An Experimental Analysis of the Affective Dimensions of Deep Vocabulary
Knowledge Used in Inferring the Meaning of Words in Context
ROBERTA CORRIGAN
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
This paper examines an under-studied component of deep vocabulary knowledge, affective meaning, which is used to convey attitudes. Two affective dimensions, evaluation and potency, are examined to determine whether they influence the vocabulary choices of native speakers of American-English in describing interpersonal interactions. In Experiment 1, 44 college students read sentences containing verbs that varied in class (experiencer or action), evaluation (positive or negative), and potency (high or low). These students were asked to choose adjectives to describe nouns filling the sentence thematic roles. In Experiment 2, 30 students chose sentence verbs, given sentences containing agents or stimuli and patients or experiencers with different levels of evaluation and potency. Students systematically used the evaluation and potency of the words to constrain their vocabulary choices. Results suggest that deep vocabulary knowledge includes subtle, affective aspects of word meaning, at least in some knowledge domains. These affective components are measurable, but they have not been systematically incorporated into assessment instruments that tap vocabulary depth. Affective components of vocabulary deserve more systematic attention in applied linguistics, because vocabulary depth is important for understanding the nature of vocabulary networks and for its contribution to proficiency in advanced L2 learners.
INTRODUCTION
Knowing a word is not an all-or-none proposition; instead, people have only partial knowledge of many words (e.g. Shore and Kempe 1999). Depth, (quality or richness) of vocabulary knowledge involves how well a person knows a word, in contrast to breadth of vocabulary knowledge which involves how many words are known. Advanced vocabulary knowledge involves being able to use a word in novel contexts and also being able to use it to help construct meaning from text (Nagy and Scott 2000). Knowledge of lexical organization is critical for deep vocabulary knowledge because words that have more complicated sets of connections to other words ‘will tend to be more deeply known than words which are linked more tenuously to other words’ (Meara and Wolter 2004: 90). Advanced vocabulary knowledge also
involves understanding the affect or attitude conveyed by different word choices (Ordo´n˜ez et al. 2002; Qian 1999).1
A widely used task that may tap deep vocabulary knowledge in both L1 and L2 is the cloze procedure, where students are given an incomplete sentence and asked to choose an appropriate word to complete it (Read 2000). Even where context is relatively unconstrained (Shore and Kempe 1999), skilled readers can easily use sentence context to fill in one or more appropriate words in an incomplete sentence. Consider, for example, the following item:
(1) John is a _____ person. Ted is a _____ person. John admired Ted.
Successful completion of this task involves constructing word meanings in context by using syntactic and schematic knowledge,2 both for missing words and for words in the surrounding text (Nagy 1997). In (1), readers must infer that appropriate completions are adjectives and that the person described by the sentence must possess the attribute described by the adjective. The words to be filled in relate to readers’ schemas about admiring—what are typical characteristics of people who admire and those who are admired? Readers use all this contextual information to decide which words are semantically related to the sentence context and which words are not. Semantic relatedness involves many aspects of the meaning of the chosen vocabulary, including the knowledge that admiring is typically evaluated positively, as are individuals who are admired. It is this affective aspect of word meaning that is the focus of this paper. Specifically, word choices in the knowledge domain of interpersonal events are studied in college students who are native speakers of American-English. After reading sentences describing interactions between two individuals, students chose either adjectives (Experiment 1) or verbs (Experiment 2) to fill in missing slots in the sentences. Both studies examined whether students used their implicit knowledge of words’ affective dimensions in their choices.
BACKGROUND
Although the background for this paper comes from several disciplines and theoretical perspectives, my personal orientation is cognitive-psychological.
I share with cognitive linguists the assumption that meaning is not static, but is a dynamic construction process where a listener accesses conceptual knowledge to interpret language in particular contexts (see Evans et al.
forthcoming for a review). An individual’s mental representations develop either through direct perceptual and emotional experience (grounded cognition) or via linguistic information that is received or produced, with interconnections established via association (Zwaan and Madden 2005).
Because language transmits cultural knowledge, an individual’s cognitive
schemas will represent both individually experienced knowledge and shared social knowledge (Stubbs 2001a).3
Affective meaning
Lyons (1977: 176) defined a word’s connotation as an ‘emotive or affective component additional to its central meaning.’ In contrast, other linguists have shown that affective meanings of words can be central to their interpretations. For example, evaluation is the primary task for some adjectives, for example ‘splendid’ (Thompson and Hunston 2000), while other adjectives indicate evaluation because they are ‘subjective and value-laden,’ for example ‘beautiful’ or ‘important’ (Hunston and Sinclair 2000: 83). Verbs such as ‘admire’ or ‘love’ that describe the emotional state of an experiencer are also words used primarily to convey affective information (Corrigan 2002).
The most extensive early psychological work on individuals’ interpretations of the affective information conveyed by words was conducted by Osgood and his colleagues (Osgood et al. 1957, 1975). In order to describe the structure of semantic space, they factor analyzed people’s ratings of many nouns and verbs on Likert scales that had bipolar adjectives (such as strong–
weak or good–bad) as their endpoints. Based on ratings from individuals in more than two dozen cultures, they identified three universal dimensions that accounted for much of the variance: evaluation, potency, and activity.
Evaluation is how good or bad something is, that is, whether the entity has people’s approval or disapproval. Potency is a measure of ‘an entity’s impact in terms of being big versus little, powerful versus powerless, consequential versus immaterial’ (Heise 2002: 37). Activity is how lively or quiet something is. Mean ratings for particular words can be viewed as measures of language communities’ prototypical affective responses to those items (Heise 2002).
Corpus linguists in the Neo-Firthean tradition (e.g. Louw 1993; Sinclair 1991; Stubbs 2001b) have found that affective meaning can extend over segments of text larger than an orthographic word. ‘Semantic prosody’ refers to the fact that words can come to have negative or positive affective associations based on words with which they frequently co-occur (Partington 1998). To my knowledge, this literature has not investigated how the degree of evaluation of the surrounding text can influence word meaning, nor have they examined the influence of Osgood’s second dimension of meaning, potency.
Vocabulary networks
Cognitive linguists claim that semantic structure is encyclopedic, with lexical concepts accessing networks of knowledge that are related to them (Evans et al. forthcoming). Cognitive psychologists have attempted to model the
organization of these networks. Although, their exact structure remains under investigation (see Stevenson and Merlo 2002 for a review), all models agree that ‘features or properties of a concept are a critical part of that concept’s semantic structure’ (Hutchinson 2003: 786).
Directly relevant to the issue of how adjectives are interrelated in vocabulary networks via evaluation and potency, Kamps and Marx (2002) examined the WordNet lexical database (Fellbaum 1998; Miller 2005) and computed measures of semantic distance between all adjectives in the database and the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (evaluation) or ‘strong’ and ‘weak’
(potency). They found a cluster of about 5,400 words (25 percent of the adjectives in the database) that carried affective meaning involving evaluation and potency, attesting to the importance of two of Osgood’s dimensions of meaning.
