<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1400" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma><SPAN class=698315021-15042004></SPAN><FONT size=2>D<SPAN
class=698315021-15042004><FONT face=Arial
color=#0000ff>ear Dirk,</FONT></SPAN></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma><FONT size=2><SPAN class=698315021-15042004><FONT
face=Arial color=#0000ff></FONT></SPAN></FONT></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma><FONT size=2><SPAN class=698315021-15042004><FONT
face=Arial color=#0000ff>I am certainly interested in your article.
Unfortunately it is not one of those</FONT></SPAN></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma><FONT size=2><SPAN class=698315021-15042004><FONT
face=Arial color=#0000ff>articles from your impressive list of publications
which can be downloaded.</FONT></SPAN></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma><FONT size=2><SPAN class=698315021-15042004><FONT
face=Arial color=#0000ff>Can you send me an electronic copy to my personal
address?</FONT></SPAN></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma><FONT size=2><SPAN class=698315021-15042004><FONT
face=Arial color=#0000ff></FONT></SPAN></FONT></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma><FONT size=2><SPAN class=698315021-15042004><FONT
face=Arial color=#0000ff><A
href="mailto:Fritz_Goerling@sil.org">Fritz_Goerling@sil.org</A></FONT></SPAN></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma><FONT size=2><SPAN class=698315021-15042004><FONT
face=Arial color=#0000ff></FONT></SPAN></FONT></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma><FONT size=2><SPAN class=698315021-15042004><FONT
face=Arial color=#0000ff>Best wishes,</FONT></SPAN></FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma><FONT size=2><SPAN class=698315021-15042004><FONT
face=Arial color=#0000ff></FONT></SPAN></FONT></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Tahoma><FONT size=2><SPAN class=698315021-15042004><FONT
face=Arial color=#0000ff>Fritz</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV></FONT></FONT>
<BLOCKQUOTE>Dear Fritz,<BR>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". <I>Lexicographica</I> 17: 6-21, 2001.<BR>Best
wishes,<BR>Dirk Geeraerts<BR><BR><BR>At 15-4-2004 13:38, you wrote:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=cite cite="" type="cite">Patrick,<BR><BR>I am glad to hear
that kind of sceptical note from someone<BR>who seems to be a professional
dictionary-maker. Most<BR>dictionaries try to be precise, as you say, or try
"to<BR>nail down", as I say. That way of approaching meaning<BR>is, indeed,
questionable and fraught with difficulties.<BR>It also does not take into
account the creativity of<BR>language by its users.<BR>You are right about
"spurious" precision. Often componential<BR>analysis which is a
controversial heuristic device has been<BR>used to establish and number
these senses. Meanings are<BR>fuzzier. I recommend Bart Kosko's "Fuzzy
Thinking. The New<BR>Science of Fuzzy Logic" (New York: Hyperion). <BR>Your
example of "to abandon" points to the need of prototype<BR>semantics to deal
with word meaning(s). What is the proto-<BR>typical meaning of "to
abandon?"<BR>Has anyone on the list applied prototype semantics to
a<BR>polysemous term? (I have applied it to Greek CHARIS for those<BR>who
are interested). There is some literature out there about<BR>"What is a
prototypical 'lie'?"<BR><BR>Fritz Goerling<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>My view is
that English monolingual dictionaries (of the kinds that I<BR>have been
editing all my life) give a very distorted picture of polysemy.<BR>Part of
the problem, it seems to me, is that word meaning is vague,<BR>while
dictionaries try to be precise. Numbered senses improve
clarity,<BR>accessibility, readability, etc., but they imply a kind of
spurious<BR>precision, I think<BR><BR>Consider a simple verb at the start of
the alphabet -- "abandon".<BR>MWIII offers 7 senses and 3 subsenses.
