14.–16. 10.
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Dagmar Divjak
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Russian and Slavonic Studies The University of Sheffield Odborné zaměření: |
| 14. 10. /č. 18/ 14.10 |
In this first talk I look at the quantitative turn in Cognitive Linguistics. According to a recent survey (Janda 2013), the majority of conference presentations, articles, and books in our field now relies on some kind of quantitative information language data, and analyzes the data using statistical methods. I will zoom in on one type of quantitative data, i.e. information on frequency of occurrence, and explain why cognitive linguists‘ fascination with frequency is unavoidable and why working with frequencies of occurrences necessitates the use of statistics. I will then move on to considering some of the currently available ways in which to capture frequency information and argue that we need to relate our measures to what we know about human memory systems in order to be able to develop cognitively realistic ways of tracking occurrence frequencies.
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| 15. 10. /č. 300/ 17.30 |
In this talk I look into the assignment of aspect in Russian and Polish modal constructions. Unlike previous accounts, I take a strictly corpus-based, quantitative approach within which corpus data on the relationship between aspect and modality are modeled using mixed effects logistic regression. |
| 16. 10. /č. 18/ 12.30 |
In this talk, I focus on the question of what language has to offer the learners in their quest for the meaning of lexemes and the concepts they give access to. I will present results of an ongoing research project that cross-validates a statistical corpus-based model designed to predict the preference for one of 6 near-synonyms that express the concept TRY in Russian by letting it compete against human beings in a series of psycholinguistic experiments. The results show that machine and human beings perform at the same level and show similar error patterns. The findings thus provide support for the Distributional Hypothesis (Harris 1954) that says that the meaning of a word is derived from the linguistic contexts in which it occurs and are relevant for concept acquisition and representation in general.
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