Towards a dynamic behavioral profile: A diachronic study of polysemous sentir in Spanish

Abstract

This study examines the diachronic evolution of the polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir (‘to feel’) by means of a corpus-based dynamic behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Methodologically, it presents the first application of the BP approach to historical data and proposes some methodological innovations not only within the current body of research in historical semantics but also with regard to previous applications of the BP approach. First, whereas the majority of existing studies in quantitative historical semantics are largely based on observed frequencies or percentages of collocational co-occurrence, our study leverages more complex historical data that are based on the similarities of vectors. Second, this study also provides an extension of the methodological apparatus of the BP approach by complementing the traditional hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis (HAC) with a dynamic BP approach derived from multidimensional scaling maps (MDS). Theoretically, this methodology contributes to a comprehensive perspective on the process of Constructionalization and the nature of networks, which is illustrated on the basis of the development of the Discourse Marker (DM) lo siento (‘I’m sorry’).

Towards a dynamic behavioral profile of the Mandarin Chinese temperature termre: a diachronic semasiological approach

“…Methodologically, although there have already been multifactorial usagefeature analyses of lexical items other than temperature terms (e.g., Glynn 2014aGlynn , 2016Jansegers and Gries 2020), the present study provides a first step towards the multifactorial usage-feature analysis of the semasiology of Chinese temperature terms in particular and of temperature terms in general. Moreover, this study extends the traditional behavioral profile approach-HAC analysis by applying MCA and corroborating its validity in accounting for the multifactorial nature of semasiological change of lexical items.…”

“…Against a usage-based background, the main assumption underlying behavioral profile analysis is that different senses of the same lexical item will co-occur with different linguistic forms and have different syntactic functions as well as different pragmatic functions (Jansegers and Gries 2020). As Firth (1957: 11) notes, "you shall know a word by the company it keeps".…”

From visual perception to evidentiality: A functional empirical approach to se ve que in Spanish

“…In the present study, the BP approach is applied to the pragmatic phenomenon of the Spanish evidential marker se ve que. Moreover, following Jansegers and Gries (2017), the statistical exploration of the BP analyses uses Multidimensional Scaling (MDS)-based semantic maps to complement the classic hierarchical cluster analysis (HAC).…”

Diachronic change of rapport orientation and sentence-periphery in Mandarin

“…In cognitive linguistics, this method is called behavioural profile analysis (BPA) and relies on multivariate exploratory statistics to differentiate senses and forms of a lexeme (cf. Gries, 2010; Jansegers and Gries, 2017: 3).…”