[Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography) - "as many senses"

[Ken Litkowski]

  Patrick Hanks has somewhere indicated that a lexeme acquires all sorts 
of components of meaning in its travels through its uses. As a result, 
any given context activates some subset of those components. A listener 
or reader has to listen or read carefully to identify just what 
components are being activated. My wife does this quite interestingly, 
picking and choosing from so-called different senses, frequently coming 
up with combinations that give me pause. I find this process quite 
intriguing. Clearly, a lexeme is defined by the company it keeps. 
Different dictionaries are only capturing a moment in time and space, 
keeping corpus linguists gainfully employed and challenged.

     Ken

On 9/10/2010 3:52 PM, Jim Fidelholtz wrote:
> Hi, all,
>
> In answer to Ramesh, I don't (and shouldn't) exclude multi-word 
> lexemes, although my comments (and Baayen's research) were focused on 
> traditional 'words' (ie, written text units separated by spaces, eg). 
> I'm not well-versed enough in Cruse's theory to comment very cogently, 
> but Tadeusz's characterization of it does not sound like a restrictive 
> enough theory for my tastes; it rather sounds like 'anything goes', 
> pretty much like my understanding of traditional semantic theory (a 
> clear and cogent discussion of semantic theory(es) is found in the 
> first chapters of Wilks et al., _Electric words_, approximately 1996 
> or so). My inclination is to prefer a very restrictive theory until it 
> can be shown that data do not support it (and, given human nature, but 
> also for sound scientific reasons, a bit beyond that point, in the 
> interest of seeing what are the ultimate consequences of the original 
> assumptions, in part to see if they are worth tweaking). Here, my 
> strong feeling about subsidiary senses (polysemy) is that they are 
> derivable (often via metaphor) from the linguistic context. 
> Independently of this, such derived senses (I would hypothesize: a 
> finite subset of them) may, over time, develop independent semantics, 
> as separate submeanings or even separate lexemes. It's hard for me to 
> fathom a practicable (both linguistically and cognitively) semantic 
> theory without some similar assumptions.
>
> Jim
>
> On Thu, Sep 9, 2010 at 8:58 AM, Krishnamurthy, Ramesh 
> <r.krishnamurthy at aston.ac.uk <mailto:r.krishnamurthy at aston.ac.uk>> wrote:
>
>     ...
>
>
>
> -- 
> James L. Fidelholtz
> Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje
> Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades
> Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO
>
>
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-- 
Ken Litkowski                     TEL.: 301-482-0237
CL Research                       EMAIL: ken at clres.com
9208 Gue Road                     Home Page: http://www.clres.com
Damascus, MD 20872-1025 USA       Blog: http://www.clres.com/blog

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