Psychological models of semantic space such as Hyperspace Analog to Language, HAL (Burgess and Lund 2000), can be viewed as modern extensions of Osgood’s work. Rather than factor-analyzing rater judgments to generate semantic space, HAL is a computer simulation of human memory that generates representations by tracking lexical co-occurrences in pieces of text (pairs, triplets, quadruplets, etc. up to ten words in length) over a 320 million word corpus of written text. Words that appear in similar contexts are represented more closely in semantic space. Affective meaning is not peripheral to central meaning but is one aspect of a multidimensional system of meaning (Burgess and Lund 1997a). Words that share more dimensions are likely to be closer in semantic space than those that share fewer. In HAL, words that share complex thematic relations can be semantically related because they share dimensions of meaning. One noun may be more closely related than another to a given verb because one is a more typical agent for a given action. For example, ‘soup’ and ‘cooked’
are closer in semantic space than ‘soup’ and ‘bubbled’ (Burgess and Lund 1997b).
Verbs are a critical part of language because they ‘constrain and interrelate the entities mentioned in sentences’ (Weimer-Hastings et al. 1998). Verbs activate schemas for events that include information about the types of entities that typically participate in them (McRae et al. 1997; Ferretti et al.
2001). McRae et al. (1997) showed that experimental participants could list features for agents or patients associated with particular verbs. For example, someone who accuses others had features such as ‘is mean’ and
‘is judgemental.’ Ferretti et al. (2001) showed that verbs activate typical agents in memory (e.g. ‘entertaining’ activates ‘comedian’) and patients (e.g. ‘convicting’ activates ‘criminal’). Furthermore, features associated with typical thematic roles were also activated (e.g. ‘convicting’ activated ‘guilty,’
which is a characteristic of criminals). McRae et al. (2005) found that nouns denoting entities activate events in which they typically play roles (as agents, patients, instruments, or locations). For example, ‘burglar’ is linked to ‘steal’;
‘lawn’ is linked to ‘mow.’
In sum, the literature suggests that when vocabulary items are read in context, features common to the words and their surrounding linguistic context are accessed in memory. Words activate other words that have overlapping features, both within and across form classes. The stimuli used in the current study (see example 1) can be viewed as similar to word association tasks under development by Meara and his colleagues (Meara and Schur 2002; Meara and Wolter 2004) where people are asked to recognize word associates from a list rather than generating them in an unconstrained fashion. In the current study, students are given lists of verbs or adjectives and asked to choose verbs that are associated with adjectives in the target sentences or to choose adjectives that are associated with verbs.
Effects of domain knowledge
Further complicating the issue of how vocabulary networks are organized is the finding that different types of features may be particularly important in different knowledge domains. Words that carry affective meaning may not be equally distributed among all domains of knowledge. For example, Schmitt (2000) notes that words from technical domains are less likely to carry much affective weight (e.g. ‘building,’ ‘vehicle,’ ‘transmission,’ ‘orbit’).
In the current study, vocabulary items were chosen from the domain of interpersonal interactions because both the verbs used to describe such interactions and the adjectives used to describe the people who interact have been widely studied in both the social psychology literature (specifically in the areas of attribution theory and impression formation) and psycholinguistic literature (most commonly in examining anaphora resolution). The interpersonal domain contains verbs that describe mental or behavioral interactions between two people and adjectives that describe properties of people (e.g. Brown and Fish 1983; Semin and Fiedler 1988).4
In the interpersonal domain, evaluation and potency have been identified as the major factors forming the basis for people’s trait judgments (Vonk 1996) and are therefore the dimensions studied in the current research.
Individuals and their behaviors can be described in terms of their evaluation and potency profiles. For example, individuals in American culture typically judge a ‘child’ as someone who is good, but impotent, while they judge a ‘gangster’ as someone who is bad and potent (Heise 2002). In a recent series of experiments, Corrigan (2001, 2002) found that experimental participants produced different attributions about who was responsible for an interpersonal interaction described in sentences depending upon the evaluation and potency of vocabulary in the sentences. Both verbs describing the interactions and adjectives describing individuals who were interacting varied in their implicit evaluation and potency. Generally, attributions were made to sentence nouns whose adjectives matched the verbs in evaluation;
the relative potency of nouns influenced the magnitude of attributions.
While it is clear from this work that people use evaluation and potency in describing why people behave as they do, it is not clear whether evaluation and potency will influence word choices where people are not explicitly directed to focus on causal attributions.
The verbs used in Corrigan (2002) were either verbs of psychological state or general action verbs that can sometimes be used to describe interpersonal interactions. Psychological state verbs take two arguments called the experiencer and the stimulus (or, alternatively, theme, cause, object, or target of emotion; Levin 1993). The stimulus causes a change in psychological state of the experiencer. In sentences containing experiencer- stimulus verbs (e.g. ‘admire’), the experiencer occurs in subject position in an active-voice sentence, while in active-voice sentences containing stimulus- experiencer verbs (e.g. ‘amuse’), the experiencer occurs in object position.
Research examining verbs involving interpersonal interactions has often been described as studying ‘implicit verb causality,’ because it has been shown that attributions about who caused an interpersonal situation are usually biased by different verbs either toward the sentence stimulus or agent (Corrigan 2001; Brown and Fish 1983; Garvey and Caramazza 1974).
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
In sum, there is evidence from work with large scale corpora that the evaluative and, to a lesser extent, the potency dimensions identified by Osgood are important in the overall structure of semantic space and also for identifying the tone of a text. There is evidence that individual speakers use these dimensions in making judgments about causal attributions. But there is currently no evidence that they use these dimensions in differentiat- ing among words within the same semantic domain when choosing vocabulary. The current studies examine the expectations of college students who are native speakers of American-English as to which words involving interpersonal events and characteristics are likely to occur given particular linguistic contexts. The research extends previous work on understanding of vocabulary items by examining the effect of affective dimensions. The research asks whether students’ implicit knowledge of the evaluation and potency of the other words in a sentence help constrain their word choices in a modified cloze task. In the first experiment described in this paper, participants are asked to choose adjectives that they think best characterize two, same-gender, proper nouns in sentence subject and object position, given a particular verb. The second experiment asks participants to choose verbs given nouns that are described by particular adjectives.
The following sets of specific research questions were examined in Experiment 1. The first set involves evaluation and the second involves potency.
1 a. Will students use implicit information that a verb is positive or negative to choose adjectives that differ in evaluation to label nouns filling different thematic roles in the same sentence or will choice of words be entirely idiosyncratic?
b. Will the degree of evaluation of the verb influence the evaluation of the adjectives chosen or will degree of evaluation be unrelated to adjective choice?
c. Will verb class (action vs. experiencer) influence the evaluation of the adjectives chosen?
