Corpora: frequencies of different meanings of a verb

[James L. Fidelholtz]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, [gb2312] mengyun lin wrote:

>Dear list members,
>Is it possible for we to know the frequencies of
>different meaning senses of a certain verb in any
>corpus? e.g. the frequency of "learn" when it means
>"to study" vs that of "learn" when it means "to know".
>
Dear Mengyun:
	To do it automatically, you would need quite a bit of AI, I
would imagine, to get at the meanings first and then pull out the ones
for the verb in question.
	There are a couple of printed sources for English.  From the
Thorndike & Lorge stuff from the 30s and 40s (_Teachers word book of
30,000 words_), Lorge had a bunch of Ph. D.s check out the occurrences
of some of the more common words, and assign each sentence in which they
occurred to one of the meanings in the OED.  100 copies of this were
dittoed up and distributed to various research university
libraries.  One exists in the Library of Congress, as well.  It was
never published, as far as I know, and is a bit difficult to use, but
possible, and *very* useful when the word is there.  A published but (I
think) partial version was a book by someone named West about in the
50s, I think, and should be a bit easier to find, if you can track it
down (I don't at the moment have access to my library; if you can't find
it with these hints, send me an email next week).
	Probably not what you were looking for, but that's all I know
about for the moment.
		Jim

-- 
James L. Fidelholtz			e-mail: jfidel at siu.buap.mx
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje	tel.: +(52-2)229-5500 x5705
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades	fax: +(01-2) 229-5681
Benemιrita Universidad Autσnoma de Puebla, MΙXICO