Monthly Archives: January 2016

Concepts Slide

Operationalising concepts (Manifesto pt. 3 of 3)

Concepts Slide

Properties of concepts, from Susan Fitzmaurice’s presentation

This blog post completes our series of three extracts from Susan Fitzmaurice’s paper on “Concepts and Conceptual Change in Linguistic DNA”. (See parts 1 and 2.)

The supra-lexical approach to the process of concept recognition that I’ve described depends upon an encyclopaedic perspective on semantics (e.g. cf. Geeraerts, 2010: 222-3). This is fitting as ‘encyclopaedic semantics is an implicit precursor to or foundation of most distributional semantics or collocation studies’ (Mehl, p.c.). However, such studies do not typically pause to model or theorise before conducting analysis of concepts and semantics as expressed lexically. In other words, semasiological (and onomasiological) studies work on the premise of ready-made or at least ready lexicalised concepts, and proceed from there. This means that although they depend upon the prior application of encyclopaedic semantics, they themselves do not need to model or theorise this semantics because it belongs to the cultural messiness that yields the lexical expressions that they then proceed to analyse.

For LDNA, concepts are not discrete or componential lexical semantic meanings; neither are they abstract or ideal. Instead, they consist of associations of lexical/phrasal/constructional semantic and pragmatic meanings in use.
This encyclopaedic perspective suggests the following operationalisation of a concept for LDNA:

  1. Concepts resemble encyclopaedic meanings (which are temporally and culturally situated chunks of knowledge about the world expressed in a distributed way) rather than discrete or componential meanings. [This coincides with non-modular theories of mind, which adopt a psychological approach to concepts.]
  2. Concepts can be expressed in texts by (typically a combination of) words, phrases, constructions, or even by implicatures or invited inferences (and possibly by textual absences).
  3. Concepts are traceable in texts primarily via significant syntagmatic (associative) relations (of words/phrases/constructions/meanings) and secondarily via significant paradigmatic (alternate) relations (of words/phrases/constructions/meanings).
  4. A concept in a given historical moment might not be encapsulated in any observed word, phrase, or construction, but might instead only be observable via a complete set of words, phrases, or constructions in syntagmatic or paradigmatic relation to each other.

It is worth noting however, that concept recognition is particularly difficult (for the automatic processes built into LDNA) because it ordinarily depends upon the level of cultural literacy possessed by a reader. This is a quality which, while we cannot incorporate it as a process, we can take it into account by testing distant reading through close reading.

As well as being encyclopaedic, our approach is also experiential, in that the conceptual structure of early modern discourse is a reflection of the way early modern people experienced the world around them. That discourse presents a particular subjective view of the world with the hierarchical network of preferences which emerges as a network of concepts in discourse. In this way we also assume a perspectival nature of concept organisation.

Concluding remarks: Testing and tracking conceptual change across time and style

All being well, if we succeed in visualising the results of an iterative and developing set of procedures to inspect the data from these large corpora, we hope to be able to discern and locate the emergence of concepts in the universe of early modern English print. A number of questions arise about where and how these will show up.

For instance, following our hypothesis, will we see the cementation of a concept in the persistent co-occurrence in particular contexts of candidate conjuncts (both binomials and alternates), bigrams, and ultimately, ‘keywords’? (e.g. ‘man of business’ → ‘businessman’ in late Modern English newspapers)

And, as part of the notion of context, it is worth considering the role of discourse genre in the emergence of a concept and in conceptual change. For instance, if it is the case that a concept emerges, not as a keyword, but in the form of an association of expressions that functions as a loose paraphrase, is this kind of process more likely to occur in a specific discourse genre than in general discourse? In other words, is it possible that technical or specialist discourses will be the locus of new concepts, concepts which might diffuse gradually into public and more general ones? (e.g. dogma, law, science → newpapers, narrative, etc.)

What we hope to do is to make our approach manifest and our results visual. For instance, the emergence of a concept might be envisaged as clusters of texts rising up on the terrain representing a certain feature. And the reminder that they might not just gradually change over time, rising and falling across the terrain, but there might instead be islands of certain features that appear in distant time periods, disparate genres, sub-genres. All of that can be identified by the computer, but we have to make sense of it as close readers afterwards.

References

Geeraerts, Dirk. 2010. Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: OUP.

