Abundantia Verborum

5. Workshops and cognitive linguistics

5.3 Summary

We will conclude the chapter about data analysis with Abundantia Verborum with a brief overview of the major observations we have derived from the example of cognitive lexicology throughout the chapter. But first we like to address two more general considerations.

graphical analysis

The first general consideration is that we believe the biggest advantage of the program, that what makes it a useful tool for technical and non-technical users alike, is its reliance on graphical analysis. In the program the analysis process is a process of looking at and interpreting diagrams, pictures that at a glance reveal which phenomena do and which do not occur, and which are most frequency. In a recent conversation with Iven Van Mechelen (Department of Psychology, University of Leuven), specialized in the application of statistical techniques to psychology, we learned that in the practice of psychological research there is a related shift, away from the classical lists and tables of numbers, and sometimes also away from the heavy calculations, towards graphical display and visual interpretation. This anecdote has strengthened our own intuition even more. A Chinese proverb says a picture is worth more than a thousand words. We would add that it is also worth more than a thousand numbers.

extrapolating the situation of the case study

The second consideration is about the question how general the conclusions of this chapter can be, given the intrinsic bias in the chapter. At the start we called the chapter biased because it is dedicated to one particular type of use, namely that of cognitive lexicology. This statement implies that we believe that similar chapters X can be written on other application fields, with a first part X.1 dedicated to a description of that field, and a remainder of the chapter X.2, X.2.1, ..., X.3 that is very analogous to 5.2, 5.2.1, ..., 5.3 (the titles of the sections could even be the same). And indeed we believe this is the case.

We chose cognitive lexicology first of all because we believe that the phenomena it describes are fundamental to cognition, and therefore to linguistics, and second because it is a difficult example: its treatment of non-classical phenomena and its use of non-quantitative methods make it extremely suited for pinpointing the limitations of our rigorous approach. We reasoned that the harder the example the more we could learn about the shortcomings of the program, and the more fundamental the topic, the more likely the chance that our experience can be extrapolated to other fields.

major observations concerning the case study

To conclude the chapter, we summarize this our 'experience' from the case study in the form of a short overview of the major observations we made in the chapter:

• The label mechanism of Abundantia Verborum can be seen as a theory-neutral formalism based on "fuzzy sets of label sets" that is suited for describing prototypicality effects such as intensional non-rigidity and intensional non-equality
• The representational formats currently used in cognitive linguistics all have a counterpart in Abundantia Verborum:
  • overlapping sets diagrams are similar to the weighed Venn diagrams of Abundantia Verborum
  • radial set diagrams are similar to the weighed Hasse diagrams of Abundantia Verborum
  • schematic network diagrams are similar to the weighed Schematic diagrams of Abundantia Verborum
  The most important differences are that Abundantia Verborum excludes theory-dependant constructions and non-quantitative information (such as logical centrality and extension relations). The diagram types of the program meet the conditions formulated in Geeraerts 1995a for representational adequacy within a cognitive linguistic framework, with the one exception that the program, as a consequence of the choice for a theory neutral formalism, supports no formal means for representing the non-quantitative theory-dependant constructions that extension relations are.
• In general Abundantia Verborum does a good job in presenting all quantifiable data in such a way that they reveal phenomena of interest such as prototypicality effect; however, due to the nature of the methods and interests of cognitive linguistics, the user will have to rely on complementary non-quantitative methods to round up the case study.
• In the previous section we saw some possible future modifications for the program. They can significantly increase the practical use of the program. However, they will not affect the fundamental observation we made in the previous item: Abundantia Verborum will not by itself make the final step of translating the results of the quantitative study to a cognitive linguistics model of the data, for two fundamental reasons:
  • on the basis of the design principle not to include theory-dependant building blocks in Abundantia Verborum, extension relations and logical centrality are not expressible
  • moreover these features have no theory-neutral quantitative equivalent, because their introduction fundamentally relies on complementary non-quantitative methods
  And since the method of cognitive linguistics fundamentally relies on the confrontation of quantitative and complementary methods (as explained in depth the "criteria for adequacy" subsection in 5.2.3 Graphs as representational formats) Abundantia Verborum can in principle only tell half of the story, be it an important half. We believe the same fundamental limitation will occur when Abundantia Verborum is used in other disciplines with an important cognitive dimension, such as lexicographic studies, pragmatic studies, etc.