2 a. Will students use implicit information that a verb is high or low in potency to choose adjectives differing in potency to label nouns filling different thematic roles in the same sentence or will potency be irrelevant to their choices?
b. Will the degree of potency of verbs have an influence on potency of the chosen adjectives?
c. Will verb class influence the potency of the adjectives that are chosen?
EXPERIMENT 1 Participants
Twenty-two undergraduate junior and senior students from Introduction to Educational Psychology classes in a large, Midwestern university in the United States rated words used to design the stimulus materials for both Experiments. Forty-four students who had not participated in the rating exercise participated in the main experiment. All students received course credit or extra credit for participating.
Materials
Prior to the experiment, 48 adjective pairs (taken from McRae et al. 1997 and Corrigan 2002) that could be used to describe characteristics of people were rated as to their evaluation and potency.5 Rating scales were 9-point scales with 4 at the negative end of the scale being very bad (evaluation) or very weak (potency) and þ4 at the positive end being very good (evaluation) or very strong/powerful (potency). Zero was the neutral midpoint of the scale. To choose stimuli for the current study, word pairs from the original pool that described more transitory behaviors or states (‘loud,’ ‘screaming’) were eliminated. Twelve adjective pairs were selected from the remaining pairs such that three were high in both evaluation and potency, three were high in evaluation and low in potency, three were low in both evaluation and potency, and three were low in evaluation and high in potency.6 Adjective pairs and their mean evaluation and potency ratings are shown in Table 1.
Thirty-two verbs that had been rated on evaluation and potency in previous experiments (Corrigan 2002) were paired with two same-gender proper names (e.g. Karen, Susan) to form sentences such as ‘Karen’ trusts
‘Susan.’ The verbs are a sample of a set originally studied by Semin and Fiedler (1988), who extracted the entire population of interpersonal terms from a small English dictionary. The expanded set of 102 state verbs and 2,487 action verbs is available on the Internet General Inquirer web site (2005).7 For the sample used in the current study, there were two sets of materials so that each verb was paired with male names in one set and female names in the other. Verbs varied in evaluation and potency, with eight positive/potent verbs; eight positive/non-potent verbs; eight negative/
potent verbs, and eight negative/non-potent verbs. Half the verbs were experiencer verbs and half were action verbs. Half of the experiencer verbs (ES verbs) were those where the thematic role of experiencer occupied the sentence subject position of the active-voice sentence and half were verbs
Table 1: Mean evaluation and potency ratings of adjectives, Experiments 1 and 2
Adjective combination Mean evaluation Mean potency
Positive/Potent
daring, courageous 2.24 2.63
sociable, confident 3.10 2.33
honest, forceful 1.38 2.14
Category mean: 2.24 2.36
Positive/Non-potent
polite, timid 1.05 .65
sensitive, inhibited 1.29 .14
young, inexperienced .15 1.24
Category mean: .83 .68
Negative/Potent
mean, devious 3.14 1.09
ruthless, sadistic 2.91 1.19
selfish, domineering 2.43 .91
Category mean: 2.83 1.07
Negative/Non-potent
vulnerable, submissive 1.48 1.86
nervous, timid 1.00 1.81
dishonest, lazy 3.09 1.43
Category mean: 1.86 1.70
Overall: .40 .26
(SE verbs) where the thematic role of experiencer occupied the object position in the active-voice sentence. Verbs and their evaluation and potency ratings are shown in Table 2.
The materials were arranged into adjective-choice booklets that had a list of the 12 adjective pairs (without the evaluation and potency ratings) arranged in random order on their first pages. Following the adjectives were written instructions to choose the pair that best described the interactants in the events described by the sentences. The sentences followed, with 6–9 sentences per page. Pages were randomized across booklets.
Procedure
Students were tested in small groups of 2–15. Half of the students saw each set of sentences (with the same verb combined with two male or two female names across sets). The entire procedure took approximately 45 minutes.
Students were instructed to imagine a typical event described by each of the listed sentences. They were told to choose one of 12 adjective pairs that they thought would be the BEST descriptor for each of the nouns in the sentence. Participants were then given an example test item as follows:
(2) John hit Ted.
Adjectives chosen to describe John: ruthless, sadistic Adjectives chosen to describe Ted: sensitive, inhibited
Students were also told that they might have chosen different descriptors and that there were no right or wrong answers.
Results
The first dependent variable was calculated by averaging evaluation scores of the adjective pairs chosen to describe sentence thematic roles for each of the four verbs falling into the same overall verb class (experiencer or action) and evaluation/potency category. For example, ‘fascinate,’ ‘forgive,’ ‘admire,’ and
‘trust’ are all positive/potent experiencer verbs and hence the adjective pairs used with them were averaged to yield a positive/potent experiencer verb score. In this and all subsequent analyses for this experiment, adjectives were coded by thematic role rather than grammatical role. That is, the stimulus for an active-voice sentence with an ES verb is the sentence object, while for an SE verb it is the sentence subject. The second independent variable was calculated by averaging potency scores for the chosen adjective pairs in the same manner as the evaluation scores. Proportion of variance accounted for, eta2, is reported only for the highest level interactions. All statistics reported in this section are significant at p 5 .05 or better.
The first two research questions asked if adjective choice would be influenced by the evaluation and class of the verb. Adjective evaluation scores were analyzed in a 2 (verb evaluation: positive or negative) 2
Table 2: Mean evaluation and potency ratings for verbs, Experiments 1 and 2
Verbs Verb class, Evaluation/Potency category Evaluation Potency
Experiencer, Positive/Potent
fascinate (SE) 2.33 2.06
forgive (SE) 3.11 1.72
admire (ES) 2.94 2.17
trust (ES) 3.28 1.94
Category mean: 2.92 1.97
Experiencer, Positive/Non-potent
amuse (SE) 2.50 .61
charm (SE) 2.06 .56
enjoy (ES) 3.06 .50
notice (ES) .89 –.39
Category mean: 2.13 .32
Experiencer, Negative/Potent
threaten (SE) –3.17 1.78
infuriate (SE) –2.06 1.71
loathe (ES) –2.18 2.06
dread (ES) –3.11 1.67
Category mean: –2.63 1.81
Experiencer, Negative/Non-potent
annoy (SE) –2.28 .67
disappoint (SE) –2.17 .44
pity (ES) –1.33 .22
misinterpret (ES) –1.50 –.50
Category mean: –1.82 .21
Action, Positive/Potent
encourage 3.09 2.04
protect 3.03 2.30
praise 3.03 2.30
correct 1.41 .92
Category mean: 2.64 1.91
Action, Positive/Non-potent
telephone .97 –.91
hold 1.25 .30
discuss 1.34 –.09
pick up .69 –.44
Category mean: 1.06 –.29
(continued)
(verb class: experiencer or action) 2 (thematic role: agent/stimulus or patient/experiencer) ANOVA. All factors were within participants. The main effects of verb evaluation, F(1,43) ¼ 629.27, MS error ¼ .44, verb class, F(1,43) ¼ 12.36, MS error ¼ .41, and thematic role, F(1,43) ¼ 16.46, MS error ¼ .28, were subsumed by the verb class by thematic role interaction, F(1,43) ¼ 32.69, MS error ¼ .56, eta2¼.43 and the verb evaluation thematic role interaction, F(1,43) ¼ 292.42, MS error ¼ .38, eta2¼.87. The verb evaluation thematic role interaction shown in Figure 1 strongly supports the first hypothesis. Sentence agents/stimuli (for sentences with action and experiencer verbs, respectively) were positive for positive verbs and negative for negative verbs. Agents/stimuli were more positive than were patients/
experiencers in sentences depicting positive events and were more negative than patients/experiencers in sentences depicting negative events.
