Chapter published in:
Perception Metaphors
Edited by Laura J. Speed, Carolyn O'Meara, Lila San Roque and Asifa Majid
[Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 19] 2019
► pp. 231–252

Polysemy of the Estonian perception verb nägema ‘to see’

This paper focuses on the polysemy of the Estonian perception verb nägema ‘to see’. The aim of the paper is to analyse polysemy using two different methods; and to show how and why the results of the two methods differ. The methods used are a sorting task and a behavioural profile analysis. Hierarchical cluster analysis is used to show which senses of nägema are more similar to each other based on each method, and why. The results show that the main differences stem from the fact that important elements of meaning for the language user are not necessarily objectively annotatable in the corpus. It is argued, however, that both experimental as well as corpus-based methods are valuable tools for polysemy research.
Keywords: Estonian, perception verbs, polysemy, sorting task, behavioural profile
Published online: 21 February 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/celcr.19.12pro
References

Corpus

BCE = Balanced Corpus of Estonian
Retrieved from http://​www​.cl​.ut​.ee​/korpused​/grammatikakorpus/

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