The Register-specific Distribution of Personification in H ungarian: A Corpus-driven Analysis (2024)

Abstract: The aim of the paper is twofold: (i) to present an extended version of the PerSE corpus, the language resource for investigating personification in Hungarian; (ii) to explore the semantic and lexicogrammatical patterns of Hungarian personification in a corpus-driven analysis, based on the current version of the research corpus. PerSE corpus is compiled from online available Hungarian texts in different registers including journalistic (car reviews and reports on interstate relations) and academic discourse (original research papers from different fields). The paper provides the reader with the infrastructure and the protocol of the semi-automatic and manual annotation in the corpus. Then it gives an overview of the register-specific distribution of personifications and focuses on some of its lexicogrammatical patterns.

## introduction despite its apparent clarity, the category of personification is far from being simple and homogeneous. in the last decades, at least four different conceptual models of personifying meaning-making have been proposed in cognitive linguistics. beyond the general metaphorical explanation (personification is an ontological conceptual metaphor with a human being as its source domain, see @xcite there is an 1 the name of the corpus is the abbreviation of the phrase "personifying structures encoded". the study is based on the extended and improved version of the perse corpus introduced previously @xcite . the former study provided the reader with the annotation protocol, the basic infrastructure of the corpus and some preliminary results of personification identification in a pilot sample of only one register. compared to it, this paper demonstrates the annotation of personifications on a relatively larger scale (analyzing three different registers) and with advanced infrastructure. this modest expansion of the corpus made it possible to consider the registerspecificity of personifying language use. consequently, the scope of the study also encompasses the quantitative analysis of ## theoretical background according to the glossary of kövecses's volume on conceptual metaphor theory, personifications "involve understanding nonhuman entities, or things, in terms of human beings. they thus impute human characteristics to things" @xcite . this very basic definition needs to be detailed with the further aspects of personifying meaningmaking: it attributes agency to non-human entities @xcite , it can rely on the metonymic link between human and non-human entities, and it can be conventionalized in different degrees ("dead personifications", see @xcite . therefore, personification as a semantic phenomenon is much more complex than it is implied in its definition. @xcite operationalize the notion in the following way: if the basic meaning of a lexical unit is human-oriented (i.e., the primary figure of the meaning is typically a human being), and the contextual (or actual) meaning of the unit refers to a non-human entity, it can be labelled as personification. by way of explanation, identifying personification in discourse is a specific process of word sense disambiguation, rendering it possible not only to highlight personifications in a text but also to categorize them in terms of conventionalization. if both the human basic meaning and the non-human contextual meaning are offered by the dictionary, the personification can be considered a conventionalized one. in (1) invasion is a military process in its basic meaning, but it has a more general meaning in the dictionary as well ('someone or something appears somewhere en masse'), therefore the personifying usage of the noun is conventional. however, if only the human basic meaning can be found in the dictionary, the expression is rather a novel personification. in (2) (referring to an engine of a car) greedy has only a human-related meaning in the dictionary @xcite trying to satisfy their desire ardently'), thus the personifying usage of the adjective has not been lexicalized yet. in the case of not referring directly to human beings in the description of the basic meaning by the dictionary, but the prototypical or default figure is human, the personification belongs to the default type. the basic meaning of develop (3) is '<living @xmath0, their features evolve gradually', in which the primary figure is not explicitly a human being, but in its default interpretation, it refers typically to people, therefore it has a default personifying usage. finally, (4) illustrates metonymic personification with the reference of russia to the leaders or the members of the russian army. this lexical semantic approach to personification provides a solid theoretical foundation for a corpusdriven analysis of the linguistic patterns of personifying language use, ensuring such a scope that is broader than in previous research. @xcite , for instance, considers metonymic and personifying readings as alternatives in meaningmaking. in the cognitive linguistic research of the discourse on interstate relations @xcite metonymy is completely excluded from the realm of personification. as a consequence of the latter decision, the personifying use of state names proves to be rather infrequent in the journalistic corpus of the previous analysis. however, the present study adopts such an operationalization of the notion of personification that results in a better recall of the corpus analysis without decreasing the level of precision. the chosen theoretical and methodological orientation is based on the mipvu protocol for metaphor identification @xcite , and since a systematic and comprehensive analysis sheds light on the register-specific patterns of metaphorization in english, we can assume that personifying language use will also show different realizations in terms of discourse types in hungarian. as @xcite observe, the academic register has the highest percentage of metaphor-related words, while fiction is only the third on the list regarding the frequency of metaphors. news texts are almost as metaphorical as academic papers, and conversation is the least metaphorical. compared to the previous research, the perse corpus represents two broad fields of discourse on a higher level of granularity than the amsterdam metaphor corpus: from journalism, i analyzed two specific registers (car reviews and reports on interstate relations), while from academic discourse i sampled original research papers from a wide range of scientific fields, including natural and social sciences. considering the linguistic structure of personification, we can claim that it is not limited to only one word in the discourse. in a previous experimental study, @xcite found that 61.90% of the personifications identified by the informants were word combinations. from a rather theoretical point of view, @xcite defines personification as an "extended unit of meaning" (relying on sinclair's notion), encompassing a node word and its collocations. in my previous analysis @xcite , personification-related arguments were slightly more frequent than words related directly to personifying meaning, which means that on average every personification had at least one argument in the corpus. consequently, the present study also focuses on personifications as potentially multi-word expressions and provides data not only on the raw frequencies of personifications in different texts but also on their size and distribution in terms of node and argument structure. as a result of the overview of the theoretical background of the present study, the central research question is as follows: what are the differences