Defining the content of a concept from below (Manifesto pt. 2 of 3)

This blog post features the second of three extracts from Susan Fitzmaurice’s paper on “Concepts and Conceptual Change in Linguistic DNA”. (See previous post.)

Before tackling the problem of actually defining the content of a concept ‘from below’, we need to imagine ourselves into the position of being able to recognize the emergence of material that is a candidate for being considered a concept. Let’s briefly consider the question of ‘when is a concept’; in other words, how will we recognize something that is relevant, resonant and important in historical, cultural and political terms for our periods of interest?

In a manner that is not trivial, we want our research process to perform the discovery work of an innocent reader, a reader who approaches a universe of discourse without an agenda, but with a will to discover what the text yields up as worthy of notice. This innocent reader is an ideal reader of course; as humans are pattern finders, pattern matchers and meaning makers, it is virtually impossible to imagine a process that is truly ab initio. Indeed, a situation in which the reader is not primed to notice specific features, characteristics or meanings by the cotext or broader context is rare indeed.

The aim is for our processes to imitate the intuitive, intelligent scanning that human readers perform as they survey the universe of discourse in which they are interested (literary and historical documents). We assume that readers gradually begin to notice patterns, perhaps prominent combinations or associations, patterns that appear in juxtaposition in some places and in connection in others (Divjak & Gries, 2012). The key process is the noticing in the text the formation of ideas that gather cohesion and content in linguistic expression. We hypothesize that in the process of noticing, the reader begins to attribute increasing weight to the meanings they locate in the text. One model for this hypothesis is the experience of the foreign language learner who reads a text with her attention drawn to the expressions she recognises and can construe.

The principal problem posed by our project is therefore to extract from the discourse stuff that we might be able to discern as potential concepts. In other words, we aim to identify a concept from the discourse inwards by inspecting the language instead of defining a concept from its content outward (i.e. starting with a term and discerning its meaning). If we move from the discourse inwards, the meanings that we attribute weight to may be implicit and distributed across a stretch of text, in a text window.

Extract from Richard Wolley's 'Present State of France' (1687)

Extract from ‘Present State of France….’ (Richard Wolley, 1687). (EEBO-TCP A27526)

That is, the meanings we notice as relevant might not be encapsulated in individual lexical items or character strings within a simple syntactic frame. This recognition requires that we resist the temptation to treat a word or a character string as coterminous with a concept. Indeed, the more we associate relevance with, say, the frequency of a particular word or character string in a sub-corpus, the less likely we are to be able to look beyond the word as an index of a concept. To remain open and receptive in the process of candidate concept recognition, we need to expand the range of the things we inspect on the one hand and the scope of the context we read on the other.

The linguistic material that will be relevant to the identification of a concept will consist of a combination or set of expressions in association that occur in a concentrated fashion in a stretch of text. Importantly, this material may consist of lexical items, phrases, sentences, and may be conveyed metaphorically as well as literally, and likely pragmatically (by implicature and invited inference) as well as semantically. If the linguistic elaboration (definition, paraphrase, implication) of a concept precedes the lexicalization of a concept, it is reasonable to assume that the appearance of regularly and frequently occurring expressions in degrees of proximity within a window will aid the identification of a concept.

The scope of the context in which a concept appears is likely to be greater than the phrase or sentence that is the context for the keyword that we customarily consider in collocation studies. This context is akin to the modern notion of the paragraph, or, the unit of discourse which conventionally treats a topic or subject with the commentary that makes up the content of the paragraph. The stretch of text relevant for the identification of conceptual material may thus amount to a paragraph, a page, or a short text.

The linguistic structure of a concept has been shown to be built both paradigmatically (via synonymy) and syntagmatically (via lexical associations, syntax, paraphrase). For our purposes, given that the task entails picking up clues to the construction of concepts from the linguistic material in the context, where ‘context’ is defined pretty broadly, paradigmatic relations are less likely to be salient than syntagmatic relations like paraphrase, vagueness and association, perhaps more than predictable relations like antonymy and polysemy.

See the final post in this Manifesto series.

References

 

Divjak, Dagmar & Gries, Stefan Th. (eds). 2012. Frequency effects in language learning and processing (Vol. 1). Berlin: De Gruyter