Lowri Williams

She/Her/Hers/Herself

WilliamsLA29@cardiff.ac.uk

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School of English, Communication & Philosophy,
Cardiff University

Lead supervisor:
Dr Andreas Buerki

Other supervisor(s):

• Dr Iwan Rees
• Dr David Schonthal

Start date: October 2023 (Full time)

Award: General

Subject Pathway:
Linguistics and Bilingualism

Thematic Cluster:
Language, Learning and Behaviour Cluster

The Experiential semantics of Welsh verbs: a corpus-informed functional approach

Summary

Verbs are central to language as they fundamentally construe the actions, states and events that make up human experience (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014). While traditional reference grammars focus on verbal morphology and syntax, a more rounded understanding of a given language calls for a systematic approach to map typical clausal patterns to the range of meanings that verbs can realise.

This project will build on preliminary work by Fontaine and Williams (2021) to develop a functional description of Welsh by integrating two powerful analytical frameworks: Hanks’ (2013) Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA) and Halliday’s (1985) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Using Welsh text data from CorCenCC  - the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh (Knight et al. 2020) - recurrent clausal patterns associated with frequently occurring verb lemmas will be identified and classified in order to capture the range of distinct meanings a verb can realise. These patterns will be further analysed and interpreted using SFL, focusing specifically on the Experiential metafunction, the aspect of functional grammar primarily concerned with representing our experience of the world (Thompson 2014, p.213).

This approach will establish a novel, mixed-methods framework for describing the lexicogrammar of Welsh. As well as offering further insight into how grammar contributes to meaning, in drawing upon methods developed in the fields of corpus linguistics and lexicography, it responds directly to calls from Gibson and Fedorenko (2013) and Lindquist (2009) for the use of empirical research methods in language description.

Research Aims

The central aim of this thesis is to understand how verbs contribute to meaning-making in Welsh, and specifically the range of actions, states and events they can convey. The project is a necessarily exploratory one concerned with the following research aims:

• To empirically identify prototypical clausal patterns associated with frequently-occurring Welsh verbs;
• To evaluate the role that Welsh verbs (in verbal groups) play in construing the categories of human experience and how these are realised in the lexicogrammar;
• To evaluate the relationship between the verbal choices made in Welsh and text type/genre.

Research Impact

This study offers fresh insights into how people communicate in Welsh, establishing a foundation for further study which diverges from prevailing traditional and generative approaches. In carrying out a CPA analysis of real Welsh sentences for the first time, I will generate a fully labelled dataset that can be reused for further linguistic analysis or replicated for other languages as required. Additionally, the Welsh Government (2018) has an ambitious strategy to reach one million speakers by 2050, citing investment in education and digital technologies among its key enablers. The outcomes of this research will therefore be of interest to those currently developing and delivering Welsh pedagogical materials, as well as those conducting research into Natural Language Processing or computational approaches to linguistics.

Bibliography