemporary corpus linguistics, that idea takes shape in various types of quantitative context analysis. This monograph explores how count-based token-level semantic vector spaces, as an advanced form of such a quantitative metho...

Whereas Chapter 2 introduced the basic concepts behind the distributional approach to modelling lexical semantics on the level of individual occurrences in an informal way, we now discuss this procedure in technical detail. We introduce the distributional models that are used in this volume and offer an overview of the different parameters that pla...

This chapter demonstrates how the joint distributional analysis of semantically related lexical items, like near-synonyms, allows to identify shared senses as common clusters in a distributional analysis. It explores the use of distributional models for analysing the evolution over time of the nearly synonymous Dutch verbs vernielen and vernietigen...

The previous chapter gave an overview of the successive steps for setting up a lexical lectometric study. This chapter puts the workflow into practice, with both a descriptive and a methodological focus. A lexical perspective on standard language change can be operationalized along three different dimensions: ‘hierarchical (de)standardization’, ‘(i...

The present study is part of a larger research project developing computational tools for large-scale corpus-based semantic analyses. One such tool represents semantic structure with vector space models (VSMs). The paper shows that this tool and the models built require a deeper understanding, especially with a view to how its results relate to cog...

If first-order empathy is the ability of Self to take into account Other’s point of view, then second-order empathy may be identified as the ability of Self to take into account Other’s point of view as including a view of Self. Considering that a hearer may choose between a first-order empathic and a second-order empathic interpretation of speaker...

The use of loanwords is generally attributed to a social feature, like social prestige, and to semantic features, like the need to fill a lexical gap. However, few studies take into account variation in the use of loanwords within a speech community, and directly compare the frequency of loanwords from more than one source language. This paper cont...

After decades of relative methodological stagnation, language attitude research is witnessing an influx of new experimental methods originally developed in social psychology. One such measure is the Personalized Implicit Association Test (P-IAT), a reaction-time-based method that measures the association between two concepts. The P-IAT has been use...

In this paper, we explore the relationship between the experiential salience of natural concepts (i.e. the degree to which the concepts are well-known to language users, because they occur frequently in the everyday environment of the speakers) and the structure of the lexicon. More specifically, we focus on whether the amount of lexical dialect va...

Lexical diversity, the amount of lexical variation shown by a particular concept, varies between concepts. For the concept drunk , for instance, nearly 3000 English expressions exist, including blitzed, intoxicated , and hammered . For the concept sober , however, a significantly smaller number of lexical items is available, like sober or abstinent...

While empirical research on attitudes towards languages and linguistic varieties has become increasingly popular from the 1960s onwards (e.g. Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, & Fillenbaum, 1960), experimental investigations into the ability to correctly identify the origin of speakers are in comparison still relatively scarce. We know that the ability to...

This paper presents a Cognitive Linguistic analysis of image macros, a subgenre of Internet memes. Internet memes encompass all kinds of online objects that are copied and imitated, altered and modified, propagated and diffused by participants on the web. Image macros are a specific example of such online content, consisting of text superimposed on...

Recently, sociolinguistic attitude research has adopted a number of new implicit attitude measures developed in social psychology. Especially the Implicit Association Test (IAT) has proven a successful new addition to the sociolinguist’s toolbox. Despite its relative success, the IAT has a number of limitations, such as the fact that it measures th...

This paper introduces the Personalized Implicit Association Test (P-IAT, Olson & Fazio, 2004) as a novel measure for language attitudes. Tying in with sociolinguists’ renewed interest in social psychological attitude measures (e.g., Campbell-Kibler, 2012; Pantos & Perkins, 2012; Speelman, Spruyt, Impe & Geeraerts, 2013), the study uses the P-IAT to...

This paper focuses on the alternative choice between literal and metonymic expressions for the concept government from an onomasiological point of view. With the help of mixed-effects logistic regression analyses, this study models the binary designations for government with the data from a self-built corpus of texts from newspapers and online foru...

When data consist of grouped observations or clusters, and there is a risk that measurements within the same group are not independent, group-specific random effects can be added to a regression model in order to account for such within-group associations. Regression models that contain such group-specific random effects are called mixed-effects re...

