engleski

Imageability of unimageable: Researching imageability of pseudoverbs in Croatian language

Imageability of lexical units can be defined as degree of ease with which the visual or auditive picture of a reference is created. Previous research on imageability of verbs and nouns point to higher imageability of nouns (Bird, Franklin, Howard 2001 ; Simonsen, Lind, Hansen, Holm, Melvik 2012). However, in the course of preliminary research on imageability carried out on the sample of 200 Croatian verbs and nouns (selected from the list of most frequent 1000 verbs and nouns from the hrWaC, Croatian web corpus), containing the pseudowords formed as nouns and pseudowords formed as verbs as well, the participants (students of the University of Zagreb) rated Croatian pseudoverbs significantly higher than pseudonouns (Peti- Stantić & Tušek 2015). Pseudowords by definition lack lexical meaning, having form only. This means that they actually represent a string of phonemes that would be acceptable according to phonotactic rules of a given language, without any semantic meaning attached. Without any semantic content, however, pseudowords should not be imageable. Pseudowords were composed by replacing first letter in the Croatian word with another differing from the original one in four distinctive features. Their resemblance to the real word has been tried to reduced to minimum by testing their possible meanings with a group of native Croatian speakers. The participants were given a list of pseudowords and were asked to answer whether the word resembles to any word from their native dialect. If more than 70% of the participants answered negatively, the pseudoword was considered adequate for the research. If in the remaining 30% who answered positively, more than 20% gave the same answer, the pseudoword has not been used. In this presentation we start from the results of this preliminary research. Consequentially, our hypothesis is that the pseudowords in/with verbal form– although the verbs themselves are supposed to be less imageable than the nouns – will be rated higher in imageability than the nouns. The reason for such a hypothesis is in the recognizeability of word-formation suffixes for infinitive which we used in composing pseudowords. Namely, in Croatian there are only two infinitive suffixes, -ti and –ći, and therefore the effect of familiarity should be very high (ie. pseudoverb njolati signalizes the verb through morpheme -ti). As a result, we expect these two verbal word-formation morphemes to be more transparent than, for example, null-morpheme in nominative of pseudonoun snub, or -a in the feminine form snuba. The report on the results of an experimental study in which the participants evaluated the imageability will be given. Firstly, they rated imageability of pseudoverbs and pseudonouns using the scale from 1 to 5. In the next part of the experiment, they got the list of the same pseudoverbs, but with additional verbal prefixes added, for example raz-, pred-, nad-, po- etc. Then they ranked pseudoverbs both without a prefix and with prefixes according to their imageability. Using this technique, we tested the impact of prefixes to the imageability of verbs in an isolated context, without the influence of root imageability.

imageability, pseudoverbs

nije evidentirano