Verbal Synonymy in Practice: Combining Corpus-Based and Psycholinguistic Evidence
Antti Arppe* and Juhani Järvikivi†

* Department of General Linguistics	† Department of Linguistics and Language
University of Helsinki, Finland	Technology
antti.arppe@helsinki.fi	University of Joensuu, Finland
	juhani.jarvikivi@joensuu.fi

Corpus-based research has shown that the usage of near-synonyms with very similar syntactic and semantic valencies may nevertheless differ according to their lexical or syntactic context (Biber 1998). Similar differentiation has also been reported based on word-internal inflectional structure (Arppe 2002). Thus, it would seem that there is a difference between linguistic competence, i.e. usage of synonyms that is deemed possible and acceptable by e.g. by a researcher or linguistic authority, and linguistic performance, i.e. the actual usage of these words by speakers and writers of a language at-large.

The purpose of this paper is to observe whether corpus-based evidence on the differences in the preferences of the usage of near-synonymous verbs in Finnish match subjective acceptability ratings. Furthermore, it is our aim to investigate whether these two types of linguistic evidence could be used to enhance traditional lexicographical descriptions of verbal usage, specifically concerning preferences based on morpho-syntactic features. Consequently, this research consists of two parts: Firstly, a corpus of Finnish newspaper text of 2 million words was used to discover differences in the inflectional profiles of two Finnish cognitive verbs, miettiä and pohtia, ‘to think over, consider, ponder, reflect’. These two verbs were selected based on a scrutiny of lexicographical descriptions, e.g. synonyms and usage examples given, in the presently most authoritative Finnish dictionary, CD-perussanakirja (Haarala et al 1997). Secondly, subjective acceptability rating tests were carried out concerning some of the preferences observed in the corpus.

Based on the newspaper corpus, there seemed to be statistically significant differences in the preferences of either verb according to person and countability of the agent. On one hand, 1st person singular preferred miettiä over pohtia. On the other hand, 3rd person singular in conjunction with a collective human agent preferred pohtia over miettiä (Tables 1 and 2) The acceptability rating tests gave similar results, though they suggested a slightly different interpretation for the observed preferences. Both verbs were deemed acceptable in the afore-mentioned contexts, with acceptability scores of 4 or above on a scale of 1–7. However, pair-wise comparisons showed that miettiä was significantly less preferred with a 3rd person human collective agent than pohtia, although the scores within the various forms of pohtia did not reliably differ in acceptability (Table 3). Thus, it seems that pohtia is used in such contexts because miettiä is not preferred.

In conclusion, it was demonstrated by both corpus-based and psycholinguistic evidence that there are real selectional differences based on morpho-syntactic features in the usage of near-synonyms. Furthermore, we could observe that the two different types of evidence were convergent, and that they could be used to provide different insights into and explanations of the observed phenomenon.

REFERENCES:

Arppe, Antti 2002. The usage patterns and selectional preferences of synonyms in a morphologically rich language. In: Morin, Annie & Sébillot, Pascale (eds.) 2002. JADT-2002. 6th International Conference on Textual Data Statistical Analysis, March 13-15, 2002, Volume 1, pp.21–32.  INRIA, Rennes, France.
 
Biber, Douglas 1998. Corpus linguistics: investigating language structure and use. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Haarala, Risto & Lehtinen Marja (eds.) 1997. CD-Perussanakirja. Edita, Helsinki, Finland.

Table 1: Evaluation of the strength of association between selected individual morpho-syntactic features and either verb
t-score	Fisher’s exact test	Verb	nfeature,verb/
nfeature,total	Morpho-syntactic feature	
2.358	1.000000		miettiä	24/26	0_SG1	
2.148	1.000000	pohtia	206/336	0_SG3	
-2.705	0.000013		miettiä	130/336	0_SG3	
-8.170	0.000001	pohtia	2/26	0_SG1	

Table 2: Evaluation of the strength of association between semantic categories of subject/agents in 3rd person singular cases and either verb (t-score or Fisher’s exact test) 
t-score	Fisher’s exact test	Verb	nfeature,verb/nfeature,total	Semantic category of subject/agent	
1.908	1.0000	pohtia	34/44	SEM_HUMAN_GROUP	
1.844	1.0000	pohtia	155/254	SEM_HUMAN_INDIVIDUAL	
0.679	1.0000	pohtia	2/2	SEM_COGNITION	
0.560	0.9089		miettiä	4/6	SEM_LOCATION	
0.480	1.0000	pohtia	1/1	SEM_ACTIVITY	
0.0	0.2700		miettiä	0/2	SEM_COGNITION	
0.0	0.5199		miettiä	0/1	SEM_ACTIVITY	
-0.791	0.3067	pohtia	2/6	SEM_LOCATION	
-2.307	0.0004		miettiä	99/254	SEM_HUMAN_INDIVIDUAL	
-3.518	0.0004		miettiä	10/44	SEM_HUMAN_GROUP	

Table 3: Acceptability ratings of verb with subject/agent
Dependent Variable: MAS (Mean Acceptability Scores) [ajatella ‘think’ is a filler]
Verb	Subject/Agent	Mean
(Scale of 1–7)	Standard error	Lower Bound (95% confidence interval)	Upper Bound
(95% confidence interval)	
ajatella	1SG	4,495	0,167	4,165	4,825	
	3SG-COLL	2,638	0,167	2,308	2,968	
	3SG-INDIV	4,043	0,167	3,713	4,373	
miettiä	1SG	5,610	0,167	5,280	5,939	
	3SG-COLL	4,443	0,167	4,113	4,773	
	3SG-INDIV	5,348	0,167	5,018	5,678	
pohtia	1SG	5,167	0,167	4,837	5,497	
	3SG-COLL	5,357	0,167	5,027	5,687	
	3SG-INDIV	5,557	0,167	5,227	5,887