English Abstract Nouns As Conceptual Shells: From Corpus to Cognition

473 Pages·2000·12.37 MB·English

by  Hans-Jörg Schmid

English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual Shells
W
DE
G
Topics in English Linguistics
34
Editors
Bernd Kortmann
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
English Abstract Nouns
as Conceptual Shells
From Corpus to Cognition
Hans-Jörg Schmid
W
Mouton de Gruyter
DE
G Berlin · New York 2000
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.
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Als Habilitationsschrift auf Empfehlung der Philosophischen Fakultät für
Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft I der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München gedruckt
mit Unterstützung der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft.
Die Deutsche Bibliothek — CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Schmid, Hans-Jörg:
English abstract nouns as conceptual shells : from corpus to
cognition / Hans-Jörg Schmid. - Berlin ; New York : Mouton
de Gruyter, 2000
(Topics in English linguistics ; 34)
ISBN 3-11-016767-0
© Copyright 2000 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Acknowledgements
This book would not be what it is without the support of a number of
friends, colleagues and institutions. To all these I am extremely grateful.
In particular, I would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemein-
schaft (DFG) for giving me a one-year grant which enabled me to carry out
research in Birmingham and Oxford, and what is more, to have my family
with me during this exciting period of time. I am grateful to the colleagues
at COBUILD, Birmingham, especially Jeremy Clear, Gill Francis and
Ramesh Krishnamurthy, for letting me work with their wonderful corpus
and take out large amounts of data, for their practical help in this process
and their patience with me. I would also like to thank Oxford University for
giving me access to the Bodleian and other libraries. Malcolm Coulthard
(Birmingham), Geoffrey Leech (Lancaster) and Len Lipka (Munich) kindly
gave me the opportunity to present my ideas in their staff seminars and
linguistic colloquia, and I should like to thank them and the members of
these seminars for their interest in my work.
It is much more difficult to appreciate and acknowledge the enormous
debt of gratitude I owe to Len Lipka and Geoffrey Leech, as well as Jean
Aitchison (Oxford) and Wolfgang Falkner (Munich), for their involvement
in the early stages of the development of this study. Each of them in their
own characteristic way contributed immensely to the formation and formu-
lation of the ideas presented here. Len Lipka and Wolfgang Falkner also
read and commented on the entire manuscript of an earlier version of this
book, which was submitted to Munich University as a Habilitationsschrift,
and so did Nick Jacob-Flynn, Dick Janney, Wolfgang Schulze, Dietmar
Zaefferer (all Munich), Thomas Herbst (Erlangen), Bernd Kortmann and
Lieselotte Anderwald (both Freiburg). Walter Hofstetter (Munich) helped
me to come to terms with some of the inconsistencies in grammatical termi-
nology. I would like to thank all these colleagues for their invaluable com-
ments and suggestions for improvement. And I am grateful to Claudia
Hommers (Bochum) and Anja Gebert (Bayreuth) for their help with the
tedious task of revising the earlier manuscript, Anja Gebert also for proof-
reading the final one. Finally, I would like to thank my family, to whom this
book is dedicated, for staying with me all the same.

Table of contents
Part I Foundations: Theory, terminology and methodology 1
1. Introduction 3
2. Approaching shell nouns 10
2.1 The term shell noun 10
2.2 Defining shell nouns and shell-content complexes in
functional terms 13
2.3 A brief note on the theoretical stance 20
3. The links between shell nouns and contents 21
3.1 Triggering co-interpretation 21
3.1.1 Lexico-grammatical patterns of shell-noun uses 21
3.1.2 From identity of reference to experiential identity 27
3.2 The semantic contributions of different types of complements:
a survey of the evidence from verbal complementation 31
3.3 Basic functions of shell-noun typical patterns 36
4. The systematic investigation of shell nouns 38
4.1 The From-Corpus-to-Cognition Principle 38
4.2 Data retrieval 40
4.3 Cleaning up the data 48
4.4 Systematic misses of the corpus inquiry 51
4.5 A survey of the results of the corpus inquiry 53
5. Semantic prerequisites 63
5.1 Abstractness 63
5.1.1 Extensional abstractness and classes of abstract entities 63
5.1.2 Stylistic abstractness and grammatical metaphor 70
5.2 Unspecificity and structure-inherent semantic gaps 73
5 .3 Summary of Part I 80
Part II The use of shell nouns 83
6. Describing shell-noun uses 85
6.1 Degrees of typicality 85