Browsing by Author "Koskela, Anu"

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    Coats and bras and jeans – and clothes, too: Lexical contrast between hyperonyms and hyponyms
    (Cambridge University Press, 2016-11-03) Koskela, Anu
    A special case of lexical contrast involves contrasting a hyperonym and a hyponym (as in clothes and socks), leading to the narrowing of the hyperonym’s sense. However, not all hyperonym/hyponym pairs are amenable to contrast (e.g. ?animals and cats). While category prototype structure forms a strong motivating and constraining factor for hyperonym/hyponym contrast (e.g. Lehrer 1990), what is lacking in previous work is a systematic consideration of the phenomenon in real language use. To that end, data from the GloWbE corpus (Davies 2013) was used to investigate which terms for items of clothing (e.g. coat, bra, jeans) can be contrasted with their hyperonym (either clothes or clothing). While marginal members of the ITEM OF CLOTHING category (e.g. belt, hat) have a stronger potential for contrasting with the hyperonym, even prototypical hyponyms (e.g. shirt, jeans) contrasted with clothes/clothing in at least some contexts. Language users can therefore manipulate category boundaries to meet their discourse needs, exploiting a range of dimensions of difference to create contrast. Many clothing terms were also found to contrast more readily with clothes than with clothing, suggesting that the meaning of clothes is generally narrower than that of its near-synonym clothing.
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    Identification of homonyms in different types of dictionaries
    (Oxford University Press, 2015) Koskela, Anu
    Homonyms are generally defined as distinct lexical items that happen to share an identical form but whose senses are etymologically or semantically unrelated (e.g. tattoo1 ‘ink mark on skin’ / tattoo2 ‘military drum signal’). In lexicography, however, the decision of when to split particular senses of a lexical form into different homonymous entries must take into account the function of the dictionary and the needs of its intended users. Consequently, different types of dictionaries adopt different homonymy identification policies. This chapter discusses how homonyms are identified and represented in different types of dictionaries, based on a review of 32 monolingual English dictionaries. In the general-purpose dictionaries surveyed, homonyms were generally identified on etymological or semantic grounds. In the special-purpose dictionaries and some of the dictionaries aimed at children and language learners, however, there was a tendency to avoid homonymous headwords and instead group even unrelated senses of a lexical form under the same headword.
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    Inclusion, contrast and polysemy in dictionaries: The relationship between theory, language use and lexicographic practice
    (De Gruyter Brill, 2015-06) Koskela, Anu
    This paper explores the lexicographic representation of a type of polysemy that arises when the meaning of one lexical item can either include or contrast with the meaning of another, as in the case of dog/bitch, shoe/boot, finger/thumb and animal/bird. A survey of how such pairs are represented in monolingual English dictionaries showed that dictionaries mostly represent as explicitly polysemous those lexical items whose broader and narrower readings are more distinctive and clearly separable in definitional terms. They commonly only represented the broader readings for terms that are in fact frequently used in the narrower reading, as shown by data from the British National Corpus.
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    Key Terms in Semantics
    (Continuum International Publishing, 2010) Murphy, M. Lynne; Koskela, Anu
    Key Terms in Semantics explains the all the terms and concepts in semantics which students on linguistics and language studies course are likely to encounter during their undergraduate study. The book is organized alphabetically, and fully cross-referenced. The book includes a section on key thinkers in semantics, from Aristotle to Noam Chomsky and will be a valuable desk reference for students throughout their undergraduate course. The final section presents a list of key readings in semantics, to signpost the reader towards classic articles, as well providing a springboard to further study.
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    Metonymy, category broadening and narrowing, and vertical polysemy
    (John Benjamins, 2011) Koskela, Anu
    This chapter examines the relationship between metonymy and cases of category broadening and narrowing and the resulting state of vertical polysemy (e.g., cat ‘domestic cat’ > ‘any feline’ and drink ‘consume liquid’ > ‘consume alcohol’). Broadening and narrowing have been argued to be motivated by metonymic processes where a category member stands for the whole category or vice versa (Radden and Kövecses, 1999; cf. also Lakoff, 1987). Here, I show that there is a crucial difference between the domain structures involved in metonymy and in vertical polysemy. Unlike metonymies, broadening and narrowing do not involve a shift in the salience of domains (see Croft, 1993). Instead, I argue that there are four possible domain configurations that may underlie vertically related meanings.
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    Shoes, boots and vertical polysemes: The dynamic construal and conventionality of word senses
    (John Benjamins, 2014) Koskela, Anu
    This paper considers lexical items such as 'shoe', whose meaning can be construed more broadly or narrowly (i.e., as either including or excluding boots), and examines how this type of “vertical” meaning variation relates to the distinction between ambiguity and vagueness. I argue that the broader and narrower readings of a single lexical form can be treated as polysemous senses to the extent that they exhibit some symptoms of autonomy as contextually construed sense units. However, as some vertical polysemes’ senses also exhibit symptoms of unity, they fall in between ambiguity and vagueness. As word senses are here defined as contextually construed units of meaning, their autonomy is considered independently from their conventionality. However, a corpus study of pairs of words with a dual inclusion/contrast relationship (including 'shoe/boot', 'cup/mug', 'dog/bitch', 'meat/chicken' and 'dog/puppy') suggests that even senses that exhibit a low degree of autonomy may nevertheless be conventionalised.
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    Signals of Contrastiveness: But, Oppositeness, and Formal Similarity in Parallel Contexts
    (Sage, 2015-07-13) Murphy, M. Lynne; Jones, Steven; Koskela, Anu
    By examining contexts in which “emergent” oppositions appear, we consider the relative contribution of formal parallelism, connective type, and semantic relation (considered as an indicator of relative semantic parallelism) in generating contrast. The data set is composed of cases of ancillary antonymy—the use of an established antonym pair to help support and/or accentuate contrast between a less established pair. Having devised measures for formal and semantic parallelism, we find that but is less likely to appear in contexts with high levels of formal parallelism than non-contrastive connectives like and or punctuation. With respect to semantic parallelism, we find that contrastive connectives are less likely to occur with pairs that are in traditional paradigmatic relations (“nym relations”: antonymy, co-hyponymy, synonymy). The article’s main hypothesis—that non-paradigmatic relations need more contextual sustenance for their opposition—was therefore supported. Indeed, pairs in nym relations were found to be more than twice as likely to be joined by a non-contrastive connective as by a contrastive one.