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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2018

Wishing and Wanting in Russian

Résumé

In contemporary Russian, there exists a set of near synonyms belonging to the conceptual domain WANTWISH. Understanding the onomasiological choice between these lexemes is complicated by the possibility for each verb to take prefixes that may change their semantic value. This complexity is compounded by the fact that they may also take different complement constructions again potentially modifying their semantics. Although there is some systematicity in the semantic effects of the prefix and complement, such formal variants often alter the semantics of the predicate in subtle and unpredictable ways. This study will focus on two lemmata, желать ‘wish’ and хотеть ‘want’, each combined with a prefix, пожелать PERF. – ‘wish’ and за-хотеть PERF. – ‘want’. These four lexemes in turn will be considered with genitive and accusative complements, resulting in 8 complex forms. At a schematic level, this can be reduced to four constructions: [IMPERF. + WANT + ACC]; [PERF. + WANT + ACC]; [IMPERF. + WANT + GEN]; [PERF. + WANT + GEN]. Although some lexical combinations are marked (such as пожелать which is formal) or semi-predictable (such as the GEN–ACC alternation for хотеть indicating a partititive reading), for the most part, these combinatory forms are semantically highly comparable. In order to explain the choice between these eight forms, the study employs the Behavioural Profile Approach (Gries, 2003). Following near-synonymy studies in Cognitive Semantics such as Glynn (2010) (inter alia), this study attempts to quantify the conceptual differences that motivate the choice between these forms. It builds on these earlier studies by extending the degree of constructional complexity under analysis to include both prefix and complement simultaneously. Rather than seeking to isolate lexical semantics from constructional semantics, the study works from the assumption that a many-to-many mapping between formal variation and semasiological variation will better account for the conceptual choices in a speaker’s lexico-grammar. The data are extracted from the stylistically homogenous LiveJounral Corpus (Speelman & Glynn, 2005/2012). The sample is based on 75 occurrences per form, making a total of 600 contextualised examples. These examples are carefully analysed and manually annotated for a range of semantic-pragmatic factors including (but not limited to) agentivity, resultativity, temporal reference, patient schematicity as well as various interpersonal pragmatic dimensions. Importantly, instead of treating formal variation as a means to explain semasiological variation (cf. Krawczak & Kokorniak, 2012), all the explanatory variables are purely semantic and they are set against the formal variation, which is treated as the dependent variable. We expect the results to identify usage patterns that will match formal context with clusters of semantic features giving a complex, yet conceptually realistic picture of the usage-network that speakers employ in natural production. Multiple correspondence analysis will be used at the exploratory stage and confirmatory modelling will be performed in LogLinear Analysis and Multiple Logistic Regression. Keywords: Behavioural Profile Approach, grammatical constructions, lexical semantics, near-synonymy, Russian. References: Glynn, D. 2010. Testing the hypothesis: Objectivity and verification in usage-based Cognitive Semantics. In D. Glynn & K. Fischer (Eds.), Quantitative cognitive semantics: Corpus-driven approaches (239–270). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Gries, St. 2003. Multifactorial analysis in corpus linguistics: A study of particle placement. London & New York: Continuum. Krawczak, K., & Kokorniak, I. 2012. A corpus-driven quantitative approach to the construal of Polish think. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 48, 439–472. Speelman, D., & Glynn, D. 2005/2012. LiveJournal Corpus of American, English, Russian and Ukrainian. Leuven University and Lund University.

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Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-04565294 , version 1 (01-05-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04565294 , version 1

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Avgustina Biryukova, Dylan Glynn. Wishing and Wanting in Russian: A behavioural case study in lexico-constructional near-synonymy. 11th International Conference of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association, Oct 2018, Cordoba, Spain. ⟨hal-04565294⟩
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