Open Access

Christine Möhrs

• In this paper, the basic assumptions are presented against the background of the development of a corpus-based method to determine suitable headword candidates for the LeGeDe-prototype (LeGeDe= Lexik des gesprochenen Deutsch), a lexicographical resource on spoken German. In a first quantitatively oriented step, potential one-word headword candidates are identified with the help of frequency class comparisons from a corpus for spoken (FOLK) and a subset from a corpus for written German (DEREKO). Qualitative analyses based on a project-specifically defined sample of data from the FOLK corpus lead to multi-word headword candidates. The results of the qualitative analyses were also compared with the results of studies from the research literature as well as (quantitative-orientated) bi- and trigram analyses. In their multi-word form, these candidates are particularly characterized by the fact that they assume a very special interactional function in the (authentic) interaction and have to be described as a whole unit. The paper explains this combined procedure, which was extracted in the LeGeDe-project for the appointment of headword candidates.