This corpus based investigation deals with the present-day usage of and the semantic relation between the two verbs rise and arise. Concordance lines containing various forms of the two verbs in question have been taken from six different (sub)corpora and were examined in view of their collocational and semantic characteristics. The basic aims were to investigate the nowadays status of the verbs rise and arise and whether they (still) can be regarded as synonyms. The results show that both verbs can sometimes be used synonymously. Their general semantic relation appeared to be near-synonymy. Furthermore, both verbs seem to have developed a semantic specialisation, which is regarded a counterargument for the thesis that the verb arise is on the verge of dying out.

affect, concreteness, corpus linguistics, cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, stereotype accuracy, national character stereotypes, semantic prosody / Increasing use of natural language corpora and methods from corpus and computational linguistics as a supplement to traditional modes of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities has been labeled the "text as data movement." Corpora afford greater scope in terms of sample sizes, time, geography, and subject populations, as well as the opportunity to ecologically validate theories by testing their predictions within behaviour which is not elicited by an experimenter. Herein, five projects are presented, each either exploiting or taking inspiration from natural language data to make novel contributions to a subject matter area in the psychological sciences, including social psychology and psycholinguistics. Additionally, each project incorporates notions of word meaning grounded in psycholinguistic and psychoevolutionary theory, either the affective or sensorimotor connotations of words. This thesis ends with a discussion of the necessity of taking both experimental and observational approaches, as well as the challenge of how to link natural language data to psychological constructs. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The internet and modern computers are changing how scientists study the mind. Instead of doing experiments within a laboratory, it is more and more common for cognitive scientists to observe patterns in online language use. These patterns in language use are then used to comment on how the mind works. Online language use is created by diverse people as they go about their lives. This is valuable for scientists studying the mind. Our experiments are often limited by how many people and which people do experiments. Sometimes, experiments can be misleading because people don't act in the real world like they do in a lab. This thesis has five studies, each using online language use to comment on some part of how the mind works. Also, each study involves how words make people feel, or whether a word refers to something you can see or touch. Studying real people as they communicate offers new perspectives on old ideas or unanswered questions.

Diskursprosodi och semantisk preferens är inneboende aspekter i språk, då inget ord existerar som en isolerad enhet så snart det är en del av en text. Syftet med denna studie var att kvantitativt undersöka August Strindbergs bruk av orden ’kvinna’ och ’man’. Materialet som låg till grund för studien utgjordes av trilogin Röda Rummet, Götiska Rummen och Svarta Fanor. För att göra det undersöktes ordens förekomst med avseende på frekvens, grad av emotionell laddning i sammansättningar, och distribution av lexikaliserade sammansättningar. Därutöver undersöktes kontexten för lemman kvinna och man, genom en kartläggning av diskursprosodi och semantisk preferens för kollokationerna för kvinna och man. Syftet var att kartlägga detta ur ett diakront perspektiv. Resultaten visade att män omtalas, i lemmaform, i större utsträckning än kvinnor i trilogin. Sammansättningar för man är oftast lexikaliserade, medan de för kvinna är det mycket mer sällan. Kvinnor färgas oftare negativt i sammansättningar med kvinna medan motsvarigheten för män nästan alltid är neutral i sin emotionella laddning. Kollokationsanalysen kunde inte säkert visa på Strindbergs attityder gentemot kvinnor och män. Mer data och djupare analysmetoder skulle behövas för en kartläggning av författarens attityd. / Discourse prosody and semantic preference are inherent aspects of language. As soon as a word becomes part of text, it seizes to exist as an isolated unit. The aim of this thesis was to study quantitatively the use of the lemmas woman and man, and the compound nouns containing them, in the works of August Strindberg. The material used consists of his novels The Red Room, Gothic Rooms and Black Banners. The occurrence of the two lemmas was observed with respect to frequency, the degree of emotional weight in compounds and the distribution of lexicalized compounds between women and men. Additionally, the context of lemmas was observed diachronically, through an analysis of discourse prosody and semantic preference of the collocations for woman and man. The results showed that the lemma man is mentioned more often than woman. Most compounds for man are lexicalized, while the opposite pertains to women. Compounds containing woman are more often negatively charged. Meanwhile, compounds containing man are predominantly neutral. The analysis of collocations for the lemmas was not able to map the author’s attitude accurately and more data and deeper methods of analysis are needed.

This paper analyses and discusses the present-day use of the noun bitch, as the term in contemporary usage seems to have started to deviate from the lexical definition. Traditionally considered an insult when applied to a woman, bitch has recently started being used as a self-imposed label rather than an applied one. Such a phenomenon indicates reappropriation, a negotiation of the meaning and semantics of a word. The purpose of this study is to investigate the origin and semantics of the term, as well as its historical usage and developments. Of particular interest and significance regarding the semantic development of bitch are social and extra-linguistic factors such as political movements, as will be evident from the results presented. Additionally, the present-day use of the term is analysed using lexical semantics and corpus linguistics, with the adjective collocates of the term retrieved from two corpora. Further, contemporary music lyrics are quoted and analysed to lend further support to the corpus findings regarding the present-day use, as well as the indicated semantic change and reappropriation. The results indicate that the term bitch is undergoing a reappropriation and is currently used both as a derogatory and self-empowering term. It is hoped that this paper will give insight to the phenomenon of reappropriation and the connection between social and linguistic change, as well as the importance of context in determining the meaning of a term.

