[Corpora-List] WordNet vs Ontology

[John F Sowa]

On 9/29/2014 8:51 PM, Jim Fidelholtz wrote:
> The gist is that, in my probably undereducated view, nearly all polysemy
> (in the usual sense of 'all the definitions under the same headword')
> originates in metaphor.

If you said 'metaphor and metonymy', that would cover the majority
of cases.  There are other terms for related phenomena.  But the fact
that those words come from ancient Greek is a reminder that many very
smart people have been analyzing the phenomena for a very long time.

> I believe once we have some sort of handle on metaphor and its role in
> the semantics/pragmatics of language use, many of the Kilgarriff et al.
> complaints about 'word senses' will be found to be at least partially
> resolvable. Then again, I'm an optimist.

I partly agree.  But I'd like to add two newer terms that may help
focus the analysis.

The first is 'microsense' by Alan Cruse:  It's compatible with the
Atkins-Kilgarriff complaint, and it's related to Wittgenstein's
point that the meaning of a word shifts with the language game.
Instead of saying that word senses don't exist, Cruse would say
the number of microsenses of a word type is open-ended and they
may shift in subtle ways from one use (token) to another.

The second is 'meaning potential' by Patrick Hanks:  He cites Cruse,
Kilgarriff, Atkins, Wittgenstein, and many others.  He doesn't use
the term 'microsense', but taken together, the two terms provide
a theory (Hanks calls it TNE -- Theory of Norms and Exploitations)
where the meaning potential for each word type, guided by its norms,
determines a cloud of microsenses for the possible exploitations.

But clouds are rarely static.  Potentials, norms, and exploitations
evolve with changes in culture, knowledge, and fads.  As Peirce said
"symbols grow":  for any word token, the listener's microsense may be
more developed, less developed, or just different from the speaker's.

For many documents, the author's intended microsense might not be the
ideal "gold standard".  For example, consider a newspaper report about
some new invention, scientific discovery, or political event.

References below.

John
______________________________________________________________________

Cruse, D. Alan (2000) Aspects of the micro-structure of word meanings, 
in Ravin & Leacock (2000) pp. 30-51.

Cruse, D. Alan (2002) Microsenses, default specificity and the 
semantics-pragmatics boundary, Axiomathes 1, 1-20.

Hanks, Patrick (2013) Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations, 
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ravin, Yael, & Claudia Leacock, eds. (2000) Polysemy: Theoretical and 
Computational Approaches, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

For CSP's observation, google Peirce and "symbols grow".


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