Behavioral Profiles, snake plots and cross-linguistic comparisons

This post complements this earlier post: The corpus-based Behavioral Profile approach to cognitive semantics as it revisits the Behavior Profile (BP) methodology and reports how, according to Divjak and Gries, snake plot representations can graphically reveal the relative significance of ID tags thus allowing for cross-linguistic ID tag-level comparisons. In this post I make reference to Divjak and Gries recent paper: Corpus-based cognitive semantics: a contrative study of phasal verbs in English and Russian (to appear).

Overall, Divjak and Gries demonstrate that the BP methodology not only allows to pick up dissimilarities between polysemous and near synonyms but it also allows to recognise and simultaneously process dissimilarities that are characteristically different:

"Because these dissimilarities are of an entirely different order, they can only be picked up if a methodology is used that adequately captures the multivariate nature of the phenomenon. The Behavioral Profiling approach we have developed and apply here does exactly that." (p.273, abst.).

For their investigation of polysemous and near synonymous lexical items the authors assume the existence of networks of words/senses. They also assume that the investigated lexical items in their study are included in such networks. Further, these networks demonstrate internal structure in the sense that "elements which are similar to each other are connected and the strength of the connection reflects the likelihood that the elements display similar syntactic and semantic behaviour" (p.281)

Divjak and Gries' paper achieves three goals:

1/ Presents the BP methodology as a means to provide a usage-based characterisation of the lemma under investigation by identifying individual syntactic and semantic characteristic features.

2/ Demonstrates that a snake plot graphic representation of those syntactic and semantic characteristic features allows to rank them in order of significance and therefore contributes to the identification of clusters of senses "on the basis of distributional characteristics collected in BPs" (p.292). Consequently, snake plots representations allow for the recognition of prototypical features of the investigated lexical items.
3/ Illustrates that semantically the BP approach allows for more rigorous investigation of translational cross-linguistic equivalents.

Overall, the authors are testing the BP approach for a simultaneous treatment of both language-specific data and cross-linguistic data.

"The (...) purpose is to show that this approach can also be applied to the notoriously difficult area of cross-linguistic comparisons. (...) [T]he approach will be put to the test by attempting a simultaneous within-language description and across-languages comparison of polysemous and near-synonymous items belonging to different subfamilies of Indo-European, i.e., English and Russian" (p.277)

Generally, Divjak and Gries' paper encourages to put the BP methodology further to the test by applying it to an interlanguage type of data where the investigated lexical items in language x and carving a specific conceptual space is used by a native speaker of language y whose conceptual space for the translational equivalent of the investigated item in language x is potentially different. In other words and with regard to the application of the BP methodology to my project, while the paper raises questions about the nature of conceptual spaces in interlanguage, it convincingly offers a methodology that would allow for the computation of my three-way data (including native English, native French and Fr-English interlanguage, details of the three sub-corpora can be found here). Simultaneous treatment of may, can and pouvoir can be carried out within language -- taking into account the native English data vs. the Fr-English interlanguage data, and across language -- taking ito account the native French vs. native English vs. Fr-English interlanguage data. Finally, the BP approach also provides the opportunity to investigate the possibilty of a correlation between the word class membership of may, can and pouvoir and their semantic BPs.