What is it about?
The purpose of the meaning hypotheses advanced in this volume is to explain why speakers and writers choose the forms that they do in the course of documented acts of speaking or writing. The choice of interest is the decision to use 'look', particularly in situations where 'see', 'seem', and 'appear' would at first glance seem to be just as appropriate. The answer to the question of why language users make the choices they do is cast in theoretical terms that rely on the construct of the sign rather than on the construct of the sentence. The analytical consequences of this decision regarding theoretical framework are laid out in detail.
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Why is it important?
The work is important in two ways. First, it establishes that the Columbia School conception of an invariant meaning found in grammar is also operative in core vocabulary items like 'look' and 'see', and it is therefore not necessary to posit polysemy in the lexicon. The second way this work is important is its quantitative methodology. All quantitative support comes from The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), a massive on-line corpus produced by thousands of speakers. This has allowed us to test such predictions as the greater frequency of the collocation 'look carefully' compared to 'look carelessly', or the greater frequency of 'but look' over 'and look', or of 'appears...but' over 'looks... but', etc., etc. Such tests which provide new knowledge about the distributions of these forms would be practically impossible to carry out without such a corpus.
Perspectives
The word 'look' has fascinated me because, like many "lexical" words, it is used in so many different ways and is a part of so many different (so called) idiomatic expressions. Being able to come up with a single invariant meaning to explain its distribution was indeed a great challenge. To me, the most exciting part of the work was testing the quantitative predictions. Many of these predictions involve distributional patterns that have never been known about previously, and so there was that little moment of excitement with every click on the mouse right before finding out the results. Some of the discovered patterns may seem surprising, but I hope you find they make perfect sense given the hypotheses.
Nadav Sabar
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This page is a summary of: Lexical meaning as a testable hypothesis, March 2018, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/sfsl.75.
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