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Levels of Linguistic Analysis II: Lexical Semantics

9 Lexical Patterns

9.1 Multi word patterns

Over the past weeks, we have been focussing mostly on properties of individual lexemes. Of course, there was always an emphasis on the fact that lexical entries are not restricted to word level. We have encountered compounds and complex prepositions which, in some situation, behave like other single-word lexemes. However, we haven’t really focussed at the syntagmatic relationships between lexemes. In grammar, we would transition from morphology to syntax now. What we could see as equivalent in lexical semantics, is multi-word patterns, which range from simple adjective-nouns collocations, to clause-sized idioms.

9.1.1 From collocations to syntactic patterns

  1. tall building
  2. remarkable feat
  3. stark contrast
  4. thick accent

With collocations, we have encountered a common class of multi-word pattern already. Most of you should also be familiar with a range of syntactic patterns, such as Subject-Verb-Object, relative clauses, the double-object construction, tenses etc. Phrase structures (remember syntax trees) are inherently multi-word patterns. Many of these structures have aspects of multi-word patterns, and often include lexical elements. Tenses, such as the going-to future (60, 61) have a fixed element (e.g. the semi-modal going to/gonna) and a variable verb phrase slot. Not every lexical verb can be used with all tenses. As a result, you get the patterns that every learner of English is familiar with. For example, stative verbs don’t usually occur in the progressive (63). Any syntactic structure has a lexical component to it.

  1. They are going to open the gyms again.
  2. They’re gonna open the gyms again.
  3. I am eating at the moment.
  4. * I am knowing it at the moment, but I might forget.

going to is an interesting case because of the direction of the contraction to gonna. With phrase structure as the only model to explain the syntagmatic relationships, we would have to expect the particle to to be contracted to its closest constituent, which would be the following verb, with which it forms a unit (to-infinitive). What we actually see is going and to fusing together. This is easily explained just by looking at frequencies. Imagine that our brain works like a sort of computer that constantly tries to model and predict incoming stimuli and automate and reduce wherever possible. The probability that going is followed by to is very high, in certain uses you could consider it redundant information. The verb slot following to, however, is much more variable. Therefore, even the most frequent combinations of to + verb aren’t frequent and distinctive enough to trigger contraction. 8

9.1.2 Lexical variability

If we think of lexical patterns and syntactic patterns as two sides of the same coin, we still have to account for their obvious differences. Syntactic patterns are much more general and have optional slots and highly variable slots. Collocations on the other hand are sometimes part of larger variable patterns, but there is always some lexically ivariant part. Below we have elements like ear off and into that don’t change. The other slots in those constructions, however, do. Nevertheless, the variable slots cannot be arbitrarily filled. The verb slot in (64) is largely restricted to communicative verbs, in (65) the noun slot only allows a very restricted set of swear words.

  1. [VERB] [SOMEONE]’s ear off
  2. [beat|kick|slap] the [crap|hell|shit] out of [SOMEONE]
  3. into-causative: [VERB] [SOMEONE] into [VERB]ing [something]

In conclusion, the most general and most variable structures would be found on the side of syntactic patterns, while the more fixed constructions are determined lexically. Lexical and syntactic patterns co-exist and readily mix and mingle.

9.2 Multiple levels of generalization

There being multi-word patterns that cross phrasal boundaries and contradict traditional grammar rules does not mean that the old models were wrong. English still has a hierarchical phrase structure and an SVO word order. What we can see, however, is that categories are formed on different levels of abstractions. Syntactic patterns, such as word order, tense and sub-ordination are much broader generalizations. Those structures reliably show up in creative language use. Collocations and most other lexical patterns are more idiomatic, bound to certain lexemes.

9.2.1 Competing motivations

There are several explanations of why we would have competing systems. One such explanation is that there are actually competing motivations shaping language.

Automation:

On the one hand, communication systems are under pressure to be more time and energy efficient. We see trends in language that make frequent utterances shorter and more specific.

Idiomatic language is more time and energy efficient in highly specific recurring situations

  • Utterances are more easily processed when they are strongly associated to specific communicative situations
  • Specific lexical structures avoid ambiguities
  • Fine-grained conventions allow for stronger group identity

Simplification is more efficient in constantly changing, unpredictable contexts

  • Broad generalizations allow for creative language use
  • Humans need to categorize the complexity of stimuli
  • Unspecific linguistic items are easier to use across speech communities

9.3 Homework

Homework for you today is just a bit of practice with the system.

  1. Pick 2 of the bundles discussed in the text and search for them in a corpus of your choice.
  2. Create a frequency list of the most commonly occurring words to the right of your bundle using count.
  3. Create a concordance of the other bundle with 4 tokens to the left and right.
  4. Export both as a .csv file, download them and import them into a spreadsheet program.