This volume offers readers interested in Discourse Analysis and/or Socio-Cognitive models of language a closer view of the relationship between discourse, cognition and society by disclosing how the cognitive mechanisms of discourse processing depend on shared knowledge and situated cognition. An inter- and multidisciplinary approach is proposed th...

Cognitive Linguistics should complement the Cognitive Commitment with a Sociosemiotic Commitment: a commitment to make one’s account of human language accord with the status of language as a social semiotic, i. e., as an intersubjective, historically and socially variable tool, and to base that account on a methodology that likewise transcends the...

Adopting a corpus-based approach, lexical collocations are reconsidered from a lectal perspective. Analyzing adjective-noun collocations, it will be shown that lexical collocations are conditioned by the language settings in which they are used. These lectal constraints do not only apply to lexical collocations as a measure of lexical association b...

This paper presents a multifactorial quantitative corpus-based analysis of the distribution of English-only ads in the Low Countries. The dataset consists of approximately one thousand job ads, published in Vacature (a Belgian Dutch job ad magazine) and Intermediair (a Netherlandic Dutch job ad magazine) in 2007 and 2008. About one in seven ads are...

This paper investigates metonymies for person in Chinese and English in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics with an emphasis on cross-linguistic variation. Our central goal is to highlight the important role of cultural elements on the use of metonymy. Three main types of cross-linguistic variation were found at different degrees of granularitie...

The paper explores language-internal variation in the referential meaning of the lexical form blue. Taking a usage-based cognitive approach, we analyze the referential range of blue in several marketing contexts from a semasiological and an onomasiological perspective. The study develops an interdisciplinary method that combines frequency analysis...

This article discusses a corpus-based method for the automatic identification of synonyms across different varieties of the same language. This method, based on the paradigm of distributional semantics, quantifies semantic similarity on the basis of contextual similarity in two comparable corpora. In two case studies for Dutch and German, we show t...

This paper demonstrates how token-level Word Space Models (a distributional semantic technique that was originally developed in statistical natural language processing) can be developed into a heuristic tool to support lexicological and lexicographical analyses of large amounts of corpus data. The paper provides a non-technical introduction to the...

This paper introduces an innovative method to aid the study of conceptual onomasiological research, with a specific emphasis on diachronic variation in the metonymic patterns with which a target concept is expressed. We illustrate how the method is applied to explore and visualize such diachronic changes by means of a case study on the metonymic pa...

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 analys...

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...

Formality variation in the written use of lexical words in the relational sphere in California English is analyzed on a geographical level for the first time in this article. Linguistic data for word alternations including a formal and an informal term for a specific concept are gathered from newspapers Web sites written in English through site-res...

The chapter presents a linguistic analysis of the referential meanings in the sema-siological structure of basic and non-basic color terms in a specific usage situation such as marketing. Although most linguistic studies share the assumption about the central role of the reference-related aspects in understanding the semantic structure of color wor...

As repositories of spontaneously realized language, corpora generally have an uncontrolled and unbalanced structure where all variables operate simultaneously. Consequently, a variable’s real effect can be concealed when studied in isolation because of the exclusion of the impact of other potentially confounding variables. Analyzing a variational c...

This volume seeks to advance and popularise the use of corpus-driven quantitative methods in the study of semantics. The first part presents state-of-the-art research in polysemy and synonymy from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. The second part presents and explains in a didactic manner each of the statistical techniques used in the first part...

It is often claimed in contact linguistics that core vocabulary is highly resistant to borrowing. If we want to test that claim in a quantitative way, we need both a quantitative measure of coreness and a method for quantifying borrowability. We suggest here a usage-based operationalization of coreness in terms of entrenchment, and of borrowability...

This paper looks at a hitherto unexplored aspect of taxonomically organized concepts which has to do with word distributions in corpora of actual language use. In parallel to the psychological informativeness claim of the differentiation explanation, the question is addressed if concepts are internally more similar than their higher-ranked taxonomi...

