Naslov
Contextualized and non-contextualized concreteness ratings

Autori
Anđel, Maja ; Stanojević, Mateusz-Milan ; Peti-Stantić, Anita

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Izvornik
BOOK OF ABSTRACTS from the 51st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea / Spevak, Olga - Talin : Societas Linguistica Europea, 2018, 273-274

Skup
51st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea

Mjesto i datum
Talin, Estonija, 29.08.2018. - 01.09.2018

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Poster

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
concreteness ratings, Croatian, context

Sažetak
There are concreteness/abstractness rating lists for a variety of languages (e.g. Brysbaert et al. 2014). A similar list has recently been produced for nouns, verbs and adjectives in Croatian (Peti-Stantić, Stanojević 2017). Such lists are based on rating words in isolation and do not take into consideration the polysemy of words, as well as the fact that context-free estimates rely on the creation of minimal context (Fauconnier 1994). The aim of this paper is to explore to what extent different semantic contexts impact concreteness ratings. More specifically, we claim 1) that greater combinatorial potential of words will be linked to higher variance scores for the respective word, because different collocations may cause different concreteness ratings, and 2) that contextualized concreteness ratings will yield different scores when tested on native speakers. To substantiate our claim, we have selected 32 nouns from the list of 1000 nouns that have been rated for concreteness by at least 30 native speakers of Croatian each in a previous study. The nouns were selected based on their high or low combinatorial potential. The combinatorial potential was checked on 16 semantically ambiguous and 16 semantically non-ambiguous words in the 2.2 B corpus of Croatian (hrWac). To determine semantic ambiguity, a qualitative analysis was performed in order to determine potential semantic groups within different collocations. The selected nouns were used as input in three sets of experiments with 120 students attending the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, and 120 majoring in a STEM area at the Polytechnic of Zagreb. The first was a pen-and-paper concreteness rating of the 32 chosen words in isolation, tested on 30 students in each group. The second experiment involved concreteness ratings of the same words in contexts constructed on the basis of naturally-occurring two-word phrases in the hrWaC corpus, but controlled for semantic group and length, as well as several other factors. It was presented to 60 participants in each group. The third experiment was a lexical decision task, where we checked for the variability and reaction time for selected words with respect to their concreteness or abstractness and in connection with different contexts, tested on 20 participants in each group. Preliminary results show a difference in contextualized and non-contextualized ratings. Nouns with higher variance scores yielded different semantic groups whose concreteness is then, in turn, rated differently. The variability seems to be connected with different reaction times. This suggests that concreteness values are not stable in different contexts. This is visible not only in the questionnaire-based study, but is confirmed in reaction times. Overall, when tested in isolation, the results seem to be realistic only in as much as native speakers agree upon a shared minimal context. Such a conclusion has consequences for lexical access theories and theories of language processing, such as Dual Coding Theory (Paivio 1986 ; 2010). References Brysbaert, Marc, Amy Beth Warriner, and Victor Kuperman (2014), Concreteness Ratings for 40 Thousand Generally Known English Word Lemmas, Behavior Research Methods 46 (3), 904– 11. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5. Fauconnier, Gilles (1994), Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Paivio, Allan (1986), Mental representations: A dual coding approach, New York: Oxford University Press. Paivio, Allan (2010.), Dual coding theory and the mental lexicon, The Mental Lexicon 5 (2), 205–230. Stanojević, Mateusz-Milan and Anita Peti-Stantić (2017), Concreteness, subjective frequency and the thing/relation distinction in Croatian. 15th Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Conference – SCLA, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

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