The second research questions asked how the potency of adjective pairs chosen to fill sentence thematic roles would relate to the potency and class of the verbs. Mean adjective potency scores served as the dependent measure for a 2 (potency: potent vs. non-potent) 2 (verb class: experiencer or action) 2 (thematic role: agent/stimulus vs. patient/experiencer). All factors were within participants. The main effects of verb potency, F(1,43) ¼ 7.24, MS error ¼ .21, verb class, F(1,43) ¼ 30.67, MS error ¼ .21, thematic role, F(1,43) ¼ 482.38, MS error ¼ .27, verb potency thematic role, F(1,43) ¼ 39.32, MS error ¼ .33, and verb class thematic role F(1,43) ¼ 72.18, MS error ¼ .42 were subsumed by the verb potency verb class thematic role interaction, F(1,43) ¼ 33.57, MS error ¼ .25, eta2¼.44.
The interaction is shown in Figure 2.
Table 2: Continued
Verbs Verb class, Evaluation/Potency category Evaluation Potency
Action, Negative/Potent
betray –2.88 2.09
harass –3.09 2.00
punish –2.22 1.56
blame –2.88 1.62
Category mean: –2.77 1.82
Action, Negative/Non-potent
tap –.46 –.31
carry .66 –.57
pull –.16 –.04
avoid –1.03 –.26
Category mean: –.25 –.30
Note: ES ¼ Experiencer-Stimulus, SE ¼ Stimulus Experiencer.
Participants generally chose adjectives that were more potent for sentence agents than for patients in sentences with action verbs and more potent adjectives for sentence stimuli in sentences with potent, experiencer verbs.
The exception to this general trend occurred in sentences with non-potent experiencer verbs, where adjectives chosen to describe stimuli and experiencers did not differ in potency.
Discussion
Results of the adjective choice task in Experiment 1 suggest that when students encounter a sentence such as ‘Ted defies John,’ they do not read
‘Ted’ and ‘John’ as neutral, but assign characteristics to them based partially on the verb and partially on characteristics typical of agents, patients, experiencers, and stimuli. Skilled first language users showed strong preferences for assigning adjectives to entities that matched verbs in evaluative valence and for assigning adjectives that were less positive or less negative than experiencers or patients in the same sentences. College students chose adjectives to describe agents and stimuli that were higher
Negative Positive
Verb evaluation
−2
−1 0 1 2
Adjective evaluation
Patient/experiencer Agent/stimulus Thematic role
Mean adjective evaluation
Note: Mean adjective evaluation is the mean evaluation (.40) for the entire set of adjective pairs that students could choose among
Figure 1: Mean evaluation of adjectives chosen to fill each thematic role for
positive and negative verbs, Experiment 1
in potency than adjectives they chose to describe patients or experiencers, except where sentences contained non-potent, experiencer verbs, in which case the students chose experiencers and stimuli that were equivalent in potency.
In the first experiment, college students chose descriptors for sentence nouns based on information contained in the verb. In a similar manner
Potent Non-potent Verb potency
Potent Non-potent Verb potency
−1.0
−0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5
Mean adjective potencyMean adjective potency
Patient Agent Thematic role
Mean adjective potency
Experiencer verbs
−1.0
−0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5
Stimulus Experiencer Thematic role
Mean adjective potency
Note: Mean adjective potency is the mean potency (.26) for the entire set of available adjective pairs
Figure 2: Mean potency of adjectives chosen to fill each thematic role for potent
and non-potent experiencer and action verbs, Experiment 1
to Experiment 1, Experiment 2 asks if the evaluation and potency of adjective pairs describing sentence nouns influences college students’ choice of verbs. The following research questions were addressed:
1 a. Will students use implicit information about whether adjectives describing sentence thematic roles are negative or positive to choose verbs differing in evaluation?
b. Will the degree of evaluation of adjectives describing one thematic role relative to the other influence the degree of evaluation of the verbs chosen?
2 a. Will students use information about whether adjectives describing sentence thematic roles are high or low in potency influence the potency of their verb choices?
b. Will the degree of potency of adjectives influence the degree of potency of the chosen verbs?
3 Will the evaluation and potency of the adjectives influence whether students choose action or experiencer verbs to complete the sentences?
EXPERIMENT 2 Participants
Participants were 30 junior and senior students from Introduction to Educational Psychology classes who were native speakers of American- English and who had not participated in the first experiment. All students received course credit or extra credit for their participation.
Materials
Two adjective pairs from Table 1 were combined into sentences of the form
‘X, who was adjective pair 1, verbed Y, who was adjective pair 2.’ X and Y were replaced with same-gender, neutral names such as John and Ted.
For example, ‘John, who was daring and courageous, _____ Ted, who was nervous and timid.’ Adjective pairs 1 and 2 each belonged to one of four evaluation/potency categories (positive/potent, positive/non-potent, nega- tive/potent, negative/non-potent). Each particular adjective combination in sentence subject position was paired with two adjective combinations from each evaluation/potency category in object position (this was done so that the same exemplar never modified both the sentence subject and object).
Thus, there were 4 subject evaluation/potency categories 3 exemplars of each adjective combination 4 object evaluation/potency choices 2 exemplars of each adjective combination for a total of 96 sentences. These were divided into two sets, so that each participant saw 48 sentences. Within each set, half of the sentences were combined with two female names and half with two male names.
The materials were arranged into booklets. On the first page of each booklet was a list of 32 verbs shown in Table 2 (without evaluation and potency ratings), arranged in random order. Following the verbs were written instructions and an example. The sentences followed, with 2–12 sentences per page. The order of pages was randomized across booklets.
Procedure
Participants were tested in small groups of 2–15. Half of the participants saw each set of sentences. The entire procedure took approximately 45 minutes.
Students were asked to imagine a typical event described by each of the listed sentences. They were told to choose a verb from the list of verbs that they thought would be the BEST descriptor for each event interactant. They were then given an example sentence with the verb choice for the blank filled in with one of the verbs from the list. They were told that this was just an example and that they might have chosen a different verb because there are no right or wrong answers:
(3) Ann, who was pretty and naı¨ve, ____ Sally, who was daring and sophisticated. verb choice: admired
Results
The frequency of each verb choice was tabulated for adjectives used to describe each combination of agent/stimulus and patient/experiencer.
