Kuhu suundub püsivus? Verbidega jääma ja jätma väljendatud sündmuste kujutamine katses

Kokkuvõte. Uurimus põhineb autorite välja töötatud joonistamise ja häälega mõtlemise katse tulemustel. Katses paluti katseisikutel (21 eesti keelt emakeelena kõnelejat) kujutada ja selgitada katse läbiviijale 24 verbi suunda (näiteks nooltega). Selles artiklis esitame täpsemalt neist kahe – jääma ja jätma – analüüsi. Verb jätma on jääma kausatiivtuletis. See mõjutab ka nende tähenduserinevust – jääma on passiivsem, jätma aga aktiivsem ja agenti rõhutav. Katseisikute kujutiste ja selgituste põhjal kirjeldame, milline oli noolte suund kujutistel ja millistest elementidest koosneb mõlema uuritava verbi skeem. Selgus, et katseisikud kujutasid verbi jätma suunda nooltega, verbi jääma oli kujutatud pigem punktide, täppide, ringide või kaarjate joontega. Kujutistel ja selgitustes avaldusid ka tüüpilised skeemi osalised: JÄÄJA, JÄTJA ja JÄETU. Mõlema verbi tegevuse aega kujutati ja selgitati minevikulisusega. Sarnane on ka nende verbide mõistemetafoorsus: mõlemad kajastavad pigem negatiivset hinnangut. Verbi jääma tähenduses on olulisel kohal see, et potentsiaalne muutus ei toimu. Verb jätma väljendab aga seda, et potentsiaalse muutuse mittetoimumine põhjustatakse. Abstract. Ilona Tragel, Jane Klavan: The direction and participants of the events expressed by the verbs jääma and jätma: a drawing experiment. We use an innovative experimental design to extract the regularities of the general conceptual structure from the speakers’ mind: a drawing task with a thinkaloud protocol. 21 native speakers of Estonian provided schematic representations of 20 experimental verbs and 4 control verbs. Our discussion focuses on jääma ‘stay, remain’ and jätma ‘leave something somewhere’. jääma typically expresses intransitive events and jätma transitive events. We zoom in on the following topics: transitivity and causativity, the positive/negative evaluation of the activity, the schematic representation of the direction of verbs and the elements belonging to the verb schema. Our study shows that the differences in the transitivity of the two verbs are reflected in the drawings and explanations given by the participants. Our results confirm the general prediction that abstract verbs have an image-schematic direction, but the specifics of the direction vary according to the type of verb.

“Make it Happen!”

Verbs may be attributed to higher agency than other grammatical categories. In Study 1, we confirmed this hypothesis with archival datasets comprising verbs ( N = 950) and adjectives ( N = 2115). We then investigated whether verbs (vs. adjectives) increase message effectiveness. In three experiments presenting potential NGOs (Studies 2 and 3) or corporate campaigns (Study 4) in verb or adjective form, we demonstrate the hypothesized relationship. Across studies, (overall N = 721) grammatical agency consistently increased message effectiveness. Semantic agency varied across contexts by either increasing (Study 2), not affecting (Study 3), or decreasing (Study 4) the effectiveness of the message. Overall, experiments provide insights in to the meta-semantic effects of verbs – demonstrating how grammar may influence communication outcomes.

When We Think About Thinking

Mental-content verbs such as think, believe, imagine and hope seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different, perhaps complementary, proposal, a major contributor to the difficulty of these items lies with the informational requirements for identifying them from the contexts in which they appear. The experiments reported here explore the implications of these proposals by investigating the contribution of observational and linguistic cues to the acquisition of mental predicate vocabulary. We demonstrate that particular observed situations can be helpful in prompting reference to mental contents, specifically contexts that include a salient and/or unusual mental state such as false belief. We then compare the potency of such observational support to the reliability of syntactic information. In tasks where children and adults hypothesize the meaning of novel verbs, we find that syntactic information is a more reliable indicator of mentalistic interpretations than even the most cooperative contextual cues. The findings support the position that the informational demands of mapping, rather than age-related cognitive deficiency, can bear much of the explanatory burden for the learning problems posed by abstract verbs.

