EmBeR Project

This project focuses on the conceptualization of abstract categories, such as ‘belief’, ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ in Polish and English. The approach is based on corpus cognitive linguistic approach. It concentrates on the syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences from language corpora. At present we are working on the analysis of the Polish verb myśleć ‘to think’ and its prefixed forms on the basis of the PWN Corpus of the Polish language.

Team members:
Prof. Dr hab. Małgorzata Fabiszak, Department of Cognitive Linguistics
Dr Anna Hebda, Department of History of English
Dr Iwona Kokorniak, Department of Cognitive Linguistics
Dr Karolina Krawczak, Department of Cognitive Linguistics
Anna Jelec, MA, Department of Cognitive Linguistics
Barbara Konat, MA, Department of Epistemology and Cognitive Science, Institute of Philosophy

Step 1:  FNP FOCUS Workshop on Categorization. Prof. Malgorzata Fabiszak and Dr. Anna Hebda gave a presentation on what was to become the EMBER project.

The presentation can be found here

Step 2: we moved from mostly qualitative analyses to testing quantitative analyses. To conform with the topic of a PLM session "Disentangling variation: Discourse in context" we tested our new methodology on four different varieties of English. Two new members joined our team: Dr Iwona Kokorniak and Dr Karolina Krawczak.

This presentation can be found here

Step 3: For Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Conference 2009, October 2009, Prague, The Czech Republic we came back to investigating Polish, this time it was the verbs myśleć 'think' and wierzyć 'believe'.

Our presentation can be found here

Step 4: In November 2009, Dr. Dylan Glynn (University of Lund) gave a workshop introducing us to the use of R statistics for corpus cognitive linguistics research. Anna Jelec, MA joined our team.

Step 5: In December 2009 Barbara Konat, MA joined our team. We started developing a coding schema and in February 2010 started coding various prefixed forms of myśleć 'to think'. The preliminary results were presented at IFA Friday Lectures on March 19th 2010.

Our IFA Friday Lecture report can be viewed here .

Step 6: We presented a paper at Syntax in Cognitive Grammar, April 2010, Częstochowa

"Thinking about THINKING" (Dr Iwona Kokorniak & Dr Karolina Krawczak)

Step 7:  We have presented papers related to the project at the International Conference on Cognitive Processes in Language in Łódź, Poland 25-27.05.2010. We will soon make the PPP of the presentations available. 

"Semantic value vs. grammaticalization of prefixes in the construal of myśleć 'think' in Polish" (Prof. Małgorzata Fabiszak & Dr Iwona Kokorniak)

In front of the conference centre (from the left:) Malgorzata Fabiszak, Barbara Konat, Iwona Kokorniak, Karolina Krawczak and our Methodology Consultant: Dylan Glynn.

Step 8: We presented two papers at the 3rd conference of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association, July 2010, Hatfield, UK:

"Dichotomy between private and public experience: A case of Polish wierzyć 'believe'" (Prof. Małgorzata Fabiszak, Dr Anna Hebda, Barbara Konat, MA)
This paper is available here

"Subjective construal of THINK in Polish" (Dr Iwona Kokorniak, Dr Karolina Krawczak)

Step 9: We presented a paper at the 3rd International Conference of the Scandinavian Association for Language and Cognition (SALC III), June 2011, Copenhagen:

"Cognition verbs in Polish, their construal and complement semantics" (Prof. Małgorzata Fabiszak & Dr Karolina Krawczak)

Step 10: We presented a paper at the 44th annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europea (SLE), September 2011, Logrono, Spain:

"Social and Individual Cognition, Modality and Negation in the use of the Polish verb wierzyć 'believe'" (Prof. Małgorzata Fabiszak, Dr Anna Hebda)

Step 11: We presented 2 papers at Meaning Context and Cognition, March 2012, Łódź:

"Conceptual gender of THOUGHT in Polish" (Dr Iwona Kokorniak)

"Thinking about THINK ABOUT" (Dr Iwona Kokorniak & Dr Karolina Krawczak)

 
Step 12: We presented a paper at Grammaticalization and data, May 2012, Rouen, France:

"Grammaticalization of mental predicates in Polish" (Prof. Małgorzata Fabiszak & Dr Iwona Kokorniak)

Step 13: We organized a workshop Corpus Approaches to (Lexical and Grammatical) Semantics (in cooperation with Dr Dylan Glynn) at the 43rd Poznań Linguistic Meeting, September 2012, at which we presented  a paper "A corpus-driven quantitative study of THINK ABOUT and its near-synonymous constructions in Polish"

Step 14: We presented a paper at the 5th International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, October 2012, Freiburg, Germany:

"Mental Predicates in Polish and English: A study of verb cosntrual and complement semantics" (Prof. Małgorzata Fabiszak & Dr Karolina Krawczak)

"Collocation analysis as a means of measuring the grammaticalization of aspectual prefixes in Polish" (Prof. Małgorzata Fabiszak & Dr Iwona Kokorniak)

Step 16: We presented a paper at the conference Cognitive Linguistics in the Year 2013, organized by the Polish Cognitive Linguistics Association, Warszawa, September 2013

"Collocation analysis as a means of measuring the grammaticalization of aspectual prefixes in Polish" (Prof. Małgorzata Fabiszak, Dr Iwona Kokorniak & Prof. Rafał L. Górski)