Identification and Analysis of Personification in Hungarian: The PerSECorp project

2730 Identification and Analysis of Personification in Hungarian: The PerSECorp project Gábor Simon Eötvös Loránd University Budapest H-1088 Budapest, Múzeum krt. 4/A. simon.gabor@btk.elte.hu Abstract Despite the recent findings on the conceptual and linguistic organization of personification, we have relatively little knowledge about its lexical patterns and grammatical templates. It is especially true in the case of Hungarian which has remained an understudied language regarding the constructions of figurative meaning generation. The present paper aims to provide a corpus-driven approach to personification analysis in the framework of cognitive linguistics. This approach is based on the building of a semi-automatically processed research corpus (the PerSE corpus) in which personifying linguistic structures are annotated manually. The present test version of the corpus consists of online car reviews written in Hungarian (10468 words altogether): the texts were tokenized, lemmatized, morphologically analyzed, syntactically parsed, and PoS-tagged with the e-magyar NLP tool. For the identification of personifications, the adaptation of the MIPVU protocol was used and combined with additional analysis of semantic relations within personifying multi- word expressions. The paper demonstrates the structure of the corpus as well as the levels of the annotation. Furthermore, it gives an overview of possible data types emerging from the analysis: lexical pattern, grammatical characteristics, and the construction-like behavior of personifications in Hungarian. Keywords: personification, annotation, Hungarian 1. Introduction Personification can be defined as “the treatment of a non- human concept or entity as if it were human” (Thornborrow and Wareing, 1998), e.g., a car can be described as powerful or having sensitive qualities. More than a decade ago, the investigation of this figurative category was deficient in systematic corpus research: as Dorst (2011) put it, “hardly any empirical work” had been done “on the different manifestations of personification in discourse” and it remained “unclear how personifications can be reliably identified and analyzed.” Five years later, the state of the art did not seem to be changed: the editors of a representative collection of studies on personification claimed that “the figure’s cognitive form and function, its rhetorical and pictorial effects, rarely elicit scholarly attention”, which means that “[a]s a communicative device it is either taken for granted or dismissed as mere convention” (Melion and Ramakers, 2016). Although Dorst and her colleagues devoted remarkable attention to exploring the conceptual complexity and linguistic variability of personification in English (see Dorst, 2011; Dorst, Mulder and Steen 2011), the systematic extension of this promising start onto a larger scale of corpus research is yet to be carried out. The aim of the present paper is to take the first steps towards this extension within the framework of cognitive linguistics. As an example, it has been observed that the PoS category has a significant role in the emergence of personifying meaning; however, we do not know the exact proportions of verbal, nominal, adjectival etc. personifications in our discourse. Or, turning to another factor, Dorst and her colleagues have found in an experiment that the majority of personifications being identified by informants was multi- word expression …

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