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On 1/29/2011 9:28 AM, Adam Kilgarriff wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:AANLkTi=NZ8v6VLGvxM=cCxHgX7xV1hYbovNhPYYPaG0F@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">Ken says:
<div>> It would be nice if we could apply John's rules to Ted's
compounds and <b>put those findings into a dictionary</b> </div>
<div>> (lexicographers have only barely done so, while
lexicologists need that information).</div>
<div><br>
</div>
Good news is, Dante (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://webdante.com">http://webdante.com</a>) has done
something very like this in a v large exercise on corpus-driven
lexicography for English. It contains 20,844 compounds, all
identified automatically and confirmed and classified by
lexicographers.. Of these, 2,989 have more than one meaning.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I think Adam has missed the point and Dante won't really fill need.
In the dark ages, particularly Ray Jackendoff, a notion of lexical
redundancy rules arose. When we look at John Sowa's analysis of
"sensor" with a lambda function, I think we're seeing the operation
of such a rule. These rules are not encoded in a dictionary and I
believe they should be. Looking at definitions shows that they may
be such rules, e.g., a gauge is "<span class="def">an instrument
that measures and gives a visual display of the amount, level, or
contents of something". In this definition, "something" plausibly
can be John's "n" in a noun compound, so that we have entries for
fuel gauge, rain gauge, wind gauge, etc. These rules should be
part of the lexicon. I believe Dan Flickinger did this in 1987.<br>
<br>
In addition to the sheer interest in having such rules, I think
they may also help in achieving the goal of this thread. With such
rules, we can <b>predict</b> the meaning of a noun compound. How
well is precisely the stuff of science.<br>
<br>
I do not mean to diminish Dante. We can justifiably look forward
to its availability, both for research and for commercial
applications.<br>
<br>
Ken<br>
<a
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Ken Litkowski TEL.: 301-482-0237
CL Research EMAIL: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:ken@clres.com">ken@clres.com</a>
9208 Gue Road Home Page: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.clres.com">http://www.clres.com</a>
Damascus, MD 20872-1025 USA Blog: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.clres.com/blog">http://www.clres.com/blog</a>
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