The study of lexical collocations occupies a central position in corpus linguistic research. Lexical restrictions on a word's combinatorial possibilities are often an integral part of corpus linguistic analyses and are applied in various domains (e.g. lexicography, language teaching). However, if a corpus is considered a sample of spontaneously rea...

This paper presents a quantitative corpus-based variationist analysis of the English insertions used by Belgian Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch participants to the reality TV show ‘Expeditie Robinson’. The data consist of manual transcriptions of 35 hours of recordings for 46 speakers from 3 seasons of the show. Focusing on the expressive utterances i...

Lexical sociolectometry considers the aggregated behavior of many lexical variables in different language varieties to identify the multifactorial structure of variation in the lexicon. In this paper, we focus on the problem of generating a large set of lexical variables. Previous sociolectometric studies collected a set of lexical variables by han...

If one aims to study a pluricentric language with the goal of making general assertions about linguistic levels, an aggregate perspective in which many linguistic items that represent the linguistic level are considered is necessary. The current paper presents and compares two methodologies for aggregating lexical variation so that the similarity o...

The embodiment hypothesis, a cornerstone of much thinking in Cognitive Linguistics, has given rise to a renewed interest in the interaction between cultural factors and embodied experience. In the course of the previous two decades, an early assumption of a universalist physiological basis (Lakoff & Kövecses 1987) gave way to a more nuanced approac...

Since the 1960s, language attitude research has known little methodological innovation.In social psychology, by contrast, a number of new implicit attitude measures haverecently been developed. We suggest to take inspiration from social psychology to bringnew methods to linguistic attitude research. In this paper, we give a succinct introductionto...

The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics is a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to research in contemporary cognitive linguistics. Written by leading figures in the field, the volume provides readers with an authoritative overview of methods and current research topics and future directions. The volume covers all the most imp...

The last decade, empirical linguistics focusing on genuine data has largely benefited from theoretical developments in Construction Grammar and from methodological and technical innovations in usage-based linguistics. In both frameworks, there is an obvious interest for lexical selectivity and idiomatic language use as part of the interplay between...

This paper presents the results of a multivariate spatial analysis of thirty-eight vowel formant variables measured in 236 cities from across the contiguous United States, based on the acoustic data from the Atlas of North American English. The results of the analysis both confirm and challenge the results of the Atlas. Most notably, while the anal...

The integration of three main dimensions of linguistic usage and variation – formal, contextual and conceptual – can be seen as a major ambition of the Cognitive Sociolinguistics enterprise. The paper illustrates this theoretical approach with a corpus-based study of near-synonymous causative constructions with doen and laten in the Belgian and Net...

In this cognitive sociolinguistic study, we aim to examine automatically activated language attitudes and to map the affective representation of language-internal variation in Dutch. We do so by applying the affective priming paradigm, an experimental-cognitive paradigm in which participants are typically faster to respond to affectively polarized...

The paper demonstrates how verb and noun classes can be used as a common interface in contrastive Construction Grammar. It presents an innovative approach to the contrastive analysis of constructional spaces (sets of constructions covering a certain semantic domain). We compare English and Dutch analytic causatives by using the statistical techniqu...

The world-wide spread of English is one of the most visible symptoms of globalization. In weak contact settings such as Western Europe, where contact with English is usually indirect, remote and asymmetrical, the English language started diffusing at a hitherto unknown rate in the second half of the twentieth century. Crucially, this diffusion happ...

Cette contribution s’inscrit dans le cadre d’une étude sémantique quantitative du vocabulaire spécifique d’un corpus de textes techniques. L’étude vise à vérifier si les unités lexicales les plus spécifiques du corpus technique sont effectivement les unités les plus monosémiques. L’objectif de l’étude est donc d’étudier la corrélation entre le rang...

Corpus linguistic research relies on corpora which generally display an unbalanced structure. We will discuss a potential corollary of this biased structure which is rarely accounted for in (corpus) linguistics, namely confounding variables. These are variables increasing, diminishing or reversing an explanatory's variable marginal effect compared...

