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English Verbs of Directional Vision:Compatibility with Designations of a Qualitative Attribute

Paper · 2024 · N. A. Antonova and T. S. Ignatyeva

Summary

The paper builds a semantic model for English words that denote deliberately directing one's eyes at something, together with a quality of that act. The authors treat each meaning as two layers. The first is a shared core sememe, the directed act of seeing. The second is a subordinate sememe that adds a qualitative attribute. The core can surface alone, as in look. The attribute can be built into the word itself (watch, glance, stare, gaze) or added by a dependent word in the phrase. The authors read 24 English fiction works, about 8,000 pages, and collected 927 collocations. Each has a vision word as head and a modifier naming a feature of the gaze. They sort the collocations into three meaning groups, ordered from most to least frequent:

  • negative emotions;
  • attention, steadiness and surprise;
  • speed, brevity and secrecy of a quick look.

The main finding is that look alone carries the bare invariant, while the other four words already bundle extra meaning. This matters for lexical semantics and for typological comparison across languages.

Key points

  • The lexemes studied are look, watch, glance, stare and gaze, each used as both verb and noun.
  • The corpus was a full manual sampling of 24 fiction works by authors such as Maugham, Dickens, Galsworthy, Wilde, Twain, Lawrence and Greene. It covered roughly 8,000 pages and yielded 927 collocations.
  • Phrase shape is deliberately ignored. "Look angrily", "look in anger", "angry look" and "look of anger" all count as one meaning unit.
  • Group I covers negative emotions such as anger, distrust, fear and contempt. It is the most frequent group. Look is its most common head, followed by glance.
  • The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary definition of glance misses some of the semantic components that the collocations reveal.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Each vision word's meaning is split into a shared invariant plus an attribute, and the attribute can live inside the word or in a modifier. This yields one comparable representation for lexical and phrasal expressions.
  • I2. Constructions differing only in syntax (adverb, prepositional phrase, adjective on a noun, "look of X") are merged when they share lexemes. This normalizes away surface form before semantic grouping.
  • I3. Collocations are classified by the semantic family of the modifier: emotion, attention/surprise, or speed/stealth. This turns scattered adverbs into a small typed attribute inventory for an event class.
  • I4. The modifiers a word habitually attracts are used as evidence of meaning components that dictionary glosses leave out. Here this exposed gaps in the definition of glance.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Verb-class knowledge could store glance as roughly "look + brief/quick" and stare as "look + prolonged". Then "glanced" and "looked briefly" would resolve to the same perception event with the same attribute.
  • I2 (frames): The frame builder could map "gave him an angry look" and "looked at him angrily" to one perception frame with a manner/emotion slot, keeping a trace of which surface pattern supplied it.
  • I3 (world): A compact inventory of gaze attributes could type the manner states attached to perception events, so questions like "how did she look at him?" get a categorized, explainable answer.
  • I4 (learn): Silver data could be mined for recurring modifier co-occurrences around each verb, flagging candidate hidden components (e.g., hostility often attached to glance) for an LLM teacher or human to confirm.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Chuvash State University.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as N. A. Antonova and T. S. Ignatyeva. 2024. English Verbs of Directional Vision:Compatibility with Designations of a Qualitative Attribute. Nauchnyi Dialog 13 (Научный диалог 13).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.24224/2227-1295-2024-13-6-26-42

@inproceedings{antonova2024english,
  title = {{English Verbs of Directional Vision:Compatibility with Designations of a Qualitative Attribute}},
  author = {N. A. Antonova and T. S. Ignatyeva},
  booktitle = {Nauchnyi Dialog 13 (Научный диалог 13)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.24224/2227-1295-2024-13-6-26-42},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.24224/2227-1295-2024-13-6-26-42}
}

References

14 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  14. The article was submitted 08.06.2024; approved after reviewing 21.07.2024; accepted for publication 30.07.2024. find

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