A corpus-based study of the figure and ground in sitting, standing, and lying constructions.

Abstract

1. Introduction Sitting, standing, and lying are common at-rest positions for humans and the verbs which refer to these positions can have a significant role to play in some languages in addition to the basic posture sense. The additional uses of these verbs include locational verbs not restricted to human subjects, auxiliary verbs indicating some posture or shape of the subject, auxiliary verbs with a tense or aspect function, and classifiers used with nouns (cf. Early 2000; Heine et al. 1993; Kuteva 1999; Newman ins; Serra Borneto 1996; van Oosten 1982; Watkins 1976). The potential of these verbs to develop figurative uses, as well their potential to develop into grammatical morphemes, mean that these verbs deserve close study. The availability of large corpora of English invites a corpus-based study of these verbs in English, enabling the researcher to construct a profile of their usage. As with any corpus-based research, the results of such analysis are invaluable in helping lexicographers of English and others concerned with a naturalistic description of English obtain a full picture of the meaning and use of the words of the language. Additionally, there is the possibility that such usage-based analyses of English can reveal tendencies which help us better understand how we conceptualize human at-rest positions. The conceptualization of the human at-rest positions of sitting, standing, and lying is the starting point for processes of change into figurative and grammaticalized uses in languages. The more we understand about such conceptualization, the more we are likely to fathom these extensions of usage. I make no claim about the universality of the sitting, standing, and lying postures familiar to modem, Western societies, tho ugh some form of these postures is likely to be found in all human societies. And certainly there is no claim that there should be one and only one way of conceptualizing such postures. The corpus-based analysis undertaken here brings into focus details of the conceptualization of these postures as revealed in a particular construction, but does not attempt to document the myriad of ways one might choose to construe at-rest positions in general. Even for English, there are countless alternative ways of portraying at-rest positions which do not rely upon the verbs sit, stand, or lie: Dr. Jones can be found in the office at the end of the corridor; the duck is in the pond; Xena is astride the horse; the ship was berthed at the dock etc. The present study, then, has been undertaken with a view to contributing to our knowledge about the usage of sit, stand, and lie in English, not only on a descriptive level, but also by adding to our understanding of the cognitive principles at work in the data being examined. 2. The corpus In this paper I report on the results obtained from interrogating the Bank of English corpus about usage of sitting, standing, and lying. The full Bank of English is approximately 360 million words comprising various genres, spoken and written, US and British. For this study, the subcorpus was selected. The brspoke sub corpus consists of transcribed informal, spoken British English. This subcorpus consists of approximately 20.2 million words, making it one of the largest, if not the largest, database of this single genre. The corpus was accessed on-line through the CobuildDirect software. (1) This software permits an extremely wide range of queries (tagged or untagged, inflected forms of a word, wild card matches, collocations etc.) Obviously, any word search based on the forms lie, lies, lying could retrieve forms which are unrelated to the posture verbs, in particular forms of the verb lie 'tell a lie' and the noun lie(s). A way was needed to eliminate such forms as far as possible without having to rely too much on manually editing them out of the resulting concordance. A way of achieving this fairly successfully was to limit the search to sitting/standing/lying immediately followed by a prepositional phrase (PP). …