Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2019

Boredom is sad

Résumé

This study is a corpus-based investigation of two near-synonyms that represent a conceptual overlap between BOREDOM and SADNESS in Russian: cкука (skuka) and тоска (toska). It attempts to empirically establish their semantic relations and understand the onomasiological choice between them. These lexical choices interact in a complex way with the grammatical profiling of their formal context. More specifically, the study tests three descriptive hypotheses: firstly, regardless of part-of-speech, the concept associated with the lemma of тоска holds a hyperonymic relation with other concepts; secondly, that conceptual specificity of the lemma скука relates to boredom caused by idleness; and thirdly, relative to the cause of idle boredom, this relationship will form a cline of specificity depended on part-of-speech where nominal instantiations of each concept will be more abstract than verbal ones. The theoretical implications of this final hypothesis for the role of grammatical semantics in lexical onomasiology are important and will be discussed relative to Langacker’s (1987) and Wierzbicka's (1988) fundamental research in the question. Following previous studies on near-synonymy in Cognitive Semantics such as Divjak (2006) and Glynn (2010) (inter alia) this study aims to identify patterns of similar and distinctive uses and, thus, to map semantic and pragmatic constraints that motivate the choice between these forms employing the Behavioural Profile Approach (Geeraerts et al. 1994; Gries 2003). The data come from the stylistically homogenous LiveJournal Corpus (Speelman & Glynn, 2005/2012). The sample is based on an even number of observations per form, making a total of approximately 600 contextualised examples. These occurrences are analysed and coded manually for a range of formal (part-of speech, person), semantic and pragmatic factors, such as intensity of boredom evaluated using a 9-point Likert-scale, cause of the BOREDOM-SADNESS event (absence of cause, idleness, unattainability), co-occurring emotion event (anxiety, depression, sadness, etc.), patient animacy, patient plexity (uniplex, multiplex). The sample will be analysed by a second coder in order to assess the validity of the annotation results and to measure inter-rater agreement using Cohen’s kappa score. The obtained behavioural profile will be submitted to exploratory and confirmatory modelling, namely the multiple correspondence analysis will be used to identify association and dissociation patterns of usage that speakers employ in natural production. These patterns will be tested with multinomial logistic regression and random decision trees. It is expected that the statistically significant usage patterns will confirm the hyperonymic conceptual relations between the lemmata and explain the speakers’ lexico-grammatical choices. These expected descriptive results will be used to challenge assumptions about the role of deverbalisation and conceptual schematicity proposed in the cognitive tradition. References: Divjak, Dagmar (2006). Ways of intending: A corpus-based Cognitive Linguistic approach to nearsynonyms in Russian. St. Th. Gries, & A. Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics: Corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis, 19–56. Berlin: Mouton. Geeraerts, Dirk, Grondelaers, Stefan & Bakema Peter (1994). The Structure of Lexical Variation: Meaning, naming, and context. Berlin: Mouton. Glynn, Dylan (2010). Synonymy, lexical fields, and grammatical constructions: A study in usage- based Cognitive Semantics. H.-J. Schmid, & S. Handl (eds.), Cognitive Foundations of Linguistic Usage-patterns: Empirical studies, 89–118. New York: Mouton. Gries, Stefan Th. (2003). Multifactorial Analysis in Corpus Linguistics: A study of particle placement. London: Continuum. Langacker, Ronald (1987). Nouns and Verbs. Language 63: 53–94. Speelman, Dirk & Glynn Dylan (2005/2012). LiveJournal Corpus of American, English, Russian and Ukrainian. Leuven University and Lund University. Wierzbicka, Anna (1988). The Semantics of Grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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Dates et versions

hal-04565091 , version 1 (01-05-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04565091 , version 1

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Avgustina Biryukova, Dylan Glynn. Boredom is sad. ICLC-15: the Fifteenth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Book of Abstracts, Aug 2019, Nishinomiya, Japan. ⟨hal-04565091⟩
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