A corpus-based contrastive study of mental verbs

Abstract

In contrastive linguistics, the development of bilingual and multilingual corpora have provided new empirical data and has allowed linguists to focus attention on the syntagmatic axis and on the analysis of word co-occurrence patterns. Corpus linguistics has given new emphasis to the importance of the context in word meaning. When syntagmatic associations are taken into consideration together with paradigmatic ones, a finer-grained linguistic analysis and new insights into the comparison of languages can be obtained. The study presented here, in line with the current trend towards lexically oriented theories, approaches the interrelation between grammar and lexis, taking into account the interdependence between lexical choice and contextual patterns. The meaning of polysemous verbs is clearly related to their complementation patterns (Levin 1993, Poch and Verdaguer 1996, Faber and Mairal 1999) and the interface between syntax and semantics allows a coherent and systematic account of the differences in word meaning.