Based on ratings by independent groups of students (see Experiment 1), each verb was coded as to its evaluation, its potency, and whether or not it was an experiencer or action verb. Note that for this scoring, different verb choices resulted in different categorizations for the same adjective combinations. For example, in sentence (4), ‘mean and devious’ is a negative/potent adjective pair while ‘nervous and timid’ is a negative/
non-potent pair.
(4) John, who was mean and devious ____ Ted, who was nervous and timid
If the verb choice were ‘loathed,’ then John would be an experiencer and Ted would be the stimulus. If the verb choice were ‘fascinated,’ then Ted would be the experiencer and John would be the stimulus.
The first dependent variable was calculated by averaging evaluation scores of the verbs chosen to complete sentences for the same thematic roles.
The second dependent variable was calculated by averaging potency scores for the chosen verbs. Proportion of variance accounted for, eta2, is reported only for the highest level interactions. All statistics reported in this section are significant at p 5 .05 or better.
The first set of research questions examined effects of thematic role evaluation on verb choice by calculating a 2 (agent/stimulus evaluation) 2 (agent/stimulus potency) 2 (patient/experiencer evaluation) 2 (patient/
experiencer potency) ANOVA, with verb evaluation as the dependent variable. The following main effects were significant: agent/stimulus evaluation, F(1,29) ¼ 209.61, MS error ¼ 1.89, agent/stimulus potency, F(1,29) ¼ 4.43, MS error ¼ 1.92, patient/experiencer evaluation, F(1,29) ¼ 21.31, MS error ¼ 1.24, patient/experiencer potency F(1,29) ¼ 51.25, MS error ¼ 1.05. The following two-way interactions were significant: agent/
stimulus evaluation agent/stimulus potency, F(1,29) ¼ 22.31, MS error ¼ 1.58; agent/stimulus evaluation patient/experiencer evaluation, F(1,29) ¼ 84.96, MS error ¼ 1.38; agent/stimulus evaluation patient/experiencer potency, F(1,29) ¼ 62.70, MS error ¼ 1.25; agent/stimulus potency patient/
experiencer potency, F(1,29) ¼ 34.50, MS error ¼ 1.01. The following three- way interactions were significant: agent/stimulus evaluation agent/stimulus potency patient/experiencer evaluation, F(1,29) ¼ 21.95, MS error ¼ 1.79;
agent/stimulus evaluation patient/experiencer evaluation patient/experi- encer potency F(1,29) ¼ 46.43, MS error ¼ 2.07. All main effects and lower level interactions are best interpreted in the context of the four-way interaction among agent/stimulus evaluation agent/stimulus potency patient/experiencer evaluation patient/experiencer potency, F(1,29) ¼ 4.18, MS error ¼ 2.05, eta2¼.13. The interaction is graphed in Figure 3.
Post-hoc Bonferroni corrected t-tests were conducted on the contrasts shown in the figure. Contrasts for simple main effects of agent/stimulus, evaluation/potency at each level of patient/experiencer, evaluation/potency were examined. When the patient/experiencer was positive and potent, all contrasts of agents/stimuli differed significantly. That is, students chose to complete sentences with positive verbs when agents/stimuli were positive and potent, with less positive verbs when agents/stimuli were positive and non-potent, with negative verbs when agents/stimuli were negative and non-potent, and with more negative verbs when agents/stimuli were negative and potent. Similar effects occurred when the patient/experiencer was positive and non-potent except that verb choices in sentences where agents/stimuli were positive and potent did not differ significantly from those where they were positive and non-potent. In sentences with negative/non- potent patients/experiencers, students chose positive verbs in sentences with positive agents/stimuli (both potent and non-potent), negative verbs for sentences with negative/non-potent agents/stimuli, and the most negative verbs for sentences with negative/potent agents/stimuli. Finally, when patients/experiencers were negative and potent, students chose negative verbs for all sentences except those containing negative, potent agent/stimuli.
In those sentences, students were equally likely to choose positive or negative verbs, resulting in a mean close to zero. In sum, the evaluation of the verbs chosen was systematically related to the interaction of the evaluation and potency of the sentence thematic roles, not just qualitatively,
but also quantitatively. The most interesting pattern evident in Figure 3 is the exact reversal of patterns of verb choice for negative, potent vs. positive, potent patients/experiencers depending upon the evaluation and potency of the agents/stimuli in the same sentences.
The second research questions examined effects of thematic role on choice of verbs with different potencies by computing a 2 (agent/stimulus evaluation) 2 (agent/stimulus potency) 2 (patient/experiencer evaluation) 2 (patient/
experiencer potency) ANOVA, with verb potency as the dependent variable.
The following main effects were significant: agent/stimulus potency, F(1,29) ¼ 57.44, MS error ¼ .408; patient/experiencer evaluation, F(1,29) ¼ 6.93, MS error ¼ .281; and patient/experiencer potency, F(1,29) ¼ 12.69, MS error ¼ .47. The following two-way interactions were significant: agent/
stimulus evaluation agent/stimulus/potency, F(1,29) ¼ 8.60, MS error ¼.307;
agent/stimulus potency patient/experiencer evaluation, F(1,29) ¼ 5.06, MS error ¼ .398; and agent/stimulus evaluation patient/experiencer potency, F(1,29) ¼ 5.58, MS error ¼ .468. These main effects and interactions were
Pos/Po t
Pos/N on-Pot
Neg/N
on-Pot Neg/Pot
Patient/experiencer EP
−3
−2
−1 0 1 2 3
Mean verb evaluation
Neg/Pot Neg/Non-Pot Pos/Non-Pot Pos/Pot Agent/stimulus EP
Note: EP = Evaluation, Potency; Pos = Positive; Neg = Negative; Pot = Potent
Figure 3: Mean evaluation of verbs chosen to complete sentences whose
thematic roles varied in evaluation and potency, Experiment 2
subsumed under the three-way agent/stimulus potency patient/experiencer evaluation patient solidus experiencer potency evaluation, F(1,29) ¼ 8.39, MS error ¼ .251, eta2¼.20 shown in Figure 4. Bonferroni corrected t-tests indicated that students generally chose more potent verbs for sentences with potent compared to non-potent agents/stimuli, regardless of patients/
experiencers evaluation and potency. The only exception occurred for sentences containing positive, potent patients/experiencers, where agent/
stimulus potency had no effect on verb choice.
There was also a two-way interaction of patient/experiencer evaluation patient/experiencer potency, F(1,29) ¼ 12.47, MS error ¼ .257, eta2¼.30 that was not included in the three-way interaction. Summed across sentences with different agent/stimulus combinations, students chose verbs that were more potent in sentences containing negative, non-potent patient/
experiencers than they did for negative, potent patient/experiencers;
there were no differences in their verb choices for sentences with positive patient/experiencers, regardless of potency.