This paper introduces a new, concept-based method for measuring variation in the use and success of loanwords by presenting the results of a case-study on 149 English person reference nouns (i.e. common nouns used to designate people, such as manager) in Dutch. With this paper, we introduce four methodological improvements to current quantitative c...

In statistical NLP, Semantic Vector Spaces (SVS) are the standard technique for the automatic modeling of lexical semantics. However, it is largely unclear how these black-box techniques exactly capture word meaning. To explore the way an SVS structures the individual occurrences of words, we use a non-parametric MDS solution of a token-by-token si...

This article discusses the contribution of cognitive linguistics to diachronic lexicology and describes how lexical studies within cognitive linguistics are gradually and naturally evolving toward a sociolexicological approach that links up with sociolinguistics. It takes the distinction between semasiology and onomasiology as its basic organizing...

On the basis of a large database of attested examples of anger, ire and wrath in Middle English texts, we perform a statistical analysis of the factors contributing to the emergence of anger as the dominant term. Specifically, we perform a logistic regression to test the hypothesis formulated by Diller (1994), who suggests that anger was introduced...

This paper examines the (non)metonymic usage of capital names in news articles from Mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese and shows that this phenomenon is actually more complex than might have been expected. We annotated capital names extracted from a self-built news corpus with insights from previous studies on place name metonymies in Cognitive Li...

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 demo...

This chapter investigates the relationship between metonymy and two related semantic phenomena: profile/zone discrepancy and facetization. Both of these phenomena aim to explain linguistic examples that activate only a specific zone or facet of the entity referred to. However, their precise semantic status, both with respect to each other and to me...

Languages are not uniform. Speakers of different language varieties use certain words differently – more or less frequently, or with different meanings. We argue that distributional semantics is the ideal framework for the investigation of such lexical variation. We address two research questions and present our analysis of the lexical variation be...

Researchers in disciplines like lexical semantics and critical discourse analysis are in need of a quantitative method that allows them to model the distribution of a word automatically. We advocate the use of word space models, a family of approaches that were developed in the context of computational linguistics and cognitive science, which repre...

We examine the role of concept characteristics in the study of lexical variation among dialects: using a quantitative methodology, we show that onomasiological heterogeneity in a dialect area may be determined by the prototype-theoretical features of the concepts involved. More specifically, a regression analysis of data taken from a large lexical...

From a lectometric point-of-view, distances between language varieties can be quantified by means of aggregating the dissimilarity in the behavior of linguistic characteristics. Given the fact that Dutch has evolved to become a pluricentric language, a sociolectometric approach can be applied to measure the distance between varieties of Dutch. The...

Cet article décrit la méthodologie et les principaux résultats d’une étude sémantique du vocabulaire spécifique d’un corpus technique. Nous montrons comment on peut exploiter un corpus électronique spécialisé afin de pouvoir accéder aux informations linguistiques et sémantiques qu’il renferme. La méthodologie s’appuie sur une double analyse quantit...

This book explores dialects and social differences in language computationally, examining topics such as how (and how much) linguistic differences impede intelligibility, how national borders accelerate and direct change, how opinion and hearsay shape perceptions of language differences, the role of intonation (melody), the differences between vari...

This paper compares two measures that quantify lexical preference patterns in the area of Construction Grammar, namely, collostructions and (construction-internal) collocations (as conceived by Stefan Th. Gries and Anatol Stefanowitsch). Starting from a case study, inflectional variation in Dutch attributive adjectives, two diagnostic calculations...

In this article, a quantitative corpus-based analysis is presented of the use of Colloquial Belgian Dutch (CBD, better known as tussentaal) in the reality-show “Expeditie Robinson” (the Dutch counterpart of “Survivor”). More specifically, we will use the format of the show and the stratified group of contestants to determine whether a correlation e...

PrototypicalityConceptual MetaphorsCase Study 1: The Word SoreCase Study 2: The Concept “Anger”And Next?References and Further Reading

This paper reports on the ways in which new entities are introduced into discourse. First, we present the evidence in support of a model of indefinite reference processing based on three principles: the listener's ability to make predictive inferences in order to decrease the unexpectedness of upcoming words, the availability to the speaker of gram...