Shouting and Screaming: Manner and Noise Verbs in Communication

• Published in: Literary and linguistic computing 2001-04, Vol.16 (1), p.77-97
• Main Authors: Urban, Margaret, Ruppenhofer, Josef
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Descriptive studies and applied theories; Linguistics; Semantics and pragmatics
• ISSN: 0268-1145; 1477-4615
• DOI: 10.1093/llc/16.1.77

When a noise verb is used to indicate verbal communication, factors from both the source domain of the verb (perception) and the target domain (communication) play a role in determining the argument structure of the sentence. While the target domain supplies a syntactic structure, the source domain's semantics constrain the degree to which that syntactic structure can be exploited. This can be determined by comparing noise verbs in this use with manner-of-communication verbs, which are superficially similar, but native to communication. Data for these two classes of verbs were drawn from the British National Corpus. The data were annotated with frame-semantic markup, as described in the Berkeley FrameNet Project. We compared the presence, type of syntactic realization, and position of the semantically annotated arguments for both classes of verbs. We found that noise and manner verbs show statistically significant differences in these three areas. For instance, noise verbs are more focused on the form of the message than manner verbs: noise verbs appear more frequently with a quoted message. In addition, there are differences other than the complementation patterns: certain noise verbs are biased with respect to speakers' genders, message types, and even orthography in quoted messages.