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BeReEm

BeReEm. Belief, Reason, Emotion Subjective construal of THINK in Polish Iwona Kokorniak Karolina Krawczak. Outline. Objective & subjective construal Intersubjective construal Performative & descriptive uses of epistemic expressions

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BeReEm

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  1. BeReEm Belief, Reason, Emotion Subjective construal of THINK in Polish Iwona Kokorniak Karolina Krawczak

  2. Outline • Objective & subjective construal • Intersubjective construal • Performative & descriptive uses of epistemic expressions • Semantics of prefixed THINK verbs and ‘think’ in Polish • Frequencies • Coding schema • Multifactorial analysis • Conclusion

  3. GENERAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE NOTIONS (Inter)subjectivity and objectivity relate to conceptualization and perspectivization They are not coextensive with our potential folk understanding of the terms The concept of subject is a focal point

  4. SUBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY • Subjectivity issues from subjectification and characterizes objects/elements of the objective situation • Elements of an objective situation are subjectified if they are relegated to the background, rather than put ‘onstage’ • Subjectivity is thus one of the results of the perspective the speaker selects to construe a given situation, and subjectification can be seen as ”semantic bleaching” (Langacker 2006)

  5. EXPLANATION • Subjective construal necessitates that a given element be ‘offstage’ • Objective construal requires that it be ‘onstage’ • The object of conception, either a thing or a relation, resides in the ”immediate scope” • The subject of conception can construe the object, being (a) offstage (b) within ”overall”, but not ”immediate scope” (c) onstage

  6. EXEMPLIFICATION ‘be going to’ (1) ‘He is going to meet his friends.’ (2) ‘It is going to rain.’ Possessive ‘have’ (1) ‘I have a new flat.’ (2) ‘The flat has three rooms.’ (cf. Langacker 2006)

  7. INTERSUBJECTIVITY Intersubjective expressions are decoder-oriented as they are the overt realization of the encoder’s sensitivity to the decoder’s subjectivity. (Traugott 2005:2)

  8. PERFORMATIVE USES OF EPISTEMIC EXPRESSIONS “at 'utterance time' the speaker subscribes to and accepts responsibility for the epistemic evaluation underlying it.” (1) It is probable that John made it to the bakery before closing time. (2) I think John made it to the bakery before closing time. (Nuyts 2001: 384f.)

  9. DESCRIPTIVE USES OF EPISTEMIC EXPRESSIONS “the speaker reports on someone else's epistemic evaluation of a state of affairs without there being any explicit indication as to whether the speaker personally subscribes (i.e., is committed) to the veracity of the evaluation or not.” (3) Mary thinks that John made it to the bakery. (4) Mary considers it probable that John made it to the bakery. (Nuyts 2001: 384f.)

  10. Prefix semantics • do–indicates an approximation to a goal or result; some effort; reaching the goal may involve encountering certain difficulties along the way, where the trajector (TR) makes every effort to achieve the goal despite any obstacles; • na–indicates an intensity of an action; expresses a cumulative process • ob–the image schema involved here refers to a circular motion of TR around LM • po–forms delimitative verbs to indicate (i) a short duration of an action; (ii) a limited nature of an action; does not involve the attainment of any obvious goal (atelic) • prze–may depict a three dimensional and bounded LM, such as a tunnel in which the TR moves from one end to the other, where the TR “gradually fills the whole volume of the landmark” (Pasich-Piasecka 1993: 19)

  11. Prefix semantics • roz–in its basic image schema represents the TR and landmark LM constituting one entity before a change and taking different forms afterwards. Thus, the comparison of the two states of the entity before and after the change profiles different senses of roz-. • wy–construal of the TR’s emergence from the LM, or its coming into existence by leaving the bounded region of the LM;the container image schema evoked • za–can represent a construal of ‘excess’ with intransitive perfective verbs, being extended from the sense of ‘going beyond a boundary’ • (Dickey 2006, 2009, p.c.; Przybylska 2001, 2006; Piernikarski 1975; Śmiech 1986; Tabakowska 2003)

  12. Semantics of myśleć ‘think’ • myśleć – one of mental verbsrepresenting what originates in the subject’s mind, the ‘internal reality’ (Shinzato2004: 862) • “internalized (and abbreviated) speech”, which is thus tantamount to “self-awareness” (Fortesque 2001:17f.) • This “private, internal activity” can be further specified into at least three kinds of processes: • “evaluating” someone or something, • “believing in the truth of a proposition” • “’mulling over’ some mental content” (Fortesque 2001:30) • THINK treated as one of semantic primes (Wierzbicka 1996)

  13. The meaning of prefixed forms of myśleć • domyśli/ać się – focus on the end point and result; intensive-resultative verb (Dickey 2009) • namyśli/ać się – focus on cumulative nature process, and goal attainement • obmyśli/ać – the mental process has a circular nature, which means that the object of thinking is considered from many different perspectives • pomyśleć – beginning of an action but no end or result, focus on process; A prefix overlaps with the meaning of a source verb enough to produce a compound verb whose meaning is identical to that of the impf source verb save for aspect (Dickey 2006: 12)

  14. The meaning of prefixed forms of myśleć • przemyśleć/iwać – implies the in-depth nature of the mental activity;may point at its completeness and duration • rozmyślać - the activity is represented both in the basic and the prefixed form of the verb; the difference may lie in the duration and intensity of the activity (Przybylska 2001: 271). The same observation is made by Dickey (p.c.: 14), who calls this type of verbs procedural ones, as they “do not alter the basic lexical meaning of the source verb” • rozmyślić się – an observed change in the subject’s mental state - between the ‘normal’ process of the mental activity represented by the unprefixed form into the ‘changed’ mental state represented by the prefixed one; • the reflexive pronoun emphasizes the internal mental change of the subject, which may also bring about a change in the subject’s behaviour frequently conceived of by observers as a negative one (Przybylska 2001: 279-280)

  15. The meaning of prefixed forms of myśleć • wymyślić – refers to a mental activity as a result of which one or more ideas emerge from one’s mind; completeness of the process, which is conscious and goal-oriented; punctual in nature • zamyślić się – an absorbtive verb, as it construes a continuous process whose subject, by becoming deeply engrossed in the activity, loses control over it; • the mental activity occurs independently of the subject’s will, some adverse consequencesmay be expected (Dickey p.c.)