Pos/Po t
Pos/N on-Pot
Neg/N
on-Pot Neg/Pot
Patient/experiencer EP 0.0
0.5 1.0 1.5
Mean verb potency
Non-Pot Pot
Agent/stimulus potency
Note: EP = Evaluation, Potency; Pos = Positive; Neg = Negative; Pot = Potent
Figure 4: Mean potency of verbs chosen to complete sentences where agent/
stimuli varied in potency and patient/experiencers varied in both evaluation
and potency, Experiment 2
In sum, the potency of the verbs chosen was systematically related to the interaction of the potency of the sentence agent/stimulus role and to the evaluation and potency of the patient/experiencer role, not just qualitatively, but also quantitatively.
The final set of analyses examined the third research question, the effect of thematic role on choice of verbs from different classes. In these analyses, evaluation and potency of thematic roles were treated as nominal variables to test their effect on choice of verb class (action or experiencer). One approach to analyzing whether students chose different verb classes as a function of evaluation and potency of nouns occupying different thematic roles would be to use log-linear analysis. Because log-linear approaches indicate when there are interactions, but do not specify the nature of the interaction, an alternative analytic strategy was chosen, as suggested by Rindskopf (1996). Four overall Likelihood Ratio (LR) chi-squares were computed for adjective evaluation/potency combinations shown in panels (a)–(d) of Table 3. The significant overall LRs were then partitioned into components to test specific hypotheses about the source of the interaction.
Like the Pearson Chi Square statistic, LR is a ratio of observed to expected frequencies; unlike the Pearson statistic, the LRs of the contrasts sum exactly to the overall LR. The complete partition of an LR yields as many 2 2 tables as there are degrees of freedom for an overall table (Rindskopf 1996).
As shown in Table 3, overall LRs were significant only for negative agents/
stimuli. For positive agents/stimuli, action verbs were chosen less frequently than experiencer verbs, but expected frequencies for different patient/experi- encers did not differ. In contrast, the proportion of action vs. experiencer verbs chosen for sentences with negative agents/stimuli varied as a function of the patients/experiencers. Table 4 shows the partitioning of the two LRs involving negative agents/stimuli. It can be seen that each of the single degree of freedom LRs in the two panels of Table 4 sums to the corresponding overall LRs shown in panels (c) and (d) of Table 3. The significant LR for sentences with negative, potent agents/stimuli is due to the fact that action verbs were chosen less often than expected in sentences with negative, potent patient/
experiencers and more frequently than expected for those with negative, non/
potent patient/experiencers. The significant LR for sentences with negative, non-potent agents/stimuli is due to the fact that action verbs were chosen less often than expected in sentences with positive patient/experiencers.
Summary
Taken together, the results of Experiment 2 suggest that college students who were native speakers of American-English were systematic in the verbs they chose to complete sentences. Students had 32 verbs to choose among that were similar in meaning only in that they could all be used to describe interactions between two people. Nevertheless, students were far from random in their choices. They systematically favored experiencer verbs over
action verbs. Although students varied in which particular verb was chosen for a given sentence, the choices were similar in their underlying affective dimensions. Generally, verbs were chosen that matched the evaluation of the agent/stimulus thematic role, regardless of whether it occurred in sentence subject or object position. An exception was in sentences where patient/
experiencer thematic roles were negative and potent—in this case students chose negative verbs for all agents/stimuli except those that were negative and potent, where they were split in their choices of negative or positive verbs (negative, potent individuals can do either negative or positive things
Table 3: Observed frequency (expected frequency) of verbs of different classes chosen to complete stimulus sentences whose thematic roles varied in evaluation and potency, Experiment 2
Evaluation/Potency of Agents/Stimulus with Evaluation/Potency of Patient/Experiencer
Verb Class
Action Experiencer
(a) Positive/Potent with
Positive/Potent 26 (32.95) 64 (57.05)
Positive/Non-potent 50 (50.15) 87 (86.85)
Negative/Potent 34 (35.88) 64 (62.13)
Negative/Non-potent 54 (45.03) 69 (77.97)
Likelihood Ratio (3) ¼ 5.305, p ¼ .15 (b) Positive/Non-potent with
Positive/Potent 14 (17.95) 29 (25.05)
Positive/Non-potent 40 (37.99) 51 (53.01)
Negative/Potent 34 (28.81) 35 (40.19)
Negative/Non-potent 36 (39.25) 58 (54.75)
Likelihood Ratio (3) ¼ 3.767, p ¼ .29 (c) Negative/Potent with
Positive/Potent 22 (28.45) 60 (53.55)
Positive/Non-potent 42 (38.16) 68 (71.84)
Negative/Potent 22 (31.22) 68 (58.78)
Negative/Non-potent 50 (38.16) 60 (71.84)
Likelihood Ratio (3) ¼ 12.74, p ¼ .005 (d) Negative/Non-potent with
Positive/Potent 12 (22.76) 45 (34.34)
Positive/Non-potent 31 (34.34) 55 (51.66)
Negative/Potent 38 (27.95) 32 (42.05)
Negative/Non-potent 40 (35.94) 50 (54.06)
Likelihood Ratio (3) ¼ 16.40, p ¼ .0001
to other negative, potent individuals and negative, potent stimuli can produce either negative or positive experiences for other negative, potent individuals).
When patients/experiencers were potent, the degree of negativity of the verb varied with evaluation and potency of the agent/stimulus. When both thematic roles in a sentence were either positive and potent or positive and non-potent, verbs that were chosen were most positive for sentences with positive, potent patients/experiencers, followed by sentences with positive, non-potent patients/experiencers. The exact opposite order of verb evaluation was seen for sentences where both thematic roles were negative.
Students’ verb choices were also influenced by the potency of the verb.
With one exception, they tended to choose more potent verbs for sentences containing potent agents/stimuli than for those containing non-potent agents/stimuli. The potency of the patient/experiencer role also had an effect, with negative/potent patients/experiencers eliciting the lowest potency verb choices in sentences with non-potent agents/stimuli and non-potent agents/
stimuli eliciting the most potent verb choices in sentences with non-potent stimuli. In sum, both the evaluation and potency of both thematic roles interacted to influence verb choice in systematic ways.
Table 4: Partition of significant Likelihood Ratio chi-squares for thematic role evaluation/potency and verb class, Experiment 2
Negative, Potent Agent/Stimuli
(a) Test of the independence of verb class and patient/experiencer potency for positive and negative patient/experiencers
LR df p
Positive patient/experiencers 2.7583 1.0000 .097 Negative patient/experiencer 9.6784 1.0000 .002 (b) Test of the independence of verb class and patient/experiencer evaluation
LR df p
.3076 1.0000 0.5792
Negative, Non-Potent Agent/Stimuli
(a) Test of the independence of verb class and patient/experiencer potency for positive and negative patient/experiencers
LR df p
Positive patient/experiencers 3.7720 1.0000 .052 Negative patient/experiencer 1.5283 1.0000 .216 (b) Test of the independence of verb class and patient/experiencer evaluation
LR df p
11.0989 1.0000 .0001
GENERAL DISCUSSION
The results of this paper have implications for the kinds of information about words that are represented in memory and about how that information is used in word choices by native speakers. The results may also have implications for L2 learning and instruction, particularly for advanced L2 learners.