Don’t worry if you don’t manage to do all the steps. Just let me know how far you get and what problems you encountered. Feel free to use the Discord chat as support forum.

9.3.1 Tiwilbemba

Today I am sharing with you my biggest regret looking back on uni days, thus, my biggest tiwilbemba: Not learning LaTeX/Markdown early enough.

Many of you are no fans of sitting in front of the computer all day. If you are a student, you will use a significant amount of time writing essays, term papers, and theses. The biggest time sinks with these are formatting, tables of contents, bibliographies, lists of abbreviations, etc. What if I told you that you don’t have to spend any time with this? If you know just enough LaTeX/Markdown, you can skip over all these steps, which equals less time tinkering at the computer. If you watched my first term paper stream, you literally saw me set up a document from scratch in under 5 minutes, including cover sheet, table of contents and bibliography, everything formatted perfectly and updated dynamically as I fill it.

It might feel counter-intuitive to spend even more time learning an entirely new computer skill. But bear with me. The time you spend on learning how to write documents in LaTeX or Markdown is ridiculously small compared to the days if not weeks of formatting frustration you can save yourself. I have always been rather tech savvy, and I know Microsoft Word much better than, I guess, the average user. Still, in hindsight, I feel like I was wasting my time. I wrote all my seminar papers, essays and theses in Microsoft Word. And I regret it.

This section is not a tutorial, rather an encouragement for you to expand your horizon (even though I will upload a simple set up for a term paper in the appendix soon). First, a profile of people that should, in my opinion, learn writing in plain text (LaTeX or Markdown).

Group 1: You have to write…

  1. Academic papers
  2. Reports
  3. Articles
  4. Books

Anything that requires a simple style that doesn’t require a crazy amount of design greatly profits from LaTeX/markdown. Any repetitive work that requires consistent formating, too. If you write larger works like books, you’d be crazy not to use LaTeX. Students definitely belong in this group. I’d say, if you force yourself to learn it now, by the time you write your bachelor thesis, it will have been worth it already.

Of course, there are people who might be happy with graphical programs. To be fair, let’s profile these people, too.

Group 2: You have to write

  1. not much at all, only the occasional document
  2. Constantly changing documents
  3. Design-heavy documents (e.g. Ad material)

If you belong to this group, you might not profit from learning LaTeX too much, and you probably don’t care for Markdown either. Creative design is difficult, unless you are very experienced already.

Here are some reasons people have against learning LaTeX that are not valid in my opinion.

  1. “It’s difficult.”
    As soon as you’ve set it up and learned the basics it is actually sooo much easier. There are also platforms with great communities like Stackoverflow, where almost any problem you encounter has been solved by users with full examples. You just have to search for it.
  2. “I am not a programmer”
    Neither am I. Don’t let the syntax scare you.
  3. “I’ll learn it eventually, but for now I have to get this paper done quickly.”
    Nope… That’s what I told myself up until a year or so ago.
  4. “I’ll need to work with people that use .docx.”
    A good .tex file can be easily transformed into .docx or .odt thanks to tools like Pandoc.

Finally, some reasons people might not consider normally.

  • Professionals love it: If you were to write a program, you’d ask a programmer how to do it best. If you were to build a door, you’d ask a carpenter. For some reason, if people do typesetting, they do not use the tools of professionals. Most publishers use LaTeX, and also accept Latex files. It’s definitely not a bad thing to put on your résumé either.
  • Focus: not seeing the output immediately is actually a great thing. You might have just hopped onto the train of thought and the words just spill onto the screen when,… Hark! The table you placed so carefully a moment ago moved unexpectedly to the wrong page… Moment over, distraction has won. This is not gonna happen with LaTeX/markdown. I personally find myself micromanaging all the time in word.
  • Light weight: if you have an old computer or laptop that is old or cheap (or pretty, expensive but still weak,…you know) Windows and Microsoft Word/MacOS and pages might actually run rather slowly. If you think they are fast, you haven’t experienced the alternative. Especially large documents might take some time to load. If you have everything in plain text files, you’re document loads in a split second. That might take away some subconscious blocks that prevent you even from even opening your project. Just pop it open and quickly add a thought to your paper. Sooo comfy. :) As a matter of fact, I’m currently writing this very article from my phone using an editor called Markor with my source file synced in my cloud.
  • Gateway drug: Writing your term paper in plain text might just be the beginning. If you understand LaTeX, you basically get html for free. The principle is the same, just with slightly different syntax. If you use something like Rmarkdown, you can essentially export your project seamlessly into any format with little adjustment needed. You might be tempted to write your own website. Maybe you get into extensible text editors, terminals, scripting, maybe even Linux, maybe even… Vim? The rabbit hole goes deep. ;)