How many ways to GO in Arabic?

A corpus-based approach to determining polysemy and

synonymy of the verbs ḏahaba, maḍā, rāḥa,and inṭalaqa

Regardless of which particular linguistic theory one adopts concerning the lexicon, polysemy
stands out as a pervasive feature of words (and constructions), and yet it is a feature which presents real
challenges to linguistic theory and description. In particular, the methods employed to identify and justify
polysemy remain problematic. The criticisms levelled at purely intuition-based approaches to describing
polysemy in Sandra and Rice (1995) continue to be as relevant now as they were when first made 14
years ago (though see Vanhove (2008) for various new methods). In this paper, we explore the value of
adapting Gries’ Behavioural Profile approach (Gries 2006; Gries & Otani to appear) as an empirical check
on intuition-based claims about polysemy and synonomy of the Arabic GO verbs ḏahaba, maḍā,
rāḥa,and inṭalaqa.
We began with 300 randomly selected concordance lines for each of the verbs ḏahaba, maḍā,
rāḥa,and inṭalaqa, taken from arabiCorpus (http://arabicorpus.byu.edu). Each verb use was coded as one
of the polysemous sub-senses, as implied by contemporary dictionary practice and intuition. So, for
example, GO ‘to go (somewhere)’ uses were distinguished from TAKE ‘to take along’ uses. Each
instance of these verbs was then additionally coded for a wide variety of features or “ID-tags”, including
morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties, with around 90 such features utilized. The dataset of
ID-tags for each verb was then subjected to a clustering algorithm, carried out in R, which results in
clusters of the sub-senses. The pvcluster package in R (Suzuki & Shimodaira, 2006) calculates
probability values for each cluster which further refines the claims that can be made on the basis of the
resulting dendrograms. In our adaptation of the Behavioural Profile method, we explored sub-senses of
verbs, for each verb, as well as combining all sub-senses of all four verbs, allowing us to explore
clustering properties relating to polysemy of a single verb as well as synonymy between different verbs.
Results showed that there are clusters of sub-senses which can be justified in a principled way, as
opposed to the simple enumeration of sub-senses found in typical dictionary practice. In the case of the
verb maḍā by itself, for example, the sub-senses ‘continue/go on (doing something)’ and
‘advance/progress’ turn out to be closely clustered by our method even though some dictionaries might
not group them together. It is particularly interesting to examine the clustering patterns when data from
all four verbs are combined in order to examine the degree of relatedness between sub-senses of the four
different verbs. Given the computational basis of the method, it is quite easy to alter the number and
nature of ID-tags which are used in the calculations of the clusters. We report on the effects of these
changes, e.g., relying on syntactic ID-tags only versus semantic ID-tags only.

References
Gries, Stefan Th. 2006. Corpus-based methods and cognitive semantics: the many meanings of to run. In: Gries,
Stefan Th. and Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds.). Corpora in cognitive linguistics: corpus-based approaches to
syntax and lexis. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gries, Stefan Th. and Naoki Otani. to appear. Behavioral profiles: a corpus-based perspective on synonymy and
antonymy. ICAME Journal.
Sandra, Dominiek and Sally Rice. 1995. Network Analyses of Prepositional Meaning: Mirroring Whose Mind – the
Linguist’s or the Language User’s? Cognitive Linguistics, 6, 89-130.
Suzuki, Ryota and Hidetoshi Shimodaira. 2006. Pvclust: an R package for assessing the uncertainty in hierarchical
clustering. Bioinformatics, 22(12), 1540-1542.
Vanhove, Martine (ed.). 2008. From polysemy to semantic change: Towards a typology of lexical semantic
associations. Studies in Language Companion Series 106. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Publishing Company.