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Review: Corpus Ling/Lexicography: Stubbs (2001)
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Mayumi Masuko, Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical SemanticsMessage 1: Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics
Date: Mon, 08 Apr 2002 16:34:36 +0900
From: Mayumi Masuko <mayumimn.waseda.ac.jp>
Subject: Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics
Stubbs, Michael (2001) Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of LexicalSemantics. Blackwell Publishers, xix+267pp, paperback ISBN0-631-20833-X, USD 39.95 / GBP 16.99.Announced in http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-436.html
Mayumi Masuko, Waseda University
OVERVIEWAs the title suggests, this book focuses on the meanings of units thatare larger than individual words. Drawing upon publicly availablecorpora, Stubbs tries to explicate which units can recur and whichcannot and what such recurring expressions mean.
The book is divided into three parts. Two chapters comprise, Part I:Introduction. Chapter 1, 'Words in Use: Introductory Examples',introduces the basis of the author's discussion. Stubbs uses 'text' and'discourse' interchangeably, and they cover 'naturally occurring,connected, spoken or written language, which has occurred in some realcontext, independently of the linguist' (p.5). That is, he uses datafrom corpora as examples and supplements them with invented examples ifthat is absolutely necessary. Many utterances are indirect, so thehearer has to infer what the speaker has intended. Stubbs emphasizesthat although many of these inferences rely on social convention, somemake use of linguistic convention.
Chapter 2, 'Words, Phrases and Meanings: Basic Concepts', defines keywords. 'Phrase' refers to a string of words, and 'collocation' meanslexical relation between co-occurring words (i.e. a phrase). 'Corpus isa collection of texts' (p.25); 'text' presumably is used in the samesense as in Chapter 1. In other words, a corpus exemplifies 'attestedlanguage'. 'Word forms' occur in actual texts. 'Lemmas' (or lexemes),on the other hand, are abstract and a list of lemmas is usually used asa representation of a vocabulary: a dictionary lists lemmas.'Collocation' simply refers to co-occurring words, and corpus linguistsare interested in frequent co-occurrence. Co-occurrence here, however,does not necessarily mean words have to occur next to each other. 'A'span' is the number of word-forms, before and/or after the node (e.g.4:4, 0:3), within which collocates are studied' (p.29). A span of 3:3or 4:4 is widely used by corpus linguists. Sometimes, a unit longerthan a single word is listed in a dictionary if the meaning is notpredictable from individual word-forms (e.g. nuclear family).Similarly, there are cases where a meaning of a word-form cannot bedetermined in the absence of its collocates: e.g. 'heavy' has differentmeanings in 'a heavy smoker' and ' a heavy weather'. In addition tothese lexical relations, reference and denotation are essential as inany other discussion of meaning. 'Reference' is the relation between alinguistic expression and a particular object that it refers to;'denotation', on the other hand, signifies the referential range: whatmay be referred to by a given expression. 'Connotation' is anotherimportant concept, and often paired with denotation. It conveys thespeaker's feeling or attitude towards the object, and may be called'emotive meaning' (cf. Lyons 1977). The vocabulary of a given languagecan be regarded as sets of words, where words in the same set, or'semantic field', share some aspect of meaning.
Part II: Case Studies consists of six chapters. The first two, Chapters3 and 4, examine phrases. They are idiomatic expressions but usuallynot idioms. Concordance (or Key Words in Context) is a simple tool forprocessing corpora, which can display all occurrences of a given wordin a text with surrounding words. Stubbs henceforth uses concordancedata, employing Sinclair's (1991) four types of co-occurrencerelations: collocation, colligation, semantic preference, and discourseprosody. Chapter 3 mainly explains key words and the method of hisanalyses. 'Collocation' was introduced in Chapter 2. 'Colligation isthe relation between a pair of grammatical categories' (p.65).'Semantic preference' is the relation between a word-form or lemma andwords in the same semantic field. 'Discourse prosodies express speakerattitude' (p.65; cf. Lyons' (1977) 'evaluative meaning'). In the restof Chapter 4, Stubbs examines the Cobuild collocations, stresses the importance of connotations in(lexical) semantics. Although connotations may appear personal, theyare often shared among native speakers. This suggests that non-nativespeakers need to be aware of and master this aspect of meaning.Unfortunately, however, they are often not included in dictionarydefinitions. Stubbs uses examples to show that some verbs share thesame discourse prosody and convey the point of view. One case involvesthree verbs 'accost' 'lurk' and 'loiter'. All three have negativeconnotations and are used when making accusations or complaints aboutother people's actions. These verbs appear in different typicalsyntactic structures, however. 'Accost' often is used in the passive,whereas 'lurk' is not. Such information, however, is not usuallyincluded in dictionaries. In Chapter 10, 'Data and Dualisms: On CorpusMethods and Pluralist Models', Stubbs rejects monism and adopts apluralism. This is different from the two-way distinctions proposed bySaussure ('langue' and 'parole') and by Chomsky ('competence' and'performance'). The main thrust of his argument is that linguistictheory must account for (a) the linguistic behaviour of an individualspeaker, (b) linguistic knowledge, or 'the 'mental lexicon' (p.232) ofa native speaker and (c) language as a system. This he argues is notmuch different from the four-way distinction proposed by Hymes (1972).
