Attraction is a bodily feeling that most of us have likely felt before. This feeling is considered highly important when choosing a potential partner. Thus, plethora of studies have focused on...Show moreAttraction is a bodily feeling that most of us have likely felt before. This feeling is considered highly important when choosing a potential partner. Thus, plethora of studies have focused on uncovering the features that people generally find attractive, such as genuine smiles, coy smiles and provocative clothing. However, the role of personal characteristics that may also influence one’s level of attraction towards these features remains not well understood. In the present thesis, I examine one such characteristic, namely adult attachment style and its effect on attraction. Following the exclusion criteria, nineteen (N = 20; 9 men; 12 women; 7 securely attached; 4 avoidantly attached; 9 anxiously attached) participants were included in this study. Participants were presented with a series of videos of opposite-sex individuals dressed in either conservative or provocative clothing and exhibiting neutral expressions, genuine smiles and coy smiles. They filled in several questionnaires, including the Adult Attachment Questionnaire (AAQ). In line with the expectations, it was found that genuine smiles were rated as significantly more attractive, compared to neutral expressions. Contrary to my expectations, no significant effects were found of coy smiles, clothing or attachment style on initial attraction. Future research may benefit from replication of this thesis with optional improvements, such as a larger sample size, the adoption of Adult Attachment Interview methods (AAI), greater differences between provocative and conservative clothing conditions and a naturalistic setting.Show less
This thesis investigates whether the demise of the cardinal posture verbs (CPVs): sit, stand, and lie, in Modern English can be ascribed to the rise of the [be +V-ing] construction. Using the data...Show moreThis thesis investigates whether the demise of the cardinal posture verbs (CPVs): sit, stand, and lie, in Modern English can be ascribed to the rise of the [be +V-ing] construction. Using the data from the Penn Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English and the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English, together comprising a period from 1500 to 1914, the frequency with which the CPVs occur have been found to nearly half in size whereas the frequency of the [be + V-ing] construction increases by more than a tenfold. There is a strong negative relationship between these constructions ( = -0.733) but not significant (p < 0.055). However, the combined coefficient of the three CPVs cumulated improves compared to the correlation coefficient of each of the CPVs individually (r = 0.13 for sit, r = -0.67 for stand, and r = -0.64 for lie). A definite semantic clash between the CPVs and the [be +V-ing] construction has been found unlikely. Instead, competition within the functional-semantic domain of ongoingness in Modern English potentially lead to a period of attraction between these two construction types and possibly more, e.g. be busy and keep V-ing. Moreover, the English language became unbounded due to a larger change in the English aspectual system (Los, 2012). The other Germanic languages are bounded languages which use the CPVs richly but have no progressive that is equivalent to the [be +V-ing] construction. The typological switch in English may have, therefore, influenced the halted grammaticalisation of the CPVs and the thriving grammaticalisation of the [be +V-ing] construction and alike constructions.Show less
