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The Old English Verbs of Smell Perception and Emission: Analysis of the Interface of their Semantic and Syntactic Representation

Paper · 2003 · Marta María González Orta

Summary

This study asks how the meaning of Old English smell verbs shapes their syntax and case marking. It uses the Lexical Grammar Model, which adds a class-specific semantic decomposition to Role and Reference Grammar logical structures (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997). The verbs come from A Thesaurus of Old English. Usage examples come from the Bosworth & Toller and Toller & Campbell dictionaries and The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts.

The author splits the class into two subclasses:

  • Perception: a causative active accomplishment. Someone uses the nose to draw in air, and this triggers a punctual feeling of a smell.
  • Emission: a state of having a pleasant or unpleasant smell, with no source or cause specified.

Two linking phases connect each template to its constructions. First, lexical mapping rules derive construction templates from the general template. Second, macrorole and case principles predict how arguments are marked. The result is a compact account in which class-level templates carry the generalisations, so individual lexical entries need less information.

Key points

  • Verbs analysed: nine in total, namely (to)stincan, (ge)stincan, steran, reocan, recelsian, hrenian, geswæccan, eðian and bladesian.
    • æþmian was excluded because the dictionaries define it as boiling or raising vapour.
    • No attestations were found for gewyrtian, besmocian and drincan in the sense 'to perfume'.
  • Perception constructions (eðian, (ge)stincan, geswæccan, hrenian, (to)stincan):
    • transitive (a "full matching" of the general template),
    • instrument, where the nose surfaces in a mid-phrase,
    • unspecified object.
  • Emission constructions:
    • stimulus subject (bladesian, reocan, stincan),
    • resultative stative (recelsian, steran).
    • No verb appears in both, so no prototypical emission verb can be singled out under the Lexical Iconicity Principle-Beta Reading.
  • Case and macroroles:
    • In perception, the perceiver is the Actor in the nominative, and the smelled thing is the Undergoer in the accusative, unless it is realised as a complex structure.
    • In emission, the smelling entity is the Undergoer in the nominative.
  • Modeling operations: templates are adapted to constructions by suppressing external variables, instantiating internal ones, dropping operators such as CAUSE, or fusing with other templates when the features are compatible.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. An instrument such as the nose is built into the verb class's decomposition as an internal variable that may optionally surface as a prepositional phrase, rather than being treated as a free adjunct.
  • I2. Each construction is derived from one class template by a small set of explicit operations (suppress, instantiate, delete operator, fuse), so every variant traces back to the base.
  • I3. The same lemma family splits into a perception reading with an Actor subject and an emission reading where the subject is an Undergoer bearing a property.
  • I4. Whether two subsets of verbs participate in overlapping or disjoint sets of constructions is used as evidence about whether one member is prototypical.
  • I5. Thesaurus entries whose dictionary definitions point to a different meaning are dropped before analysis, and senses with no attested examples are left out.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (frames): smell, see and hear frames could carry a default body-part instrument, so "with our noses" fills an expected slot and an implicit instrument can still be inferred.
  • I2 (frames): frame variants such as unspecified object or stimulus-as-subject could be logged as named operations on the VerbNet-based frame, which keeps the mapping explainable.
  • I3 (world): "X smelled the wine" should create an event, while "the wine smelled sweet" should create a state on the wine, chosen by the frame rather than by the surface verb.
  • I4 (world): construction-participation profiles mined from treebank data could check whether compiled verb classes are coherent or need splitting.
  • I5 (learn): lexicon items imported from WordNet/FrameNet could be cross-checked against a second source and against corpus attestations before they feed training or rules.

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

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksClassics · 116 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 250 works

Cite

Cite as Marta María González Orta. 2003. The Old English Verbs of Smell Perception and Emission: Analysis of the Interface of their Semantic and Syntactic Representation. SELIM 12.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.17811/selim.12.2003.33-48

@inproceedings{orta2003old,
  title = {{The Old English Verbs of Smell Perception and Emission: Analysis of the Interface of their Semantic and Syntactic Representation}},
  author = {Marta María González Orta},
  booktitle = {SELIM 12},
  year = {2003},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.12.2003.33-48},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.12.2003.33-48}
}

References

23 references, 1 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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  4. Cortés, F. J. & R. Mairal 2002: A Preliminary Design for a Syntactic Dictionary of Old English on Semantic Principles. In A Changing World of Words. Ed. J.E. Díaz. Rodopi, Amsterdam. 3-46. find
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