The role of evaluation and potency in vocabulary networks
There are currently many models available to explain the organization and relationship of vocabulary items in memory and how they are processed as they are encountered in text and discourse. Some models focus on relationships among words in the same form class, while others also describe associations across form classes. Research reported in the current paper did not attempt to distinguish among different models. Instead, the current studies extend previous work on vocabulary networks by looking at features involving the affective dimensions of evaluation and potency.Results from the current study provide experimental evidence that readers use both evaluative and potency information to choose which words are most likely to complete sentences. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with sentences of the kind often used in previous research on implicit causality, for example ‘John defied Ted.’ Only the verb is informative in these sentences. Participants were asked to fill in characteristics of John and Ted from a list of adjectives. Although participants supposedly knew nothing about John or Ted, they easily generated information about them that was consistent with their knowledge of the type of person who is likely to defy or be defied. Specifically, readers consistently preferred adjectives matching the verb in evaluative valence to describe stimuli or agents, and adjectives that were less positive or less negative to describe experiencers or patients in the same sentences. They chose adjectives that were more potent for the sentence agent than for the patient in sentences with action verbs and, with one exception, they chose more potent adjectives for the sentence stimulus in sentences with potent, experiencer verbs. This provides clear evidence that evaluation and potency are components of lexical knowledge that affect word choice.
In the second experiment, participants chose verbs given information about nouns in the sentences. Nouns were described by dispositional adjectives that differed in evaluation and potency. Evidently, the use of these adjectives led most participants to choose experiencer verbs rather than action verbs for most sentences. Participants generally chose positive verbs when adjectives describing the agent or stimulus were positive and negative verbs when they were negative. The evaluation and potency of thematic roles interacted to influence the degree of evaluation of the chosen verb. For example, the mean evaluation of verbs chosen to complete sentences where
both thematic roles were positive and potent was higher than those where the agent or stimulus was positive and potent and the patient or experiencer was positive and non-potent. Students used the degree of potency of adjectives describing thematic roles in the sentences to choose verbs that differed in potency. Generally, they chose more potent verbs in sentences with more potent agents or stimuli.
One might wonder whether a more appropriate method for selecting stimuli for the current study would have been to use utterances from corpus data. Instead, an experimental approach using stripped-down, somewhat artificial sentences was chosen for several reasons. First, using a sample of vocabulary from previous work facilitates comparison of findings across studies. In addition, by selectively sampling stimuli, input to participants could be limited to items from the domain of interpersonal vocabulary.
Furthermore, possible confounds such as the number of adjectives describing each noun in the sentence could be controlled, as well as the degree of evaluation and potency of the words. Selecting words that fit these constraints provides a crucial test of the influence of evaluation and potency without introducing confounding information. If results did not come out as predicted under these ‘best case’ conditions, further testing under less controlled, more natural conditions would be unnecessary. Having determined that evaluation and potency are used in word choices in constrained situations, the extent and distribution of their use in natural texts can now be undertaken in future research.
An example of how the evaluative dimension can assist in understanding vocabulary in a more naturalistic context comes from Bloom (2000), who described his learning of ‘hobbledehoy.’ He encountered the word in a passage of a novel set in the 1930s, where a father forbids his son to meet a classmate, stating,
Anyway, to me at least, in one way and another he looks like a bit of a hobbledehoy. Also, to me just now over the telephone, he sounded a good deal of a hobbledehoy. Do I make myself clear?
(Amis 1994: 28)
Bloom noted that from this he understood that ‘hobbledehoy’ referred to a kind of person that he evaluated negatively. The son in the novel, then continues,
You do, thought Robin.. . . Even bloody clearer than you thought.
To you at least Wade is a rough, a rowdy, a hooligan, a johnny whose mother sews him up for the winter, who habitually makes rude noises in front of people and shouts at them from up or downstairs or in the next room instead of going where they are and speaking politely, who picks his nose and eats it and never learnt to talk proper. (Amis, 1994: 28)
Bloom noted that this passage provides ‘a definition of sorts’ (Bloom 2000:
192). Interestingly, a standard dictionary definition (Flexner and Hauck 1987)
of ‘hobbledehoy’ is ‘an awkward, ungainly youth.’ The passage conveys considerably more information about the word in context than does the dictionary definition. Specifically, the negative connotations of ‘hobbledehoy’
are conveyed by the evaluative aspects of the other words used to describe Wade. This is consistent with suggestions by some linguists that a word’s affective meaning can be studied by looking at its collocates in text (Sinclair 1991; Stubbs 2001b). Some dictionaries intended primarily for learners of English have taken advantage of collocational information from large corpora to enhance their definitions. For example, the definition of ‘hobbledehoy’ taken from Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English (Quirk et al. 2001: 679) is: ‘a rude young person.’ ‘Rude’ is more negative in affect than ‘awkward’ or ‘ungainly,’ thus capturing the affective meaning of
‘hobbledehoy’ better than the definition provided by the non-corpus-based dictionary.
Although readers use evaluation and potency information associated with vocabulary as an aid to comprehension, these dimensions may not be equally important in all knowledge domains. Kreszowski (1990) documents that vocabulary items that are associated with human beings tend to have more good or bad associations than those associated with concrete, material objects, which tend to be more neutral. For example, the verb ‘hit’ may be negative when it involves two humans, but may be positive or neutral when it involves a bat and ball.
Implications for L2 learning and instruction
Two issues arise regarding the relationship of the current work and L2 vocabulary. First, will the current results generalize to other languages?
There is reason to believe that evaluation and potency are universal dimensions of affective meaning, although they apply differently to different items in different languages. Osgood et al. (1957) used data from more than two dozen countries in order to identify that evaluation and potency were two of the major dimensions of affective meaning. More recently, Heise (2002) collected additional evaluation and potency ratings in six different nations and found that speakers in all of them used evaluation and potency in their judgments of others.
Second, is it useful to look at attributes of individual words when examining lexical competence? Meara (1996) and Meara and Wolter (2004) suggested that lexical competence should be judged by estimating the overall size and organization of the entire vocabulary network, rather than by examining attributes of individual words. This overall network approach holds promise in being able to provide general laws about how vocabularies grow; however, it may be less useful in providing specific clues about which words are related to other words that could be useful in deciding how to structure vocabulary instruction for advanced language learners.