CRITICAL EVALUATIONStubbs' main argument is '[i]t makes little sense to describe themeaning of individual words in isolation, since words are co-selectedwith other words, and meanings are distributed across larger units'(p.100). This is not new. It is practically the same as what Fregeclaimed in 1884, which is known as 'context principle': 'Only in thecontext of a sentence does a word stand for anything' (Dummett: 192).In his attempt to prove this, Stubbs extensively uses corpora. This isbecause he thinks analysing publicly available data in replaceablemethods is what linguistics requires and this in turn is because hebelieves linguistics to be an empirical science. This does not mean herejects native speakers' intuitions and invented data as completelyunreliable: they are reliable in some areas and not in others (p.72). Ihave always held a similar view of meaning, so I may be too biased tojudge objectively. Nevertheless, I should think that Stubbs providessufficient evidence to show his claim is valid.
There are two aspects of the book that I find particularly appealing.The first is Stubbs' attempt to explain why an expected collocationdoes not actually occur very often. One such case is a perhapsunexpected non-co-occurrence of 'kick' and 'foot': as the use of theformer normally implies the use of the latter, they do not co-occurvery often. Another involves differences in collocation. Verbs such as'bump' and 'smash' refer to the same action but they differ inconnotations. As one of the main claims of the book is that most workin semantics/pragmatics ignores or pays little attention toconnotations, this is rather a neat way to highlight their importance.
The other is analyses of cultural significance of certain expressionsdiscussed in Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 illustrates Stubbs' pointabout the importance of the context, here perhaps more largelyconstrued than usual, with expressions such as 'ethnic' vs. 'racial','care', 'proper', etc. Chapter 8 discusses loanwords from German andpoints out that native speakers' conception of 'proper' language usemight be wrong. The chapter functions also as a neat illustration ofhistorical change in meanings across languages.
This book contains ample data drawn from publicly available corpora andprovides a convincing case for the author's main claim that contextplays an essential role in determining the meaning of words or phrases.The author's style renders his arguments comprehensible. I have,however, a couple of quibbles.
The first is the lack of precise definitions of some of the keytechnical terms. I am not sure whom the target audience would be, butfrom the easy-to-follow style of the book, I should guess this might beintended as an introductory textbook for corpus semantics. If so, Iwould have been happier to see key words/phrases more clearly andexplicitly defined. I shall just give two examples. One is 'discourseprosody' which is 'descriptor of speaker attitude and discoursefunction' (p.88). I can understand what this intuitively means, but itwould have been helpful to provide a fuller explanation because the useof 'prosody' may suggest this is limited to phonological issues when itis not. Another is 'inter-collocations' whose definition I cannot findin the book. From the discussion of the phrase 'roam the streets'(pp.203-5), I would guess that this probably means the collocation of aphrase consisting of more than one word. It is not clear to me how thisis to be obtained or computed, for 'roam' on its own may have apositive or a negative connotation whilst 'roam the streets', accordingto Stubbs, is 'almost always negative' (p.203). His argument seems tobe that this is because the phrase 'the streets' is predominantlynegative. Some of the examples he gives for this argument do not seemto be wholly convincing (e.g. do the negative connotations of 'visionsof rubbish piled high in the streets' arise from 'the streets' asStubbs argues to be the case (pp.204-5) or from 'rubbish'?). And does aword with negative connotations in a phrase always make the phrase as awhole have negative connotations?
The second is perhaps inevitable, but his discussion of the culturalsignificance of linguistic expressions is cast in a predominantlyBritish context. This in itself is not a bad thing, but makes itdifficult for some readers to appreciate some arguments. In hisdiscussion of the cultural significance of 'care' in Chapter 7, Stubbscites an utterance made by 'Dame Edna Everage (Barry Humphries)', whomhe uses as an example of 'parodies of psycho-babbles by socialsatirists'. Perhaps this is enough, but what this signifies I wouldhave thought might be only grasped by those with the knowledge of (someareas of) the British popular culture in the 1980s/1990s.
Such minor issues aside, this book presents the author's argumentsfairly convincingly in a style accessible to undergraduate students. Irecommend this book also to postgraduate students ofsemantics/pragmatics who may have a narrower conception of what'meaning' means. Putting on my language teacher's hat, I would like tosee a dictionary, or still better, an on-line interface, which EFLstudents could use to find out if the words they put together reallycollocate with one another or not. As Stubbs rightly points out, 'manyconnotations for which there is strong corpus evidence are not recordedin dictionaries' (p.198) and currently available '[d]ictionaries haveno systematic way of relating words which have shared connotations'(p.203). One of Stubbs' main claims is that connotations are a centralpart of meaning as 'the whole point of utterance may be to express thespeaker's attitude, evaluation and point of view' (p.198). If thisappears tenable, and he provides ample evidence for it, then it isessential for EFL learners to come to grips with connotations.
REFERENCESDummett, M. (1981) Frege: Philosophy of Language 2nd ed., Duckworth.
Frege, G. (1884) Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik: eine logisch-mathematische Untersuchung ueber den Begriff der Zahl, Breslau.
Hymes, D. (1972) 'On communicative competence'. In J. Pride and J.Holmes (eds.) Sociolinguistics, Penguin, pp. 269-293.
Lyons, J. (1977) Semantics, 2 Vols., Cambridge University Press.
Sinclair, J. (1991) Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, Oxford UniversityPress.
Youmans, G. (1991) 'A new tool for discourse analysis: the vocabularymanagement profile', Language 67:4, pp.763-789.
ABOUT THE REVIEWERMayumi Masuko did her postgraduate studies at the University ofCambridge, where she received an MPhil and a PhD in linguistics. She isan Associate Professor of English at Waseda University, where sheteaches English and linguistics. Her main research interest lies in theinteraction between semantics (broadly conceived) and morphosyntax.
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