Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (15) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (15)
Keywords
- Deutsch (11)
- Korpus <Linguistik> (9)
- Paronym (5)
- Computerunterstützte Lexikographie (4)
- Online-Wörterbuch (4)
- Wörterbuch (3)
- Antonym (2)
- Faux amis (2)
- Lexikografie (2)
- Lexikographie (2)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (6)
- (Verlags)-Lektorat (5)
This paper discusses how cognitive aspects can be incorporated into lexicographic meaning descriptions based on corpus-driven analysis. The new German Online dictionary “Paronyme − Dynamisch im Kontrast” is concerned with easily confused words such as effektiv/effizient, sensibel/sensitiv. It is currently in the process of being developed and it aims at adopting a more conceptual and encyclopedic approach to meaning. Contrastive entries emphasize usage, comparing conceptual categories and indicating the mapping of knowledge. Adaptable access to lexicographic details offers different perspectives on information, and authentic examples reflect prototypical structures.
Some of the cognitive features are demonstrated with the help of examples. Firstly, I will outline how patterns of usage imply conceptual categories as central ideas instead of sufficiently logical criteria of semantic distinction. In this way, linguistic findings correlate better with how users conceptualize language. Secondly, it is pointed out how collocates are family members and fillers in contexts. Thirdly, I will demonstrate how contextual structure and function are included by summarizing referential information. Details are drawn from corpus data; they are usage-based patterns illustrating conversational interaction and semantic negotiation in contemporary public discourse. Finally, I will show flexible consultation routines where the focus on structural knowledge changes.
In this paper, we will present a first attempt to classify commonly confused words in German by consulting their communicative functions in corpora. Although the use of so-called paronyms causes frequent uncertainties due to similarities in spelling, sound and semantics, up until now the phenomenon has attracted little attention either from the perspective of corpus linguistics or from cognitive linguistics. Existing investigations rely on structuralist models, which do not account for empirical evidence. Still, they have developed an elaborate model based on formal criteria, primarily on word formation (cf. Lăzărescu 1999). Looking from a corpus perspective, such classifications are incompatible with language in use and cognitive elements of misuse.
This article sketches first lexicological insights into a classification model as derived from semantic analyses of written communication. Firstly, a brief description of the project will be provided. Secondly, corpus-assisted paronym detection will be focused. Thirdly, in the main section the paper concerns the description of the datasets for paronym classification and the classification procedures. As a work in progress, new insights will continually be extended once spoken and CMC data are added to the investigations.
German lexical items with similar or related morphological roots and similar meaning potential are easily confused by native speakers and language learners. These include so-called paronyms such as effektiv/effizient , sensitive/sensibel, formell/formal/förmlich . Although these are generally not regarded as synonyms, empirical studies suggest that in some cases items of a paronym set have undergone meaning change and developed synonymous notions. In other cases, they remain similar in meaning, but show subtle differences in definition and restrictions of usage. Whereas the treatment of synonyms has received attention from corpus-linguists (cf. Partington 1998; Taylor 2003), the subject of paronyms has not been revisited with empirical, data-driven methods neither in terms of semantic theory nor in terms of practical lexicography. As a consequence, we also need to search for suitable corpus methods for detailed semantic investigation. Lexicographically, some German paronyms have been documented in printed dictionaries (e.g. Müller 1973; Pollmann & Wolk 2010). However, there is no corpus-assisted reference guide describing paronyms empirically and enabling readers to find the correct contemporary usage. Therefore, solutions to some lexicographic challenges are required.
This paper shows how corpora and related tools can be used to analyse and present significant colligational patterns lexicographically. In German, patterns such as das nötige Wissen vermitteln and sein Wissen unter Beweis stellen play a vital role when learning the language, as they exhibit relevant idiomatic usage and lexical and syntactic rules of combination. Each item has specific semantic and grammatical functions and particular preferences with respect to position and distribution. An analysis of adjectives, for example, identifies preferences in adverbial, attributive, or predicative functions.
Traditionally, corpus analyses of syntagmatic constructions have not been conducted for lexicographic purposes. This paper shows how to utilise corpora to extract and examine typical syntagms and how the results of such an analysis are documented systematically in ELEXIKO, a large-scale corpus-based Internet reference work of German. It also demonstrates how this dictionary accounts for the lexical and grammatical interplay between units in a syntagm and how authentic corpus material and complementary prose-style usage notes are a useful guide to text production or reception.
