TY - JOUR A1 - Kranich, Svenja T1 - Functional layering and the English progressive JF - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences N2 - In this article, it will be argued that the concept of functional layering - an extension of Hopper's (1991) concept of layering - can be fruitfully applied to understand the mechanisms behind the sometimes large and messy looking synchronic picture of diverse meanings which one and the same construction can fulfill at a particular point in time. The concept will be used to account for the meaning spectrum of the present-day English progressive, which, it will be argued, no monosemic approach to date can account for. Taking a look at the diachrony of the construction will help to reveal that the various "exceptions" found in the use of the progressive can be understood as reflections of different stages in its development. Older, less grammaticalized or less well-defined usage patterns thus often survive in certain restricted niches next to the newer, more grammaticalized or more clear-cut functions, representing different diachronic layers. In addition to this diachronic motivation for synchronic meaning variety, the article will also address the crucial question of how a present-day hearer of a progressive form is able to decode the specific meaning intended by the speaker based on contextual clues. The article ends with some suggestions for further applications of the concept of functional layering. KW - grammaticalization KW - subjectification KW - semantic change KW - the English progressive construction KW - polysemy Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2013-0001 SN - 0024-3949 VL - 51 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 32 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lopukhina, Anastasiya A1 - Laurinavichyute, Anna A1 - Lopukhin, Konstantin A1 - Dragoy, Olga V. T1 - The Mental Representation of Polysemy across Word Classes JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Experimental studies on polysemy have come to contradictory conclusions on whether words with multiple senses are stored as separate or shared mental representations. The present study examined the semantic relatedness and semantic similarity of literal and non-literal (metonymic and metaphorical) senses of three word classes: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Two methods were used: a psycholinguistic experiment and a distributional analysis of corpus data. In the experiment, participants were presented with 6-12 short phrases containing a polysemous word in literal, metonymic, or metaphorical senses and were asked to classify them so that phrases with the same perceived sense were grouped together. To investigate the impact of professional background on their decisions, participants were controlled for linguistic vs. non-linguistic education. For nouns and verbs, all participants preferred to group together phrases with literal and metonymic senses, but not any other pairs of senses. For adjectives, two pairs of senses were often grouped together: literal with metonymic, and metonymic with metaphorical. Participants with a linguistic background were more accurate than participants with non-linguistic backgrounds, although both groups shared principal patterns of sense classification. For the distributional analysis of corpus data, we used a semantic vector approach to quantify the similarity of phrases with literal, metonymic, and metaphorical senses in the corpora. We found that phrases with literal and metonymic senses had the highest degree of similarity for the three word classes, and that metonymic and metaphorical senses of adjectives had the highest degree of similarity among all word classes. These findings are in line with the experimental results. Overall, the results suggest that the mental representation of a polysemous word depends on its word class. In nouns and verbs, literal and metonymic senses are stored together, while metaphorical senses are stored separately; in adjectives, metonymic senses significantly overlap with both literal and metaphorical senses. KW - polysemy KW - lexical representation KW - metaphor KW - metonymy KW - semantic vectors KW - word classes Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00192 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 9 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER -