Parts of speech membership as a factor of meaning extension and level of abstraction: Comparison of Czech adjectives and Japanese verbs in adnominal modification
Abstract
Methodological Innovations in Cognitive Linguistics Approaches to meaning and cognition across languages Chapter Proposal Parts of Speech Membership as a Factor of Meaning Extension and Level of Abstraction: Comparison of Czech Adjectives and Japanese Verbs in Adnominal Modification Czech and Japanese languages show due to typological reasons substantial formal differences in adnominal modification. One of the differences lies in parts of speech use.
Czech tends to utilize both for classification (e.g. suchý záchod - dry toilet) and qualification (e.g. mokrý ručník - wet towel) purposes adjectives whereas Japanese tends to express classification by compounding (e.g. otoshibenjo) and to use a whole range of parts of speech (e.g. verb nureta taoru) for qualification. Such difference often results in a parts of speech membership difference between the renderings of the same propositional content in the two languages.
Cognitive Grammar (Langacker (1991, etc.) assumes that parts of speech as linguistic categories dispose of schematic meaning which contributes to conceptualization. This claim has been supported by results of psycholinguistic studies such as Imai (2002, 2008) or Maas, Karasawa, Politi, Suga (2006) etc. which show that the schemas are psychologically realistic.
The schemas of the two compared parts of speech - adjectives and verbs (specifically verbs of change) differ substantially in their complexity (number of symbolic structures as well as mappings). The verbal schema is naturally more complex than the adjectival one.
It seems reasonable to expect that the words belonging to the category with lesser schematic complexity will tend to extend their meaning more readily than their rather complex counterparts. Which should due to the schematization process (Langacker 2008: 15) result in their more abstract meaning.
The purpose of the present chapter is to provide evidence in support of this assumption. The analytical part will present the results of corpora studies of six Czech adjectives (three genuine adjectives, three deverbal adjectives) and their Japanese verbal counterparts which share the same core, prototypical meaning.
The individual uses will be 1) arranged to schematic networks (Langacker 2008: 74), and 2) evaluated with view to construal closeness (Dirvén, 2002). These methodologies shall produce sufficient evidence for judgement on the level of abstraction of each member of the pair and thus validated or falsify the proposed hypothesis.