  16. The Polish PWN Corpus data • extracts from 386 books, 977 issues of 185 newspapers and magazines, 84 recorded conversations, 207 websites and several hundred promotional leaflets • 40 million words; demo online version of the corpus used – 7.5 million words • 1000 random hits of myśleć coded

  17. Verb frequencies; PWN Corpus • Ja to uzupełnię

  18. Coding schema • Person: V1, V2, V3, VPersNA (e.g. należałobysiędomyślać‘one shouldguess’) • Mood: Conditional, Indicative, Imperative, Interrogative • Adverbial modifiers • currently categories limited to: • INTENS, MANNER, INSTR, TEMP, FREQ, ADD, CONTR, HYPO,LOC

  19. STUDY QUESTIONS • Correlation between subjective/objective construal & THINK verbs • Correlation between subjective/objective construal & adverbs used with THINK verbs

  20. METHODS OF ANALYSIS • Multiple Correspondence Analysis • Logistic Regression Analysis

  21. MCA 1: VERB PERSON & VERB FORM

  22. CORPUS EXAMPLES

  23. MCA 2: Verb Person & Adverb • Goal • Instrumental

  24. EXAMPLES

  25. Logistic Regression for Construal

  26. EXAMPLES FOR NON-OBJECTIVE CONSTRUALS

  27. Conclusion • Prevalence of the subjective construal viewing with prefixed forms, corresponding with the descriptive stance on epistemic verbs • Strong correlation between objective construal and myśleć ‘think’ in Polish • Important correlation between non-objective costrual and hypothetical adverbs

  28. References Dickey, Stephen M. 2000. Parameters of Slavic aspect: A cognitive approach. Stanford: CSLI. Dickey, Stephen M. 2009. Subjectification and the East-West aspect division. (Paper presented at the 9th Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Conference, 16th Oct. 2009.). Dickey, Stephen M. (personal communication). Subjectification and the Russian perfective. Glynn, Dylan. 2009. Polysemy, syntax, and variation. A usage-based method for Cognitive Semantics. In New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics, Vyvyan Evans and Stéphanie Pourcel (eds.), 77-106. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Glynn, Dylan. 2010 Synonymy, lexical fields, and grammatical constructions. A study in usage-based Cognitive Semantics. In Cognitive Foundationsof Linguistic Usage-Patterns, Hans-Jörg Schmid and Susanne Handl (eds.), 89-118. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald. 1991. Concept, image and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar. Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald. 1990 ”Subjectification”. In: Cognitive Linguistics 1-1, 5-38. Langacker, Ronald. 2006.”Subjectification, grammaticalization and conceptual archetypes”. In: Subjectification. Various Paths to subjectivity. Athanasiadou, Angeliki et al. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Nuyts, Jan. 2001. Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expressions. In: Journal of Pragmatics 33: 383-400. Pasich-Piasecka, Agnieszka. 1993. “Polysemy of the Polish verbal prefix prze-“, in: Elżbieta Górska (ed.), Images from the cognitive scene. Kraków: Universitas. Piernikarski, Cezary. 1975. Czasowniki z prefiksem po- w języku polskim i czeskim: Na tle rodzajów akcji w językach słowiańskich. [Verbs with the po- prefix in Polish and Czech: In the background of Aktionsarten in Slavic languages]. Warszawa: PWN.

  29. References (cont.) • Przybylska, Renata. 2001. “Struktura schematyczno-wyobrażeniowa prefiksu czasownikowego roz-“ [Image-schematic structure of the verbal prefix ‘roz-’] Polonica 21: 269-286. • Przybylska, Renata. 2006. Schematy wyobrażeniowe a semantyka polskich prefiksów czasownikowych do-, od-, prze-, roz-, u-. [Image schemata and semantics of Polish verb prefixes do-, od-, prze-, roz-, u-]. Kraków: Universitas • Shinzato, Rumiko. 2004. “Some observations concerning mental verbs and speech act verbs”, Journal of Pragmatics 36: 861-882. • Śmiech, Witold. 1986. Derywacja prefiksalna czasowników polskich. [Prefix derivation of Polish verbs] . Wrocław: Ossolineum. • Tabakowska, Elżbieta. 2003a. “Space and time in Polish: The preposition za and the verbal prefix za-”, in: Hubert Cuyckens, Thomas Berg, René Dirven and Klaus-Uwe Panther (eds.). Motivation in language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 153-177. • Tabakowska, Elżbieta. 2003b. The notorious Polish reflexive pronouns: A plea for Middle Voice. Glossos 4. (http://www.seelrc.org/glossos/issues/4/tabakowska.pdf) (date of access: 9th Nov. 2008) • Traugott, Elisabeth. 2005. From ideational to interpersonal: perspective from grammaticalization. Handout of paper presented at University of Leuven, Feb. 10th 2005

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