Vol 22, No 3 (2018): Studies in semantics: for Anna Wierzbicka’s anniversary

The paper aims to demonstrate that the main contribution of Anna Wierzbicka to linguistics is the idea of semantic decomposition - that is, representing meaning in terms of structurally organized configurations of simpler meanings - and a huge amount of specific decompositions of lexical meanings from many languages. One of possible developments of this idea of Wierzbicka’s is the Meaning-Text linguistic approach, and in particular - the Meaning-Text model of natural language. To illustrate the importance and fruitfulness of semantic decomposition, two Meaning-Text mini-models are presented for English and Russian. Two semantically equivalent sentences of these languages are considered: (1) a. Eng. A honeymooner was fatally attacked by a shark. ~ b. Rus. Molodožën pogib v rezul´tate napadenija akuly vo vremja medovogo mesjaca lit. ‘Young.husband died as result of.attack of.shark during honey month’ The formal representations of these sentences at four levels-Meaning-Text style-are shown: semantic, deep-syntactic, surface-syntactic, and deep-morphological. Examples of formal rules relating the representations of two adjacent levels are presented.

In the spirit of NSM accounts that attempt to build up a language’s full expressivity from a small set of lexical primitives, we have investigated the usage in English of basic verbs of ideation ( think, know ) and physical activity ( strike, hit, go, run ) as they take on new epistemic meanings and functions, all the while calcifying in their inflectional range. It is well known that certain verbs of cognition in English such as remember , forget , and think are grammaticalizing into pragmatic particles of epistemic stance and, consequently, 1st person singular (1sg) forms account for the majority of usages. Likewise, we have carried out systematic queries and hand-tagging of corpus returns and have found that many verbs and phrasal expressions, ideational or not, seem to be associated with rather narrow collocational patterning, argument structure, and inflectional marking in almost idiom-like and constructional fashion. Moreover, we find that expressions associated with 1sg and 2nd person “cognizers” are, to a large extent, in complementary distribution, giving rise to fairly strong semantic differences in how I and you “ideate”. In this study, we demonstrate the extent of inflectional and collocational specificity for verbs of cognition and physical activity and discuss implications this lexico-syntactic idiosyncracy has for cognitive linguistics.

The paper deals with a well known problem of the distribution of grammatical markers within a certain category and whether this distribution is motivated semantically or not. It discusses the choice of singular and plural forms of nouns in Russian texts. Anna Wierzbicka was one of the first to recognize that the rules which regulate the usage of number markers in Russian are language-specific. She compared the Russian system with the systems of other languages, mainly, English and Polish (cf. Wierzbicka 1988). According to her theoretical assumptions, the difference of the linguistic behaviour of singular and plural forms is always semantically motivated, even if the corresponding nouns represent the same taxonomic class and occur in the same context (like different pieces of furniture, or kinds of vegetables, or types of dishes, etc.). The difference is always determined by the semantics of nouns and the typical functions of the extralinguistic objects they encode. This approach has been pursued by a number of scholars (see: Polivanova 1997; Lyashevskaya 2004а and others). Our paper develops this approach further on the basis of very different data. We take our data from texts written by nonstandard speakers of Russian (as defined by Mustajoki, Protassova & Vakhtin 2010) who are bilinguals. In our case these are students of the major universities in Almaty, who speak Russian fluently and acquired it long before entering university, having Kazakh as their native language. We have gathered and tagged a corpus of bilingual texts of this kind containing 60 000 tokens. This is a part of the Russian Learner Corpus (RLC) which facilitates identification of deviations from standard Russian. The analysis of these deviations is of particular interest for linguistic theory, since they provide cases of interference and interaction for languages of very different structure, such as Russian and Kazakh. The main goal of our paper is to show that the deviations in nominal number marking we come across in the texts of bilinguals are not arbitrary but motivated. They follow semantic strategies which are characteristic for speakers appealing to both systems at once. The paper argues that the violation of standard usage observed in the learner corpus can specify the rules governing Russian number usage which have been violated, even though the domain of number has been well described already.

Russian reduplicated constructions with colour terms have never previously been an object of a comprehensive corpus study. Nevertheless, they present considerable interest for a researcher because comparative ability of colour terms to be reduplicated reflects their semantic and pragmatic differences, whereas semantics and pragmatics of reduplication construction are revealed in the properties of colour terms that can fill its slots. Thus, the goal of the paper is to study semantic and pragmatic properties of Russian colour terms and Russian syntactic reduplication construction by analyzing their co-occurrence. We apply corpus methods to the data from the Russian National Corpus, RuTenTen Corpus on Sketch Engine and RuSkell corpus. We analyze absolute corpus frequencies and collocation patterns of Russian non-reduplicated colour terms, as well as their relative frequencies and collocation patterns in the construction of syntactic reduplication with a hyphen ( belyj-belyj ‘white-white, very white, spotlessly white’). Drawing on this data, we establish that absolute frequencies of non-reduplicated colour terms in Russian reflect both Anna Wierzbicka’s “universals of visual semantics”, as well as certain language and culture-specific tendencies, as evidenced by the prominence of goluboj ‘light blue’ and ryzhij ‘carroty-red’ in Russian. We also argue that the Russian reduplication construction with a hyphen ( belyj-belyj ‘white-white) is semantically and prosodically different from the construction of repetition with a comma ( belyj , belyj ‘white, white’). The former has the meaning of high degree, and thus attracts only gradable colour terms, such as belyj ‘white’, chernyj ‘black’, sinij ‘medium to dark blue’, and other basic colour terms. There are additional factors that influence colour term reduplication. Collocation patterns suggest that colour terms that co-occur with the names of culturally and cognitively salient objects, such as denotations of human appearance (face, hands, skin, eyes, hair) or landscape features (sea, sky, fire, grass) are more likely to be reduplicated. Moreover, aesthetic or emotional evaluation of such objects (‘blue-blue eyes’, ‘green-green grass’) is also a factor that is conducive to their occurrence in the construction of reduplication. Our findings establish the importance of corpus methods in the study of colour terms and reduplication, demonstrate that the use and interpretation of lexical and syntactic items hinges both on semantic and pragmatic factors, and add to the understanding of semantics and pragmatics of Russian colour terms and reduplication construction.