Naslov
Social construction of an abstract lexicon

Autori
Peti-Stantić, Anita

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

Izvornik
SCLC-2023 Book of Abstracts / Fried, Miriam ; Stanojević, Mateusz-Milan ; Clancy, Stephen - Cambridge, MA : Harvard University, 2023, 43-44

Skup
THE EIGHTEENTH CONFERENCE OF THE SLAVIC COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION (SCLC-2023)

Mjesto i datum
Cambridge (MA), Sjedinjene Američke Države, 01.06.2023. - 03.06.2023

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
languages as social tools, cognitive linguistics, abstract words, parallel architecture

Sažetak
Understood as social tools, languages have traditionally been reduced to their use and evaluated through relevant variables, such as social, regional, gender, and political differences. They have not been analyzed with the architecture of the language in mind, or by questioning the correspondence of semantic and syntactic representations to the social construction of reality. I build on the idea that sociocultural environment informs language, especially in the construction of the abstract lexicon network. Whereas the concrete lexicon depends on the specific (non-)linguistic repertoire of a community of speakers, following almost localized, concrete expressive needs, the abstract lexicon depends on the cognitive capacity of this same community for establishing the correspondence between the social reality and the conceptual network. Therefore, I explore the parallelism between the compositional character of the social reality and the language as a social tool. Starting from one of the main tenets of the Parallel Architecture – that the lexical items should be seen as particular rules of grammar (Jackendoff 2007), I try to demonstrate that individual differences in native lexical density attainment (Dąbrovska 2012) impact broader cognition, especially in linguistic processing. I do this by comparing the constructional potential of pairs and triplets of abstract verbs and the relative frequency of their realized constructions. By using the data from the Croatian Psycholinguistic Database (Peti-Stantić et al. 2021) I first select abstract verbs that are conceptually closely related (e.g., prosuditi ‘to judge’, HrWac 4.22 per million and procijeniti ‘to assess’, 35.48 per million, or pridati ' to add' 1.15 per million, pridodati 'to attach' 8.97 per million and pripisati 'to attribute' 8.43 per million). I take them to be lexical pieces of structure that offer prototypical conditions for exploring semantics-syntax interface rules in domains relevant to understanding the language as a social tool. Verbs are chosen to reflect different areas of social reality, as well as different corpus frequencies in HrWac. The parallelism between the compositional character of the social reality and the language as a social tool will be examined through comparing the potential of selected verbs to become part of a number of different multi-word constructions with the corpus and relative frequency of those constructions in Croatian. In this view, after analyzing the quantity and quality of semantic and syntactic connections of selected pairs and triplets of verbs, my aim is to demonstrate that the density of their networks depends on the socially conditioned potential for realizing compositionality and producing precise meaning in a community of speakers. Such 44 an analysis can serve as a starting point for better understanding the place of breath and depth of intellectual abstract vocabulary in languages as social tools. References Dąbrovska, E. (2012), Different speakers, Different grammar: Individual differences in native language attainment. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2(3), 219- 253. Jackendoff, R. (2007), Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure. MIT Press. Peti-Stantić, A. et. al (2021), The Croatian psycholinguistic database: Estimates for 6000 nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Behavior Research Methods, 53, 1799–1816.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija, Interdisciplinarne humanističke znanosti

POVEZANOST RADA