Testing the hypothesis
Résumé
This study has two aims: to show the methodological possibility of doing purely subjective semantic research quantitatively and to demonstrate theoretically that discreet senses and discreet linguistic forms do not exist. On the methodological front, it argues that, with due caution and statistical modelling, subjective semantic characteristics, such as affect and cause, can be successfully employed in corpusdriven research. The theoretical implications show that we cannot treat lexical senses as discreet categories and that the semasiological - onomasiological and polysemy - synonymy distinctions are not tenable and must be replaced with a more multidimensional and variable conception of semantic structure. The case study examines a sample of 650 occurrences of the lexeme bother in British and American English. The occurrences are manually analysed for a range of formal and semantic features. The exploratory multivariate technique Correspondence Analysis is used to indentify three basic senses relative to formal variation and subjective usage-features. Two of these sense clusters are then verified using Logistic Regression Analysis. The analysis demonstrates a statistically significant difference between the two senses and indentifies which of the semantic features are most important in distinguishing the uses. The statistical model is powerful and its predictive strength serves as further verification of the accuracy of the semantic analysis.
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