本研究探討漢語動補結構在語料庫中的使用情況，透過語料庫研究方法，辨析動詞「用X」及「弄X」與動補結構的關係，並探究動補結構中「用X」及「弄X」相互替代的使用現象，最後由詞彙語意及語義韻律的角度提出說明。 本研究利用中文詞彙網路（Chinese Wordnet）、《平衡語料庫》（Sinica Corpus 4.0）以及《批踢踢語料庫》（PTT Corpus），觀察語料庫中動詞「用」、動詞「弄」、動補結構「用X」及動補結構「弄X」的語料分布，以及語料與動詞義項的互動情況。研究發現，在語料庫中，動詞「用」的主要語義是「利用特定對象的特定功能」，而動詞「弄」的主要語義則是以「造成特定結果」和「代動詞，做」，且在語料庫中，「用X」結構的分布集中、「弄X」分布廣泛。研究亦發現，《平衡語料庫》中的動補結構語料相對來說較《批踢踢語料庫》中的語料組合穩定，此一現象是由於不同語料庫中的語料結合緊密程度不同所致。 藉由動詞代換檢測及動詞義項的比對，可知在動結式動補結構這個特定的環境下，動詞「用」和「弄」顯示了與近義詞相似的特質，甚至展現出詞彙語意關係中的上下位（hyponymy）或者蘊含關係（entailment）。研究最後透過觀察「用X」和「弄X」動補結構的語義韻律，探究動詞「用」和「弄」在動詞義項以外的異同之處，並發現語料庫中的動補結構「用X」及「弄X」在語義韻律的分布上有相似的表現。 / This paper aims to explore the cause of the mutual substitution of verbs yòng(用) and nòng(弄) in verb-complement structure in Taiwan Mandarin. The study adopts a semantic corpus-based approach to examine this phenomenon. To find out the resemblance of meanings shared by the verbs yòng and nòng, this study first retrieved their senses by using Chinese Wordnet and analyzed the sentences from the Sinica Corpus. Three hundred instances of yòng and 240 instances for nòng were analyzed and classified according to their corresponding verb senses. The results showed that yòng and nòng both contain the concept of “utilize certain tool/method/means to fulfill particular purposes”, proving that they could possibly form a synonymous set of verb. The analysis then focused on the behavior of the verbs in verb-complement structures. The verb-complement structures of yòng and nòng from the Sinica Corpus and the PTT Corpus were further inspected: 14 entries of ‘yòng-complement’ (179 instances) and 32 entries of ‘nòng-complement’ (157 instances) were found in Sinica Corpus, while 21 entries of ‘yòng-complement’ (82 instances) and 97 entries of ‘nòng-complement’ (781 instances) were found in the PTT Corpus. The distributions showed that the verb-complement structures in Sinica Corpus were relatively more stable than those in the PTT Corpus, and the phenomenon was inferred to be caused by the distinct degree of the structure combination. In order to examine the possibility of the mutual substitution of yòng and nòng, a verb-substitution test was conducted. The results were further examined by comparing with the verb-complement structures found in the PTT Corpus. In addition, introspective survey of native speakers of Mandarin was also added to re-confirm the substitution test result. Lastly, the verb senses and the semantic prosody of the verb-complement structures were also analyzed. The study showed that the verbs yòng and nòng have shared senses when they appear in resultive verb-complement structures, and the mutual substitution patterns were also discovered. As for the analysis of semantic prosody of the verb-complement structures, the result showed that yòng-complement and nòng-complement have identical distribution tendency: structures with neutral semantic prosody occupied the greatest proportion, followed by the negative ones and the positive ones, which also proved the synonymous relationship between the verbs yòng and nòng in the verb-complement structures.

It has been suggested that the semantics of some metaphoricalmotion constructions is related to the deixis of the verbs involved. In accordance with the directions of movement, metaphorical go is said to be associated with deterioration ( go rotten etc.) and metaphorical come – with improvement ( come true etc (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 1174). The paper at hand aims at empirically testing this assumption from a usage-based construction grammar perspective. It analyses metaphorical-motion constructions from the BNC whose verb-slot is filled by the motion verbs go , come and run followed by an adjective, using the methods of collostruction analysis (cf. Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004a). On the basis of the quantitative analyses carried out, the semantic preferences of the three verbs are determined, compared and related to the deictic aspects involved in the verb meanings. The verb run was selected as a ‘control verb’, since it does not exhibit any deictic aspect of meaning. All three verb constructions are found to exhibit semantic preferences, and, since deixis is absent in run , other aspects are discussed which may motivate such associations. Finally, the results of the data analyses are inspected for what they can say about the emergence of semantic prosodies ‘colouring’ the verbs in the respective constructions.

Self-help counselling is an important industry that not only influences its immediate users’ behavior but also society and social behaviors more generally. Since New Ageis a main branch of self-help, and since positivity is a dominant concept in (New Age) self-help discourse, it is worth analyzing how positivity might be achieved in terms of language use. The present study investigates whether the adjectives in a couple of New Age publications contribute to communicating positivity and, if yes, how. What adjectives are used and how can they be categorized in terms of positive, negative, neutral or undetermined connotations as well as semantic prosody? The findings support the hypothesis that the use of “positive adjectives” (Rozin, Berman & Royzman, 2010, p. 536) is what helps to make New Age self-help books convey a positive spirit.