More objective descriptions of polysemous English prepositions and their effective presentation to learners

2023 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 19K00834
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Review Section: Basic Section 02100:Foreign language education-related
• Research Institution: Seijo University
• Principal Investigator: Ishii Yasutake 成城大学, 社会イノベーション学部, 教授 (70530103)
• Project Period (FY): 2019-04-01 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: 英語前置詞 / ジェスチャー / 認知言語学 / 日本人英語学習者 / マルチモーダルコーパス / 多変量解析

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study observed the hand gestures that accompany prepositions to propose a framework that can help to represent the semantic networks of prepositions in a more objective and data-driven way. Studying the gestures that speakers make when they utter prepositions can reveal the semantic networks of prepositions that exist in their minds. About 10,000 uses of prepositions in a multimodal corpus of TED Talks were analyzed, and each use was classified and counted based on its sense and the presence and type of gesture. The distances between each pair of senses were calculated employing multivariate statistical methods. Some of the resulting clusters of senses are consistent with the way English speakers envisage the events and situations denoted by prepositions, which demonstrates the effectiveness of this method in providing empirically better grounded data to enable more objective and reasonable descriptions of the semantics of prepositions.

Free Research Field

認知言語学，コーパス言語学，辞書学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

比喩的なジェスチャーの分析は先行研究でも行われているが、認知言語学の広い意味での比喩（文字通りの意味から離れた意味）に着目してジェスチャーを分析し、言語使用者の無意識的な事態把握に基づいて言語表現の意味を説き明かすという本研究の手法は独創的なものであると考えられる。得られた分析結果を基にして、辞書などにおける実際の語義記述に応用し、記述の改善を通して学習者の英語学習をより効果的にできる可能性があるという点でも意義があると考えられる。