A Cognitive Analysis of English Dimensional Terms

Suzanne Kemmer
Rice University

 

 

Dimensional terms are words that describe extent along various dimensions of objects in space; for example the English adjectives deep/shallow, wide/narrow, and thick/thin. Using the spoken subcorpus of the British National Corpus, a very large corpus of English, I provide a cognitive analysis of the lexical semantics of a set of English dimensional terms. First the relation of dimensional terms to gradable adjectives in general is laid out, and the relevance of markedness to their conceptual semantics is described. The main analysis is an investigation of collocate patterns and their frequencies, yielding generalizations about various senses of the target items and their various levels of entrenchment in the lexical network. I then relate the terms analyzed to general cognitive models of shape and space. I hypothesize that the semantics of dimensional terms is linked to specific experiential frames extracted by speakers from linguistic and accompanying non-linguistic experience.