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Article published In: Beyond Corpus Data — Complementary and Alternative Methods in Cognitive Linguistics
Edited by Anton Granvik, Veera Hatakka, Olli O. Silvennoinen, Riku Erkkilä and Eveliina Mäntylä
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 23:2] 2025
► pp. 345–374

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Special issue article

Combining corpora and video-based descriptions

A multimodal approach to the contrastive analysis of verbs and events

 | Università degli Studi di Firenze
Published online: 5 September 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00227.cac
Abstract
This paper explores the methodological potential of combining corpus-based and video-based resources in Contrastive Analysis within the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics. Focusing on the breaking domain and the verbs used to describe events in this domain in English, Italian, and Swedish, we integrate data from the TenTen corpora and IMAGACT, a multimodal linguistic resource, to examine how different linguistic resources contribute to semantic analysis. We argue that using multiple data types enhances methodological robustness. We show that the use of a video-based language resource provides a consistent and reliable tertium comparationis and allows the researchers to observe how actions are performed and to identify the characteristics of the action participants. These insights are combined with corpus data, which offers richer information about the verbs’ use in a variety of contexts. By combining different data types, we gain a more comprehensive understanding of verbs and action semantics.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.A brief description of the breaking domain
  • 4.Combining linguistic resources: A case study of the breaking domain
    • 4.1Breaking events in IMAGACT
    • 4.2Results based on IMAGACT
    • 4.3Breaking events in TenTen corpora
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (50)
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