[Corpora-List] associative experiments, comparative linguistics

Thu Aug 20 07:31:48 UTC 2009

Hi, Lev,

Many of the members of CL are linguists, like me, so I'm a bit surprised
that no one has mentioned the following brilliant (especially for its time)
article, in the very first collection (?1970) _New horizons in linguistics_
by John Lyons (my surprise also accounts for my tardiness, since I thought
someone would mention at least the first chapter):

the chapter is, I think, called just 'Word associations', and, at least for
me, helped very much to make sense of a complex area of research that was
often very unclear to non-psychologists. I had the author's name in mind
(?Herbert Clark), but now I'm not sure. Likewise, an idea (totally untested,
as far as I know) that is worth considering is to ask for 'antonyms' instead
of 'associations' for words (yes, *all* tested words). This idea is based,
in part, on ?Clark's observation that (paraphrasing) 'any limitation or
qualification attached to the association request will narrow the responses'
(in part, getting rid of most of the 'random scatter' type of responses, as
well as the syntagmatic ones [the latter not usually what researchers are
most interested in]). The other motivation for the idea is Ken Hale's
article (from Google: *Hale*, *Kenneth* L. 1971. A note on a Warlpiri *
tradition* of *antonymy*. *Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in
Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology*. Danny D. Steinberg and Leon A.
Jakobovits, eds. Pp. 472-482. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Both
of these chapters are relatively short and well worth reading, as well as
possibly seminal for you. Hope this helps.

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Lev Kundin <lev.kundin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear corpora list members,
>
> Thank you very much for all replies - I will be having a look at all
> the resources that you have kindly referenced very shortly and maybe
> will be getting back to you with some further questions. I appreciate
> your commitment - it's always very nice to get back to corpora list
> and find everyone being so helpful, and replying very promptly.
>
> However, having scanned your responses and read my message again, I
> realised that I did not express myself clearly. By associative
> experiments and word associations I meant those experiments when a
> respondent is given a number of words in one language (or several? -
> but that's something I haven't heard of so far, hence asking) and they
> are supposed to put down their first association with each of the
> words. Those pairs (stimulus-reaction) are then being analysed),
> semantic networks bearing the strength of each association are
> constructed and drawn conclusions upon etc. That's my vague
> understanding of the field, I am only embarking on (or rather planning
> to do) research in this field and would like to find references on
> current/previous achievements in the area. I hope this clarifies what
> I am looking for and maybe you can give me more specific hints. I am
> sorry if some of you already did get me right and pointed out some
> highly relevant materials - I haven't had a chance to have a look
> through the references, but will definitely do so shortly.
>
> I would also like to give some background, because both of my
> enquiries sound a bit 'out of the blue'. I am a computer scientist,
> did my BA in Moscow, then went to Oxford for an MSc in Computer
> Science last year where I took several CL-related courses (this is my
> professional hobby, so to say) and did a final project under
> supervision of Steve Clark (Oxford Comlab) and Pete Whitelock (OUP)
> called 'Bilingual Corpus Exploratory Workbench'. The project was about
> trying to analyse the nature of bilingual equivalence and creating a
> tool for lexicographers to assist them in putting together bilingual
> dictionaries by suggesting different translations for stem words
> entered. I then wanted to do a DPhil in Oxford, but didn't find any
> funding, so had to get back to work (now in UK). I am still thinking
> back to Computational Linguistics though, because that's one of the
> few areas in my profession that really amuses me.
>
> Having got in touch with a researcher back in Russia recently, I am
> now planning to do a part-time research work under his supervision in
> the field that I attempted to describe above. Their lab has previously
> done such experiments in Russian and several other languages I
> believe. My idea and potential topic is to firstly try and create an
> internet-based multilingual version of such experiment to bring it to
> a much larger scale and collect some more or less significant volumes
> of data. Secondly, I am supposed to come up with new methods/forms of
> such experiments, and, more importantly, new ways of analysing their
> results. That's it in a nutshell.
>
> Once again, I would appreciate any advice on all above. Sorry it was a
> lengthy email, but I wanted to try and get it as clear as I could at
> this point. If anyone who is reading this feels they might be
> interested in any sort of collaboration regarding my future research,
> I would definitely be keen on discussing that.
>
> Thanks again to everyone.
>
> Regards,
> Lev.
>
> 2009/8/17 Lev Kundin <lev.kundin at gmail.com>:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I would appreciate if someone could point me into the direction of
> > some research/experiments(off/on-line)/articles/any other materials in
> > the area of gathering word associations, various methods of analysing
> > them and/or comparative analysis of word associations among different
> > languages. Any help will be highly appreciated, including corrections
> > on the terminology of this research area that I have hopefully vaguely
> > identified.
> >
> > Thank you very much in advance.
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Lev.
> >
>
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>

-- 
James L. Fidelholtz
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO
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