7. Hierarchy of Features and Ergativity

Silverstein, Michael

doi:10.1515/9783110871661-008

Cited by 351 publications

(409 citation statements)

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“…Inanimate. Word senses that refer to animate entities may carry more expressive power than ones referring to less animate entities, and may thus serve as a source of metaphorical mapping to convey salient features of target inanimate entities (Silverstein, 1976;Traugott, 2003). 5.…”

Section: Candidate Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium

Malt

Srinivasan

2017

Cognitive Psychology

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TitleEvolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium Data AvailabilityThe data associated with this publication are available upon request. One way that languages are able to communicate a potentially infinite set of ideas through a finite lexicon is by compressing emerging meanings into words, such that over time, individual words come to express multiple, related senses of meaning. We propose that overarching communicative and cognitive pressures have created systematic directionality in how new metaphorical senses have developed from existing word senses over the history of English. Given a large set of pairs of semantic domains, we used computational models to test which domains have been more commonly the starting points (source domains) and which the ending points (target domains) of metaphorical mappings over the past millennium. We found that a compact set of variables, including externality, embodiment, and valence, explain directionality in the majority of about 5000 metaphorical mappings recorded over the past 1100 years. These results provide the first large-scale historical evidence that metaphorical mapping is systematic, and driven by measurable communicative and cognitive principles. Published by Elsevier Inc.

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Section: Candidate Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium

Malt

Srinivasan

2017

Cognitive Psychology

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“…The following variable features are considered relevant for this study and will be analyzed in the following pages: (i) Animacy, i.e. animate vs. inanimate, which is an index of inherent agency potential (Silverstein 1976). (ii) Instantiation, i.e.…”

Section: Variable Coding and Object Alignment In Spanishmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The most relevant factors have to do with animacy and definiteness. Since the Variable coding and object alignment in Spanish annotation of our database includes information on syntactic category (personal pronoun, NP, relative pronoun, clause), on definiteness (definite, indefinite), and on animacy (animate, inanimate), these features can be combined and positioned on a scale which, broadly speaking, follows the animacy and referential hierarchy (Silverstein 1976;Lazard 1984;Bossong 1998;Aissen 2003). As Table 4 shows, the descending order of frequencies of the preposition a and of doubling correlates with the descending degree of animacy/definiteness:…”

Section: Preposition a And Object Doubling In Two-participant Clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variable coding and object alignment in Spanish: A corpus-based approach

Gallego

2015

Folia Linguistica

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This article discusses three variable coding properties of Spanish objects: flagging (a-marking vs. ø-marking), indexing (clitic doubling vs. no doubling), and clitic case form (accusative lo vs. dative le). These properties are essential for the formal identification of grammatical relations. They are triggered by similar parameters that partly overlap and partly show distinct distributions, yet they also challenge the boundaries between direct objects [DO] and indirect objects [IO] and raise the question whether the typological alignment of Spanish (di)transitive clauses is indirective or secundative. The study draws on quantitative and qualitative corpus data on formal, semantic, and discourse properties of core participants in Spanish clauses, relating these properties to the distribution of variable coding. It is concluded that a-marking, clitic doubling, and leísmo are less frequently employed than unmarked objects, no doubling, and accusative case for clitics, that Spanish DO and IO must be taken as extreme points of a more general Object syntactic function, and that, in general, all variable object coding follows an indirective alignment type. Consequently, animate and topical objects are considered as formally and functionally marked atypical objects both in monotransitive and ditransitive clauses.

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“…In an influential series of papers on di¤erential case marking, Aissen (1999Aissen ( , 2003 has proposed a number of such markedness constraint subhierarchies, based on person/number/animacy hierarchies such as that of Silverstein (1976). Aissen proposes these constraint families in order to deal with the universal tendency that ''marked'' subjects and ''marked'' objects can be marked di¤erently for case (and/or agreement) than ''unmarked'' ones.…”

Section: Crosslinguistic Variation and Universal Hierarchiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A functional explanation for this is that overtly marking a less typical subject with ''subjective case marking'' or a less typical object with ''objective case marking'' helps to tag the grammatical function of one argument with respect to the other, and so to ease the parsing of the sentence (cf. Silverstein 1976;Comrie 1989). Two papers in this special issue test Aissen's framework against evidence from lesser studied languages.…”

Section: Crosslinguistic Variation and Universal Hierarchiesmentioning

confidence: 99%