[Lexicog] Lexical polysemy and prototype semantics

Wed Apr 21 09:18:51 UTC 2004

Here it comes !

At 15-4-2004 23:55, you wrote:
>Dear Dirk,
>
>I am certainly interested in your article. Unfortunately it is not one of
>those
>articles from your impressive list of publications which can be downloaded.
>Can you send me an electronic copy to my personal address?
>
><mailto:Fritz_Goerling at sil.org>Fritz_Goerling at sil.org
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Fritz
>Dear Fritz,
>There's lots of work on prototype analyses of polysemous words in the
>linguistic (rather than lexicographical or metalexicographical)
>literature. If you're interested in an attempt to systematically chart the
>relevance of prototype theory for lexicography (in a somewhat more
>theoretical mode than Patrick's reply), you might have a look at my paper
>"The definitional practice of dictionaries and the Cognitive Semantic
>conception of polysemy". Lexicographica 17: 6-21, 2001.
>Best wishes,
>Dirk Geeraerts
>
>
>
>At 15-4-2004 13:38, you wrote:
>>Patrick,
>>
>>I am glad to hear that kind of sceptical note from someone
>>who seems to be a professional dictionary-maker. Most
>>dictionaries try to be precise, as you say, or try "to
>>nail down", as I say. That way of approaching meaning
>>is, indeed, questionable and fraught with difficulties.
>>It also does not take into account the creativity of
>>language by its users.
>>You are right about "spurious" precision. Often componential
>>analysis which is a controversial heuristic device has been
>>used to establish and number these senses. Meanings are
>>fuzzier. I recommend Bart Kosko's "Fuzzy Thinking. The New
>>Science of Fuzzy Logic" (New York: Hyperion).
>>Your example of "to abandon" points to the need of prototype
>>semantics to deal with word meaning(s). What is the proto-
>>typical meaning of "to abandon?"
>>Has anyone on the list applied prototype semantics to a
>>polysemous term? (I have applied it to Greek CHARIS for those
>>who are interested). There is some literature out there about
>>"What is a prototypical 'lie'?"
>>
>>Fritz Goerling
>>
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>>My view is that English monolingual dictionaries (of the kinds that I
>>have been editing all my life) give a very distorted picture of polysemy.
>>Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that word meaning is vague,
>>while dictionaries try to be precise. Numbered senses improve clarity,
>>accessibility, readability, etc., but they imply a kind of spurious
>>precision, I think
>>
>>Consider a simple verb at the start of the alphabet -- "abandon".
>>MWIII offers 7 senses and 3 subsenses.  CED also has 7 senses.
>>NSOED has 6.  These appear to be mutually exclusive, but in fact
>>they are not.  For example, it could be argued that only the context,
>>not the sense of the verb, is different in "abandon a site", "abandon
>>a person", and "abandon a vehicle".  The 6 or 7 senses could easily
>>be reduced to 3 or 4 senses by rewriting some of the definitions at
>>a more general level.   Alternatively, one could further split "abandon"
>>into a dozen or more senses by treating, say, "abandon a refrigerator"
>>as different from "abandon a car".
>>
>>NSOED lumps "Parisians abandoning their city to scalding sunshine"
>>in with "a schoolgirl abandoning herself to grief" (because of the to-PP).
>>But other dictionaries make the split differently, giving a higher
>>priority to the reflexive pronoun and a lower priority to the PP.
>>If you do this, "abandoning the city to something" ends up with
>>"abandoning a site".
>>
>>So my first point is that there is no one "correct" way to split up the
>>different uses of a word into meanings.  Definition writing is more a
>>matter of market forces (how big do we want our dictionary to be?),
>>and (dare I say it) of art, taste, and judgement, rather than the
>>application of data-driven rules.
>>
>>My second point is that it's often better to read a group of different
>>definitions as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. I don't
>>know of any dictionary users who are taught to read definitions in
>>this way, and even if they were, there is nothing in the dictionary text
>>to tell them which definition groups are mutually exclusive and which
>>are complementary.   (If I remember rightly, in the first edition of COD,
>>1911, the Fowlers used numbers only for mutually exclusive sense
>>groups.)
>>
>>My third point is that, even when splitting is well justified (i.e. when
>>senses really are mutually exclusive), there is no indication of
>>relative frequency.  For many polysemous words, one sense (or
>>sometimes one group of complementary senses) accounts for 80%
>>or 90% of the uses, while the remainder are quite rare.   So, for
>>example, "abandoning oneself to something" accounts for only
>>around 1% of all uses of  "abandon" in the British National
>>Corpus -- a balanced and representative collection of texts.
>>Some dictionaries record an even rarer use of "abandon", a
>>domain-specific term in the insurance world, defined in NSOED
>>as "relinquish a claim to (property insured) to underwriters."  This
>>is the sort of sense that is supported by citations collected from
>>domain-specific reading, rather than from corpus analysis of a
>>general corpus. I think it's fair to say that this specialist sense
>>accounts for much less than 0.1% of uses of "abandon" in general
>>English, but of course it's just the sort of use that users of a large
>>monolingual dictionary like to have explained.
>>
>>Patrick Hanks
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>>----- Original Message -----
>>From: "Rusmadi Baharudin" <rusmadi at dbp.gov.my>
>>To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
>>Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 1:22 AM
>>Subject: RE: [Lexicog] Other topics?
>>
>>
>>
>> > What about the treatment of polysemous word in the dictionary? Polysemy
>> > - a multiple but related meanings for a single form - poses a problem in
>> > semantic theory and the semantic applications such as lexicography and
>> > natural language processing system. It seem that in lexicographic
>> > practice there is no objective criteria for the analysis and the
>> > treatment of this polysemous word. Anyone out there to share a comment
>> > on this matter?
>> >
>>
>>
>
>
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