Although the current studies did not directly assess whether it would be possible to teach affective features used by skilled readers in completing sentences, there is evidence in the literature that suggests that this might be a fruitful area for further research. Several successful vocabulary instruction programs with L1 learners have focused on teaching words in ways that go beyond having students look up words in a dictionary to having them construct relationships among words (both similarities and differences) and having them relate new vocabulary items to prior knowledge (e.g. Beck et al. 2002). A review of research on vocabulary instruction on L1 learners concludes that ‘various semantic relatedness and prior knowledge approaches, such as semantic mapping and semantic feature analysis, are effective techniques for teaching new concepts to students of varied abilities and different cultural and ethnic backgrounds’ (Baumann et al. 2003: 770).
There is far less research available on L2 learners. Julian (2000: 37) notes that Spanish speakers who are learning English at the upper-intermediate and advanced level often communicate grammatically, but ‘they produce very plain utterances which are unable to convey different emotional loads, or to express shades of intensity or connotation.’ However, teaching L2 vocabulary in semantic sets has shown mixed results (e.g. Machalias 1991;
Finkbeiner and Nicol 2003; Tinkham 1997). There are two issues that need to be addressed concerning these studies.
First, the level of the L2 learner may play a role in whether or not semantic approaches are successful. Dewaele and Pavlenko (2002) found that the use of emotion words by 29 Dutch L1 advanced learners of French was linked to their language proficiency. DeVitto and Burgess (2004) found that speakers with less L2 experience did not show the same memory links between weakly associated lexical items (e.g. ‘city-grass’) as did L1 speakers.
Wolter (2001) examined non-native speakers’ responses on a word association measure in relationship to their depth of vocabulary knowledge.
He found that L2 speakers tended to give more phonological associates for lesser-known words, but that they produced more semantic associates as they acquired greater understanding of individual words. In particular, cross form–
class links dominated. Jiang (2004) suggested that in the earliest stages of word learning, an L2 lexical entry may contain only phonological and orthographic information. During the second stage, semantic information from L1 is transferred into the L2 entry, such that the lexical entry is a mixture of L2 form and L1 semantic information. Jiang found that Korean- English bilingual graduate students who had between 8 and 23 years of formal instruction in English transferred semantic content from their L1.
That is, they mapped L2 words onto existing L1 meanings. This indicates that once L2 learners are beyond the earliest stages of word learning, they use their L1 semantic system for L2 processing. One would thus predict that teaching about the affective meaning of words could facilitate transfer
in languages where a word shares similar evaluation and potency ratings in L1 and L2 and could create interference in languages where the ratings diverge.
The second issue regarding the effectiveness of teaching L2 learners using semantic learning strategies is whether different kinds of semantic strategies produce different effects. Tinkham (1997) made a distinction between thematic and semantic grouping of vocabulary items. He found that students found it easier to learn words in a new language when they were presented in thematic groups such as ‘frog, green, hop, pond, slippery, croak,’ that corresponded to schemas that they already had in their first language. In the context of the current study, this would suggest that introducing a verb such as ‘admire’ with vocabulary expressing the types of people who are likely to be admired would be more effective than presenting two verbs such as ‘admire’ and ‘respect’ at the same time.
Assuming that some semantic strategies may be effective for learning advanced vocabulary in either L1 or L2, teachers must know which aspects of word meaning are important in particular domains. The current research supplies information about two of the underlying dimensions that are important in the interpersonal domain. Determining how different words are related in evaluation and potency and how verbs differ in implicit causality is one way to have students explore language in the interpersonal domain.
Results from the current research show the importance of teaching not only adjectives and verbs, but also the relationships between them. Having students reflect on the kinds of interactions different types of characters are likely to engage in and the types of emotions or mental states they are likely to experience as they are interacting may help the students learn vocabulary that is particularly useful in narrative texts, where understanding causal structure is central to understanding the storyline.
This work raises intriguing possibilities for expanding work on depth of vocabulary knowledge. In recent years, researchers have paid increasing attention to the notion of vocabulary depth. It is important because it has been shown to make a unique contribution (i.e. beyond vocabulary breadth) in predicting reading comprehension (Qian 1999). Yet, existing measures of vocabulary depth have tapped only some of its components. The research reported in the current study suggests that affective aspects of word meaning that contribute to vocabulary depth are used systematically, at least in some domains of knowledge. The research isolates two dimensions of vocabulary understanding, evaluation and potency, that have largely been ignored in the recent literature. In the future, more attempts could be made to systematically incorporate these aspects of knowledge into assessment instruments that tap depth of vocabulary.
Final version received May 2006
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Portions of this paper were presented at the Society for Text and Discourse, Amsterdam, July 2005. I would like to thank Kim Marek for her help in data scoring and analysis and John Surber for his helpful comments on the manuscript.
NOTES
1 The authors cited here actually use the term ‘connotation’ rather than ‘affect.’
There is no standard terminology in the literature for language expressing a speaker or writer’s opinion. Alternative terms include ‘affect’, ‘evaluation’,
‘stance’, ‘attitude’, and ‘appraisal.’
Although ‘connotation’ is probably the most familiar word in everyday parlance, Thompson and Hunston (2000) suggest that it focuses on language items (words have connota- tions), while the other terms take the perspective of the language user (people feel affect and make evalua- tions, etc.). For that reason, the term
‘affective’ has been adopted in this paper.
2 Kemmer and Barlow (2000: xxiii) define a schema as ‘a cognitive representation comprising a general- ization over perceived similarities among instances of usage. Schemas arise via repeated activation of a set of co-occurring properties.’
3 Stubbs (2001a) labels cognitive views
‘inference theories’ and contrasts them with ‘code theories’ that also emphasize mental representation in language comprehension, but that place more emphasis on how much meaning is conventionally encoded in text.
4 The use of the term ‘interpersonal’
here differs from that of Halliday (1973) who argues that all uses of language have an interpersonal function.
5 Ratings of word pairs presented with- out sentence context are assumed to represent the rater’s default schemas.
When encountering an adjective pair such as ‘daring, courageous,’ the reader activates a mental representa- tion of a person who typically has those characteristics.
6 The word ‘timid’ appears in two stimuli because the original pool yielded very few pairs that were positive and non-potent. The rated affective meaning of adjective pairs, rather than of individual words, was used to classify the stimuli into groups.
The meaning of ‘timid’ shifts depend- ing upon other characteristics of the individual being described. For the American college students in this study, a prototypical ‘polite, timid’
person is viewed as positive, while a prototypical ‘nervous, timid’ person is viewed as negative.
7 The only verb used in the current study which was not identified in the original population is ‘loathe.’ How- ever, ‘hate’ and ‘detest’, which are both direct hypernyms of ‘loathe’
(WordNet database, Miller 2005), were in the original verb set. Brown and Fish (1983) also identified ‘loathe’
as an interpersonal verb. They studied the entire list of English words that occur in one million words of text and extracted all action and state verbs that had derived dispositional adjectives that could fit in a context such as
‘Ted loathes Paul because Paul is loathsome’.