Incompatibility (or co-hyponymy) is the most general type of semantic relation between lexical items, the meaning of which entails exclusion. Such items fall under a superordinate term or concept and denote sets which have no members in common (e.g. animal: dog-cat-mouse-lion-sheep; example from Cruse 2004). Traditionally, these have been of interest to lexical semanticists for the description of the structure of the lexicon. However, incompatibility is not just a relation that signifies a difference of meaning. This paper is a critical corpus-assisted re-evaluation of the phenomenon of incompatibility which argues that the relation in question sometimes also functions as a discourse marker. Incompatibles indicate recurrent intertextual patterns. This holds particularly true for socially or politically controversial lexical items such as Flexibilität (flexibility), Mobilität (mobility) or Globalisierung (globalisation). Corpus investigations of such words have revealed that among other semantically related terms, incompatibles have a crucial discourse focussing function. For the German lexical item Globalisierung, I will show how its lexical usage can be studied through a corpus-driven analysis of corresponding incompatibles. Incompatible terms are not contingent co-words but often occur in close contextual proximity and participate in regular syntagmatic structures (e.g. Globalisierung und Rationalisierung; Globalisierung und Modernisierung; Neoliberalismus, Globalisierung und Kapitalismus). Hence, these are easily extracted by conducting a computational collocation analysis. Such significant collocates provide a good insight into the discursive and thematic contexts of the search word. Following Teubert (2004), I will demonstrate how the meaning of such lexical items is constituted in discourse and how the examination of these particular collocates reveals their sense-constructing function and their pragmatic-discursive force. I will provide a brief discussion of the methodology used for such analyses, and I will explain why the complex semantic-pragmatic and thematic-communicative patterns implied in sets of incompatibles should be given a stronger emphasis in lexicography.
Contextual lexical relations, such as sense relations, have traditionally played an essential role in disambiguating word senses in lexicography, as they offer insights into the meaning and use of a word. However, the description of paradigmatic relations in particular is often restricted to a few types such as synonymy and antonymy. The limited description of various types of relations and the method of presenting these relations in existing German dictionaries are often problematic.
Elexiko, the first German hypertext dictionary compiled exclusively on the basis of an electronic corpus, offers a new way of presenting sense relations, using a variety of approaches to extract the necessary data. In this paper, I will show how elexiko presents a differentiated system of paradigmatic relations including synonymy, various subtypes of incompatibility (such as antonymy, complementarity, converseness, reversiveness, etc.), and vertical structures (such as hyponymy and meronymy). Primary attention, however, will focus on the question of how data for a paradigmatic description is retrieved from the corpus. Whereas a corpus-driven approach is mainly used for various semantic information and a corpus-based method plays an important part in obtaining data for the grammatical description in elexiko, it will be argued that both the corpus-driven and the corpus-based approach can be complementary methods in gaining insights into sense relations. I will demonstrate which results can be obtained by each approach, and advantages and disadvantages of both procedures will be explored in more detail.
As sense relations are context-dependent, it will also be demonstrated how a sense-bound presentation can be realised in an electronic reference work including a system of cross-referencing that illustrates lexical structures and the interrelatedness of words within the lexicon. Finally, I will show how accompanying examples from the corpus and additional lexicographic information help the user to understand contextual restrictions, so that s/he is able to use dictionary information more effectively.
Current working practice of established German dictionaries incorporates large corpora as the basis of most analyses, descriptions and presentations. It is, however, individual lexicological and/or different corpus-methodological approaches that play a crucial role in the process of extracting and documenting lexicographic information in individual reference works. This paper addresses the question of how reliable information is in some electronic German dictionaries. Objects of our investigation are different types of corpus dictionaries, e.g. a digitized dictionary, a reference work that compiles its data fully automatically, a lexicographic system combining different electronic resources, and a corpus-assisted dictionary that examines and interprets its corpus data lexicographically. Critical examinations of such reference works inevitably come up with questions of authenticity and reliability of the given dictionary information. The advantages and disadvantages of various lexicographic or corpus-linguistic methods which are individually implemented will be outlined and critically analyzed with the help of examples. According to an extensive study (cf. Müller-Spitzer 2011) reliability of given information is one of the key criteria assigned to any reference work by users. We will elicit how different corpus methods expose different descriptions of natural discourse and how they answer questions of authenticity, typicality and reliability with regard to phenomena such as meaning spectrum, collocations, antonymy and hyperonymy. Overall, this paper is a critical account of the current German lexicographic developments. It will include discussions on meta-lexicographic demands and focus on whether there are suitable complementary corpus approaches providing authentic dictionary information to a satisfactory extent.
ELEXIKO is a relatively new lexicological-lexicographic project based at the Institut fiir Deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim. The project compiles a reference work that explains and documents contemporary German; it was specifically designed for online publication (www.elexiko.de). The primary and exclusive basis for lexicographic interpretation is an extensive German corpus. If one refers to elexiko as an Internet dictionary, it is purely for practical reasons, elexiko is (far) more than a dictionary in its traditional sense, although, of course, it contains descriptions of the meaning and use of a lexeme just as any traditional dictionary. It is both, a hypertext dictionary and a lexical data information system.