between the patterns of linguistic personification in different registers in hungarian? this general question can be answered from more than one perspective, regarding the distribution and frequency of personifications on the one hand (whole corpus design, see @xcite , and on the other hand taking the lexicogrammatical features of personification in different registers into consideration (linguistic feature design, see @xcite . in this paper, i apply both points of view. ## material and methods before turning to the results of the annotation process and the corpus analysis, i introduce the language resource that served as the basis of the research: the perse corpus. the process of corpus building, the infrastructure of the research, the annotation protocol and the methods of the quantitative analysis are outlined in this section. ## results and discussion after introducing an extended version of the perse corpus, this section demonstrates why such a language resource is useful in researching figurative language use (especially in cognitive linguistics). first of all, i explore the distributions of the allocated labels in the entire corpus. the statistical testing of register-specific differences is the next focus of the analysis. finally, i zoom in on some lexicogrammatical patterns of personification in the corpus. ## limitations of the study the perse corpus can be considered a new language resource in hungarian that makes it possible to analyze the expressions of personification within and across different registers in a systematic way. it has, however, three major limitations that need to be addressed here. first, it is the manifestation of in-progress research, which means that other texts will be sampled into it on the one hand, and on the other, it needs to be made available for the broader research community. in its present version, it is rather a modest-scale research corpus, thus, the long-term goal of corpus compilation is to provide an open-source database designed to support cognitive corpus linguistic investigations. secondly, further refinement of the annotation procedure needs to be carried out to increase the reliability of the identification process and create a benchmark for cross-linguistic exploration of personification. this also means that not only do additional annotators have to be involved in the curation phase of the corpus but also that the reliability of personification identification needs to be tested via alternative empirical (experimental and/or questionnaire-based) psycholinguistic methods as well. the dictionary-based analysis demonstrates currently that the precise identification of potential personifications is feasible, but whether the annotated expressions are true personifications in actual discourse comprehension has remained an open question. finally, the corpus paves the way for automatic personification detection providing a precise and comprehensive data set for training large language models to this task. however, it is not clear whether these models would gain enough information from the corpus to produce good results, and if so, how this development could contribute to the current nlp field. nevertheless, personification is a pervasive phenomenon in discourse, which makes its identification a good start for improving text classification or observing the patterns of how (mental) health issues or other negative factors are construed figuratively in everyday life. ## conclusion personification is a complex phenomenon in terms of both conceptualization and linguistic organization. thus, cognitive and corpus linguistics need to cooperate in exploring the functioning of personifying meaning-making. the perse corpus is a unique language resource for analyzing personification in hungarian from a corpus-driven perspective. with its extended size (exceeding 30,000 tokens), genre and register variability (including technical, political and scientific language use, but also formal and informal styles in three different registers) and hybrid annotation design (extending to automatic preprocessing of grammatical features and manual identification of personifications as well) the perse corpus provides the analyst with a vast amount of information on personification, making it possible to approach it from different theoretical perspectives and with a wide range of methods. the present paper introduced the new, extended version of the corpus, outlining its methodological framework, and demonstrated how to exploit this language resource in a corpus-driven analysis. the corpus annotation relies partly on automatic language processing, and hence the texts in the corpus can be analyzed on different levels of granularity (from lexical density based on tokenization and lemmatization to word class categories, and morphological and syntactic analyses). the identification of personification is based on the operationalization of the notion proposed in the literature. the dictionary-based word sense disambiguation maximizes the transparency of the annotation while minimizing its intuitive nature. moreover, the protocol extends the task of identification to measuring the idiomatic character of personifying expressions and allocating semantic relation labels in the corpus. thus, not only the lexicogrammatical patterns of personification can be observed but also their internal semantic organization and their prefabricatedness. this line of analysis can lead us toward the exploration of the construction-like behavior of personification in hungarian in the future. compared to its pilot version, the extended perse corpus sheds new light on the languageinternal variability of personification as well. the most important findings in this regard are as follows. (i) journalistic registers use more personifications than academic discourse (although register-specificity is assumable based on the observations). (ii) personifications in academic texts and interstate reports appear to be more complex in their linguistic structure with a stronger tendency to use idiomatic patterns of hungarian. (iii) register has a significant effect on the semantic quality of personification: interstate reports prefer metonymic personifications whereas car reviews exploit the potential of novel personifications. (iv) some frequent hungarian verbs are associated more with personifying language use in particular registers (e.g., the verb tud ('can/know') in car reviews). the perse corpus also provides a solid methodological grounding for an even more extended analysis of hungarian personifications in the future. the closest aim of the author of the present paper is to sample literary texts into the corpus and test the well-known assumption that literature would be the richest source of figurative language use. additionally, the corpus may serve as an input data set for improving large language models in the direction of detecting and automatically identifying personification in language. in other words, the perse corpus as a reliable language resource with precise and multifaceted processing of lexicogrammatical features can be used as a corpus for training existing nlp resources in hungarian toward automatic personification annotation. finally, the design of the corpus and the identification protocol may serve as a vantage point for creating other similar language-specific resources in various languages, bringing personification onto the top of the agenda of cross-linguistic cognitive corpus analyses. this would motivate the reinterpretation of personification as figurative language use evaluating it not as a subtype of metaphor but rather as a complex and colorful phenomenon, which is worth investigating in its own right.