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Identifying the Old English exponent for the semantic prime LIVE

Paper · 2021 · Raquel Mateo Mendaza

Summary

The paper looks for the Old English (OE) word that best expresses the semantic prime LIVE. It works within the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework, which assumes that every language has a small universal set of basic meanings. The author reuses a method she built in earlier work on DO, HAPPEN, MOVE and TOUCH.

First, five candidate verbs meaning 'to live' are taken from dictionaries and thesauri: (ge)buan, drohtian, (ge)eardian, (ge)libban and wunian. Each is then tested on four markedness-based criteria:

  • morphological: is it the base of a productive derivational family?
  • textual: how many types and tokens does it have in the corpus?
  • semantic: is the prime's meaning its core sense?
  • syntactic: do its complementation patterns fit the prime's frame?

Evidence comes from the Dictionary of Old English, the DOE Corpus, Bosworth-Toller and the Nerthus lexical database. Drohtian also matches the syntactic patterns, but only (ge)libban passes all four tests. Corpus examples confirm it across the prime's valency options. This adds one more entry to the OE inventory of primes and supports applying NSM to historical languages.

Key points

  • The five candidates were (ge)buan, drohtian, (ge)eardian, (ge)libban and wunian; (ge)libban was chosen as the exponent of LIVE.
  • The sources were the Dictionary of Old English (DOE), the Dictionary of Old English Corpus (DOEC), Bosworth-Toller and the Nerthus database.
  • The criteria rest on Croft's (1991) markedness: unmarked words are simpler, more frequent and more iconic, so they make better primes.
  • DOEC citations show (ge)libban in the temporal, locational, comitative and manner valency options. The locational option covers only a kind-of-place domain, because plain LIVE SOMEWHERE is not treated as universal.
  • OE exponents found so far by this line of work: DO=(ge)don, HAPPEN=(ge)limpan, MOVE=(ge)styrian, TOUCH=(ge)hrinan. Out of about 65 primes, DIE is the next target.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The method separates a word's minimal frame from its optional extra slots (patient, instrument, comitative, time, manner) and counts both as part of the prime.
  • I2. No single criterion decides; a candidate must pass four independent tests (derivation, frequency, core sense, syntax).
  • I3. Being the base of a derivational family counts as evidence that a word is basic. Productivity is judged both by how many derivatives exist and by which word-formation processes and categories they involve.
  • I4. The author checks the chosen word after the fact by finding real corpus sentences for each predicted valency pattern.
  • I5. Complex word meanings are broken down into a few primes plus language-specific "molecules", which avoids circular definitions.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (frames): VerbNet-based frames could tag each role as core or optional-universal, so missing optional roles are not reported as parse errors.
  • I2 (learn): when silver data is agreed by witness parsers, a label could be accepted only if structurally different checks all agree, not by a majority vote of similar ones.
  • I3 (world): the compiled ontology could rank head concepts by the size and variety of their derivational families when choosing primitive nodes.
  • I4 (answer): an answer could be validated by finding text spans that instantiate each expected argument pattern, which keeps the reasoning explainable.
  • I5 (back): generation from the meaning graph could fall back to prime-plus-molecule paraphrases when no direct lexical item fits.

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

🎓Universidad de La RiojaLogroño · Spain13 works · 74 citations

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Raquel Mateo Mendaza. 2021. Identifying the Old English exponent for the semantic prime LIVE. SELIM 26.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.26.2021.85-107

@inproceedings{mendaza2021identifying,
  title = {{Identifying the Old English exponent for the semantic prime LIVE}},
  author = {Raquel Mateo Mendaza},
  booktitle = {SELIM 26},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.26.2021.85-107},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.26.2021.85-107}
}

References

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