Time flies! So it’s already been a year that Esme Richardson-Owen started her job as a PhD-student and linguistics colleague at Salzburg University. We were very glad to be in a position to hire her, and I have had the pleasure of spending an interesting first few months discussing some extremely fascinating cognitive semantics issues with her.
After some deliberation, Esme decided to pursue ideas developed in her M.A.-thesis on Adj.-Noun combinations where the adjective is of a sensory kind, such as smooth, cold, sweet, flowery, hushed, bright etc. The nouns may either literally fit the adjective as in smooth skin or transfer the perceptual adjective quality to some non-sensory meaning, as in rough time(s).
In her PhD-project, Esme will test some 350 adjectives for their corpus occurrences with literally perceptual nouns and see which cognitive semantic dimensions of adjective quality guide or constrain the use of the adjectives. Also, she plans to design and carry out a perception study with some of the most frequently attested of the adjective-noun pairs in question to find out how language users judge the semantic acceptability of the phrases in line with their cognitive semantic properties.
The project seeks to fruitfully combine cognitive semantics and corpus linguistics.
Image Copyrights: Jude Infantini for UNSPLASH
Prof. Dr. Hartmut Stöckl 