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The Lexical Semantics of Imaginings—A Corpus-Based Analysis
Abstract
In this paper, I propose a decompositional lexical semantic analysis of the plural noun imaginings. The data for this study are sourced from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), and as analytical framework an object-oriented semantics based on the Unified Eventity Representation (UER) is deployed. After presenting the background to this study and introducing the data and methods, I discuss the results of the corpus data analyses. Frequencies across genres and decades, collocated adjectives and their evaluative strength, coordinated nouns, nominal genitives preceding the target word, and prepositional phrases embedded in the target word’s noun phrase are screened for their contribution to the meaning specification. The results feed into the development of a lexical semantic description for imaginings, and substantiate that the semantics of imaginings—and its corresponding verb imagine—are closely related to that of remember.
How to Cite:
Schalley, A.C., 2020. The Lexical Semantics of Imaginings—A Corpus-Based Analysis. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 19(4), pp.218–248. DOI: http://doi.org/10.35360/njes.609
Published on
22 Nov 2020.
Peer Reviewed
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