CED also has 7 senses.<BR>NSOED has 6. These appear to be mutually
exclusive, but in fact<BR>they are not. For example, it could be
argued that only the context,<BR>not the sense of the verb, is different in
"abandon a site", "abandon<BR>a person", and "abandon a vehicle". The
6 or 7 senses could easily<BR>be reduced to 3 or 4 senses by rewriting some
of the definitions at<BR>a more general level. Alternatively,
one could further split "abandon"<BR>into a dozen or more senses by
treating, say, "abandon a refrigerator"<BR>as different from "abandon a
car".<BR><BR>NSOED lumps "Parisians abandoning their city to scalding
sunshine"<BR>in with "a schoolgirl abandoning herself to grief" (because of
the to-PP).<BR>But other dictionaries make the split differently, giving a
higher<BR>priority to the reflexive pronoun and a lower priority to the
PP.<BR>If you do this, "abandoning the city to something" ends up
with<BR>"abandoning a site".<BR><BR>So my first point is that there is no
one "correct" way to split up the<BR>different uses of a word into
meanings. Definition writing is more a<BR>matter of market forces (how
big do we want our dictionary to be?),<BR>and (dare I say it) of art, taste,
and judgement, rather than the<BR>application of data-driven
rules.<BR><BR>My second point is that it's often better to read a group of
different<BR>definitions as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. I
don't<BR>know of any dictionary users who are taught to read definitions
in<BR>this way, and even if they were, there is nothing in the dictionary
text<BR>to tell them which definition groups are mutually exclusive and
which<BR>are complementary. (If I remember rightly, in the first
edition of COD,<BR>1911, the Fowlers used numbers only for mutually
exclusive sense<BR>groups.)<BR><BR>My third point is that, even when
splitting is well justified (i.e. when<BR>senses really are mutually
exclusive), there is no indication of<BR>relative frequency. For many
polysemous words, one sense (or<BR>sometimes one group of complementary
senses) accounts for 80%<BR>or 90% of the uses, while the remainder are
quite rare. So, for<BR>example, "abandoning oneself to
something" accounts for only<BR>around 1% of all uses of "abandon" in
the British National<BR>Corpus -- a balanced and representative collection
of texts.<BR>Some dictionaries record an even rarer use of "abandon",
a<BR>domain-specific term in the insurance world, defined in NSOED<BR>as
"relinquish a claim to (property insured) to underwriters." This<BR>is
the sort of sense that is supported by citations collected
from<BR>domain-specific reading, rather than from corpus analysis of
a<BR>general corpus. I think it's fair to say that this specialist
sense<BR>accounts for much less than 0.1% of uses of "abandon" in
general<BR>English, but of course it's just the sort of use that users of a
large<BR>monolingual dictionary like to have explained.<BR><BR>Patrick
Hanks<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>----- Original
Message -----<BR>From: "Rusmadi Baharudin" <rusmadi@dbp.gov.my><BR>To:
<lexicographylist@yahoogroups.com><BR>Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004
1:22 AM<BR>Subject: RE: [Lexicog] Other topics?<BR><BR><BR>> What about
the treatment of polysemous word in the dictionary? Polysemy<BR>> - a
multiple but related meanings for a single form - poses a problem in<BR>>
semantic theory and the semantic applications such as lexicography
and<BR>> natural language processing system. It seem that in
lexicographic<BR>> practice there is no objective criteria for the
analysis and the<BR>> treatment of this polysemous word. Anyone out there
to share a comment<BR>> on this
matter?<BR>><BR><BR><TT> </BLOCKQUOTE></TT><BR></BLOCKQUOTE><!-- |**|end egp html banner|**| -->
<!-- |**|begin egp html banner|**| -->
<br>
<tt><hr width="500">
<b>Yahoo! Groups Links</b><br>
<ul>
<li>To visit your group on the web, go to:<br><a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/</a><br>
<li>To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:<br><a href="mailto:lexicographylist-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com?subject=Unsubscribe">lexicographylist-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com</a><br>
<li>Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the <a href="http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/">Yahoo! Terms of Service</a>.
</ul>
</tt>
</br>
<!-- |**|end egp html banner|**| -->
</BODY></HTML>