Linguistic Profiles: Going from Form to Meaning via Statistics

The monograph investigates the relationship between form and meaning in different domains and centers on a group of methods referred to as “linguistic profiles” that have been developed recently by researchers at the University of Tromsø. These methods are based on the observation that there is a strong correlation between semantic and distributional properties of linguistic units. This book discusses grammatical, semantic, constructional, collostructional and diachronic profiles. Linguistic profiles as a group of methods are based on recent developments in the area of cognitive and functional linguistics: 1) form in language always has a relation to meaning, 2) a categorical approach to language is replaced with an understanding of language as a gradient phenomenon, which is investigated via statistics, 3) grammar is seen as a usage-based phenomenon. Throughout the book we see that each of the profiles determines a correlation between certain forms and certain meanings. By studying the distribution of different forms we can uncover the semantic restrictions standing behind them.