What You Think Ain’t What You Get: Highly polysemous verbs in grammar and mind

It is widely assumed, if only implicitly, that frequency can be equated with salience, that is, that the most frequent item (as attested, for example, in language) is the one that comes first to people’s minds. This belief has even been elevated to the status of principle, namely Schmid’s (2000: 39) ‘From-Corpus-to-Cognition Principle’, according to which ‘frequency in text instantiates entrenchment in the cognitive system’. And unsurprisingly, both frequency and salience have been taken as evidence for the notion of prototypicality (see e.g. Winters 1990). Yet, some studies suggest that this equation might not be justified and that the linguistically most frequent item might not correspond to the cognitively most salient one (cf. Roland & Jurafsky 2002, Gilquin 2004 or Nordquist 2004). In order to further explore this hypothesis, the case of highly polysemous verbs will be investigated. More precisely, the verbs take and give will be examined both from a grammatical and cognitive perspective. The most frequent use(s) of the two verbs in language, established on the basis of corpus data, will be compared to the results obtained for the most salient use(s) by means of elicitation tests, where respondents are asked to spontaneously produce a sentence for each of the verbs. Reasons will be put forward to explain the discrepancies between the two sets of data, among which the primacy of the concrete over the abstract in neural representations (MacLennan 1998) and the unit status and independent storage of idioms or idiom-like expressions (Vogel Sosa & MacFarlane 2002). The consequences of this mismatch for Second Language Acquisition will also be discussed. If the corpus-attested and experimentally retrieved patterns do not overlap, which pattern should be given priority in SLA? While both positions have been defended in the literature, it will be shown that each of them has its pros and cons and that the question probably deserves more attention than it has been given thus far