Lowri Williams

(she/her)

Research

Thesis

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

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.

Supervision

Dr Andreas Buerki, Dr David Schönthal & Dr Iwan Rees

Funding sources

Funded by the Welsh Graduate School for the Social Sciences (formerly ESRC Wales DTP)

Biography

Academic Qualifications

• 2018: MA Language & Linguistics (Cardiff University) - Distinction
• 2017: BSc (Hons) Open Degree in Linguistics and Social Science (The Open University) - First Class

Supervisors

David Schonthal

Lecturer

Andreas Buerki

Senior Lecturer