How Europeans GIVE
A two-layered semantic typology based on two parallel corpora
This study investigates how ten European languages from the Germanic, Romance and Slavic groups divide the semantic space of giving. The study is based on exemplars of events of giving extracted from two very different parallel corpora: Bible translations and film subtitles. This probabilistic exemplar-based approach allows for integration of the postclassical categorization models and semantic typology. The analyses show that there was more cross-linguistic variation in verbalization of GIVE in the subtitles than in the Bible translations, and also more cross-linguistic variation at the level of specific verbs than at the level of more abstract constructions. Moreover, there were significant associations between the constructional and lexical ways of expressing GIVE in all languages in the sample. Finally, the way these ten languages cut the semantic space of GIVE conforms to the genetic relationships between them only at the level of specific verbs, but not at the more abstract and iconic constructional level of categorization.
References
Berlin, Brent & Kay, Paul
1969 Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Bresnan, Joan, Cueni, Anna, Nikitina, Tatiana & Baayen, R. Harald
2007 Predicting the dative alternation. In
Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation,
Gerlof Bouma,
Irene Kramer &
Joost Zwarts (eds), 69–94. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Science.

Cysouw, Michael & Forker, Diana
2009 Reconstruction of morphosyntactic function: Non-spatial usage of spatial case marking in Tsezic.
Language 85(3): 588–617.


Dixon, Robert M.W
1973 The semantics of giving. In
The Formal Analysis of Natural Languages,
Maurice Gross,
Morris Halle &
Marcel-P. Schützenberger (eds), 205–223. The Hague: Mouton.

Ellis, Nick & Ferreira-Junior, Fernando G
Evans, Nicholas
2010 Semantic typology. In
The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology,
Jae Jung Song (ed.), 504–533. Oxford: OUP.

Falissard, Bruno
2012 psy: Various procedures used in psychometry. R package version 1.1.
[URL] (28 April 2014).
Furrer, Reinhard, Nychka, Douglas & Sain, Stephan
2013 fields: Tools for spatial data. R package version 6.8.
[URL] (28 April 2014)
Goldberg, Adele E., Casenhiser, Devin & Sethuraman, Nitya
2004 Learning argument structure generalizations.
Cognitive Linguistics 14(3): 289–316.

Haspelmath, Martin
2011 Ditransitive constructions: The verb “Give.” In
The World Atlas of Language Structures Online.
Matthew S. Dryer &
Martin Haspelmath (eds). Munich: Max Planck Digital Library.
[URL] (7 November 2013).

de Leeuw, Jan & Mair, Patrick
2009 Multidimensional Scaling Using Majorization: SMACOF in R.
Journal of Statistical Software 31(3): 1–30.
[URL] (28 April 2014).

Maechler, Martin, Rousseeuw, Peter, Struyf, Anja, Hubert, Mia & Hornik, Kurt
2013 cluster: Cluster Analysis Basics and Extensions. R package version 1.14.4.
Malchukov, Andrej, Haspelmath, Martin & Comrie, Bernard
2010 Ditransitive constructions: A typological overview. In
Studies in Ditransitive Constructions. A Comparative Handbook,
Andrej Malchukov,
Martin Haspelmath &
Bernard Comrie (eds), 1–64. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Mayer, Thomas & Cysouw, Michael
2014.
Creating a massively parallel Bible corpus.
Proceedings of LREC 2014, Reykjavik
, 26–31 May 2014.
Meyer, David, Zeileis, Achim & Hornik, Kurt
2012 vcd: Visualizing Categorical Data. R package version 1.2–13.
[URL] (28 April 2014)
Murphy, Gregory L
2002 The Big Book of Concepts. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

Nerlove, Sarah & Romney, Kimball
1967 Sibling terminology and cross-sex behaviour.
American Anthropologist 69: 179–187.


Newman, John
1996 Give: A Cognitive Linguistic Study. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


Newman, John
1998b The origin of the German es gibt construction. In
Newman (ed.), 307–325.

Och, Franz J. & Ney, Hermann
2003 A systematic comparison of various statistical alignment models.
Computational Linguistics 29(1): 19–51.


R Core Team
2013 R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
[URL] (28 April 2014).
Roberts, John R
1998 GIVE in Amele. In
Newman (ed.), 1–33.

Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Gries, Stefan T
van der Auwera, Johan, Schalley, Ewa & Nuyts, Jan
2005 Epistemic possibility in a Slavonic parallel corpus: A pilot study. In
Modality in Slavonic Languages. New Perspectives,
Björn Hansen &
Petr Karlik (eds), 201–217. Munich: Sagner.

de Vries, Lourens
2009 Some remarks on the use of Bible translations as parallel texts in linguistic research.
STUF – Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 60(2): 148–157.

Wälchli, Bernhard
2010 Similarity semantics and building probabilistic semantic maps from parallel texts.
Linguistic Discovery 8(1): 331–371.

Wälchli, Bernhard & Cysouw, Michael
2012 Lexical typology through similarity semantics: Toward a semantic map of motion verbs.
Linguistics 50(3): 671–710.


von Waldenfels, Ruprecht
2012 The Grammaticalization of “give” + Infinitive: A Comparative Study of Russian, Polish and Czech. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 may 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.