What is up and down in embodied language processing? An experimental study on semantic priming of visual perception

Linguistic processing has been suggested to involve rich perceptual representations grounded in non-linguistic experiential content often straddling multiple modal cognitive systems. This distributed approach implies that the processing of words signifying perceptual content can interfere with other aspects of perceptual experience through cross-modal priming. In an experimental study, we investigated semantically activated cross-modal priming between perception of auditory verbs and visual motion illusions. Participants solved a lexical decision task involving concrete and abstract verbs while presented with the Motion Quartet Paradigm, a visual stimulus inducing the illusory experience of vertical or horizontal motion. We found that the semantic direction of verbs primed participants to experience the visual stimulus as moving in compatible directions (horizontally or vertically), supporting our predictions. Interestingly, and contrary to our hypotheses, the priming effect was mainly driven by abstract words. We suggest that these results might be due to the socially interactive semantics of the abstract words.

Imageability, familiarity, and age of acquisition ratings for Arabic abstract nouns, abstract verbs and adjectives

To date, normative psycholinguistics research has mainly focused on establishing norms for producing databases for concrete words using standardized pictures, while abstract words have been subject to much less attention. Understandably, the fact that the first can be represented visually helps in formulating picture-naming tasks to elicit verbal identification for pictures representing nouns and verbs, which greatly contributes to language experiments in both theoretical and clinical studies. The present study argues for the equal importance of studies that aim to develop databases for abstract words, as language use is not restricted to picturable/concrete concepts. We provide norms for a set of 165 abstract nouns, 56 abstract verbs and 109 abstract adjectives, collected from healthy speakers of Arabic. Using rating tasks, norms for imageability, age of acquisition, and familiarity are established. Linguistic factors such as syllable length and phoneme length are also accounted for. We also include orthographic frequency values (extracted from AraLex; Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson, 2010). The norms for the processing of abstract words collected in the current study present a valuable resource for researchers and clinicians working with speakers of Arabic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset of abstract words for the Arabic language.

Showing with words

In the current study, we explored the hypothesis that the level of language concreteness influences readers’ emotional involvement and, thus, fosters the evocation of suspense. To this end, 141 suspenseful texts with comparable content were assessed altogether by 1226 participants on items referring to emotional involvement and suspense. A concreteness score per text was calculated from the ratio between concrete and abstract verbs. Additionally, participants were asked to provide personal data, such as sex, age, or reading habits, and to answer items referring to their ability to feel empathy (trait empathy). Applying a stepwise multiple regression analysis we found that language concreteness is one significant predictor for emotional involvement and suspense (next to affinity for suspense and trait empathy). These results are discussed with respect to their implications on the nature of suspense and on the so-called paradox of suspense.

The Semantics of Syntax: The Grounding of Transitive and Intransitive Constructions

Embodied theories of language maintain that brain areas associated with perception and action are also involved in the processing and representation of word meaning. A number of studies have shown that sentences with action verbs elicit activation within sensory–motor brain regions, arguing that sentence-induced mental simulations provide a means for grounding their lexical-semantic meaning. Constructionist theories argue, however, that form–meaning correspondence is present not only at the lexical level but also at the level of constructions. We investigated whether sentence-induced motor resonance is present for syntactic constructions. We measured the BOLD signal while participants read sentences with (di)transitive (caused motion) or intransitive constructions that contained either action or abstract verbs. The results showed a distinct neuronal signature for caused motion and intransitive syntactic frames. Caused motion frames activated regions associated with reaching and grasping actions, including the left anterior intraparietal sulcus and the parietal reach region. Intransitive frames activated lateral temporal regions commonly associated with abstract word processing. The left pars orbitalis showed an interaction between the syntactic frame and verb class. These findings show that sensory–motor activation elicited by sentences entails both motor resonance evoked by single words as well as at the level of syntactic constructions.