[Corpora-List] RE: Corpus size for lexicography

[Amsler, Robert]

Well, I certainly wouldn't want to argue with lexicographic experience.

My basic recollection was from the perspective of lexicology rather than
lexicography.
That is, I found a pocket dictionary to be largely adequate to explain the
contents of
a 1 million word corpus, whereas when one went to larger corpora, it was
clear one needed
larger dictionaries to explain their contents.

I guess I shouldn't have thought one could "invert" such experience to infer
that the dictionary adequate
for the corpus meant the corpus was adequate to "build" the dictionary to
start with.

Certainly I never intended to imply that the variability in meaning possible
was covered in the corpus--only that
the vocabulary used was largely comparable to the coverage of a pocket
dictionary (at 1 million words).


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