Is each person’s lexicogrammaticalsystem unique? An ......Is each person’s...
Transcript of Is each person’s lexicogrammaticalsystem unique? An ......Is each person’s...
-
Is each person’s lexicogrammatical system unique? An experimental study on linguistic individuality
Dr Andrea [email protected]
UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference 2020University of Birmingham
29th July 2020
Michael Cameron Colin Murphy
mailto:[email protected]://www.andreanini.com
-
AuthorshipIdentification
-
Jenny NichollLast seen 30th June 2005.
After her disappearance a series of text messages were sent from her phone.
Linguistic analysis showed that the later messages were more likely to have
been sent by her ex-lover, David Hodgson.
Hodgson was convicted of Jenny’s murder 19th February 2008 in part because of the linguistic evidence.
-
School Law School Lawyer
School Electrician Manager
different life experiences
in-group variation that influences perception (personality, cognitive abilities, …)
à different texts à different exemplars
-
entirelyabsolutelyaltogethercompletely
entirelyextremely
fullyperfectly
thoroughlytotallyutterly
criticalagreecentral
acceptableunderstand
respect…
Tony Blair
3M words of interviews, speeches, PM question time
Maximisers
Speechtotally agree, perfectly entitled,perfectly obvious
Newspaperperfectly simple,perfectly fair
Parliamententirely endorse,entirely share
Tony Blairentirely understand
Mollin, Sandra. 2009. “I entirely understand” is a Blairism: The methodology of identifying idiolectal collocations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14(3). 367–392. doi:10.1075/ijcl.14.3.04mol.
-
Words that go together. Measuring individual differences in native speakers’ knowledge of collocations
Dąbrowska, Ewa. 2014. Words that go together. Measuring individual differences in native speakers’ knowledge of collocations. The Mental Lexicon 9(3). 401–418. doi:10.1075/ml.9.3.02dab.
blatant lie clear lie
conspicuous lie distinct lie
recognizable lie
double production enlarge production
boost production extend production
redouble production
peculiar remark queer remark
unnatural remark weird remark
odd remark
40 items
% of correct responses
~linguistic
experiencelinguistic
proficiency IQ
-
Words that go together. Measuring individual differences in native speakers’ knowledge of collocations
Dąbrowska, Ewa. 2014. Words that go together. Measuring individual differences in native speakers’ knowledge of collocations. The Mental Lexicon 9(3). 401–418. doi:10.1075/ml.9.3.02dab.
80 adults Distribution of backgrounds roughly following general UK populationü Grammatical comprehension testü Vocabulary testü Test of print exposureü Nonverbal IQ test
30 adults
28% 98%74%
Test/retest reliability: 80%
meanmin max
-
Words that go together. Measuring individual differences in native speakers’ knowledge of collocations
Dąbrowska, Ewa. 2014. Words that go together. Measuring individual differences in native speakers’ knowledge of collocations. The Mental Lexicon 9(3). 401–418. doi:10.1075/ml.9.3.02dab.
% of correct responses
~linguistic
experiencelinguistic
proficiency IQ
blatant lie clear lie
conspicuous lie distinct lie
recognizable lie
double production enlarge production
boost production extend production
redouble production
peculiar remark queer remark
unnatural remark weird remark
odd remark
-
data for 62 participants à 1891 pairs
-
Words that go together. Measuring individual differences in native speakers’ knowledge of collocations
Dąbrowska, Ewa. 2014. Words that go together. Measuring individual differences in native speakers’ knowledge of collocations. The Mental Lexicon 9(3). 401–418. doi:10.1075/ml.9.3.02dab.
80%
blatant lie clear lie
conspicuous lie distinct lie
recognizable lie
double production enlarge production
boost production extend production
redouble production
peculiar remark queer remark
unnatural remark weird remark
odd remark
-
Words that go together. Measuring individual differences in native speakers’ knowledge of collocations
How much inter-speaker variation is there between two random speakers?
How much intra-speaker variation is
there within the same speaker?
intra-speaker variation
inter-speaker variation
-
8 participantsAll academics in the humanities with PhDAll native speakers of British English
Questionnaire
Collocation test
Grammatical alternations test
-
Test on collocations25 sentences
Into each of the following sentences, please insert the word which you think would most naturally fill the gap. It is important that you insert only individual words into each space. Please do not leave any sentence space blank. For this task there is no correct or incorrect answer and so you should choose the answer which seems most natural to you.
1. Even among the largest and most successful of companies, there is still ____________ competition.
2. The Madison banks collapsed after sustaining ____________ losses on real estate loans.
a. majorb. substantialc. significant
British Academic Written Corpus (BAWE)
-
Test on grammatical alternations27 sentences divided in 12 categories
The author relies on speculation to make his point, _________ providing hard evidence to back up his argument.
a. rather than
b. instead of
British Academic Written Corpus (BAWE):
rather than V 544
instead of V 171
rather than providing 5
instead of providing 4
-
Test on grammatical alternations27 sentences divided in 12 categories
• rather than / instead ofPreposition (7)
• take N off / take off NParticle-verb alternation (5)
• which / that / ∅ / who / whomRelative pronouns (3)
• give N N / give N to NDative alternation (2)
• s-genitive / of-genitiveGenitive alternation (2)
• half / half ofDeterminer (2)
• e.g. Ikea’s website / the Ikea websiteProper name (1)
• help V / help to VHelp (1)
• try to V / try and VTry (1)
• e.g. spray water on the grass / spray the grass with waterLocative alternation (1)
• sort of / kind of / type ofSKT (1)
• e.g. not affected / unaffectedNegation (1)
Controlling for factors that influence variation
-
8 participantsAll academics in the humanities with PhDAll native speakers of British English
Questionnaire
Collocation test
Grammatical alternations test
at least 2 weeks
Collocation test
Grammatical alternations test
“another questionnaire”
Changed the order of questions
Changed the order and as much lexical material as possible
-
Grammatical alternations test Collocations test
Wilcoxon test p = 0.0007 Wilcoxon test p = 0.0005
Results
Higher levels of similarity for grammar test than collocations test
Cohen’s d = 1.8 with p < 0.05 power is 0.99 even with this small sample size!
-
Grammatical alternations test Collocations test
Sanity checkResults
-
No two questionnaires are identical
Same person tests more similar to themselves than random pairs
Results are consistent with usage-based approaches to lexicogrammar
Results have massive implications for forensic linguistics
Could it be a memory test? Anecdotal evidence from debriefing points to weak memory effect
Conclusions
Larger replication in the works
-
Is each person’s lexicogrammatical system unique? An experimental study on linguistic individuality
Dr Andrea [email protected]
Michael Cameron Colin Murphy
We would like to thank Prof Ewa Dąbrowska for sharing the Words that Go Together data set
mailto:[email protected]://www.andreanini.com