[Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography) - "as many senses"

Wed Sep 8 14:51:41 UTC 2010

Oh dear, too late - as usual...  I just tried a Google search for "as many senses" and added 'words' and 'lexicographers' (neither in quotes) afterwards, to reduce hits (ended up with 5000+)
and came across:
---
[PDF] Meaning as Use: a communication-centered approach to lexical meanings<http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/serge/book.pdf>
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat
by S Sharoff - 2004 - Related articles<http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=related:EucpEvMaLgUJ:scholar.google.com/&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=X6GHTMTLOJT14AbmvIzSBA&sa=X&oi=science_links&ct=sl-related&resnum=10&ved=0CD8QzwIwCTgK>
lexicographer. Some words are more polysemous than others. Some lexi- cographers are 'splitters': they tend to analyse words in as many senses as ...
corpus.leeds.ac.uk/serge/book.pdf

The length of the list of senses of a word depends on the word and the
lexicographer. Some words are more polysemous than others. Some lexicographers
are 'splitters': they tend to analyse words in as many senses as
possible to classify different examples of uses, while others are 'lumpers':
they tend to provide more broad definitions covering a variety of uses.
---

Could this be an alternative solution to Laura's quest?

I also noticed many references to translation:  a word has as many senses as it has translation equivalents...?

Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Lecturer in English Studies, School of Languages and Social Sciences,
Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK
Tel: +44 (0)121-204-3812 ; Fax: +44 (0)121-204-3766 [Room NX08, 10th
Floor, North Wing of Main Building]
http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/krishnamurthyr/
Director, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network project): http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/

------------------------------

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Laura Lofberg <Laura.Lofberg at uta.fi<mailto:Laura.Lofberg at uta.fi>> wrote:

Could someone with a better memory help me?

If I remember correctly, someone has said 'a word has as many meanings as a lexicographer cares to perceive' or something like that. Does anyone remember the exact wording? And who has made this brilliant comment, where and when?

Best,

Laura Löfberg

University of Tampere

Finland
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Message: 3

Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:04:45 +0100

From: Geoffrey Sampson <grs2 at sussex.ac.uk>

Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography)

To: Laura Lofberg <Laura.Lofberg at uta.fi>

Cc: corpora at uib.no

I'm wondering whether you might be thinking about some of Adam Kilgarriff's writings, e.g. "I don't believe in word senses", _Computers and the Humanities_ vol. 31, 1997, and available online.  His overall message could be paraphrased broadly the way you suggest, though I don't remember whether he actually uses a similar form of words anywhere.

Geoffrey Sampson

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Message: 4

Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:49:51 -0400

From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa at bestweb.net>

Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography)

To: corpora at uib.no

Alan Cruse coined a good word for the phenomenon:  microsense.

 From his _Glossary of Semantics and Pragmatics_, p. 108:

   "The microsenses of a word are distinct readings that behave in some

   respects like ambiguous readings, but which, unlike the latter, can

   be subsumed under an inclusive reading.  An example of a word with

   microsenses is _ball_.  There are different sorts of ball, but in

   normal use, only one of these is intended..."

http://books.google.com/books?id=v72E26s6JTkC&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109&dq=cruse+microsense&source=bl&ots=WHH9WQDxIR&sig=8yLs84qg4DO01sPNqe82BtZkS48&hl=en&ei=fz-GTLzSKIKBlAfw3uCyDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDUQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=true

John Sowa

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Message: 5

Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2010 09:36:07 -0500

From: Jim Fidelholtz <fidelholtz at gmail.com>

Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography)

To: "John F. Sowa" <sowa at bestweb.net>

Cc: corpora at uib.no

Hi, All,

Laura's comment (quote) is no doubt true. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that, if we examine the particular practice of each lexicographer (or, say, the OED) and rank all their headwords from the largest number of numbered 'senses' down to 1, that this will correlate (p <  .0...01 or, colloquially,

'*very* significantly'), whatever test you use, with the order most-to-least-frequent. I haven't actually done this bit of research, but if it turns out this way (as I'm sure it will, or, perhaps, as has been shown by someone, at least for some lexicographers), then *this* is an important fact that must be explained by lexicologists. My personal favorite for the principal explanation is metaphor, but it will not be easy to make a convincing case for that.

Jim

--

James L. Fidelholtz

Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje

Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, MÉXICO

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Message: 6

Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2010 07:48:11 -0700 (PDT)

From: Bill Louw <louwfirth at yahoo.com>

Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography)

To: corpora at uib.no, Laura Lofberg <Laura.Lofberg at uta.fi>

Hello. The Cobuilders are curiously silent. Old-style lexicographers may have behaved in this way, but modern lexicographers would leave the number of senses to the software to determine, largely through collocation.

The line you quote offers only one match via the limited search techniques offered to the general public. It is as follows:

testable concept, and has almost as many meanings as it has advocates.

Corpus BoE: Strathy

Canadian journal: 1987

document 24

Match number 1

A wildcard or skip search would reveal the subtext. This is only available via a Cobuild log-in. I can only guess that the variables of such a search would reveal more of a sense of causality. Cobuilders are having their logins revoked at this time, I am reliably informed. Mine was removed on December 31 2003, a fortnight after I falsified The Truth and Reconciliation Commission using the Bank of English.

Jeremy Pope of Transparency International wrote:'A country will be as corrupt as its institutions will allow.'

Bill Louw

University of Zimbabwe

____________________________________________

Message: 8

Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:14:44 -0400

From: maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu>

Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography)

To: Bill Louw <louwfirth at yahoo.com>

Cc: corpora at uib.no

On Tue, 7 Sep 2010 07:48:11 -0700 (PDT), Bill Louw <louwfirth at yahoo.com<mailto:louwfirth at yahoo.com>>

wrote:

> ...modern lexicographers would leave the number of senses to the

> software to determine, largely through collocation.

Doesn't the software need to be told how many clusters to make (or what degree of dissimilarity to allow within clusters)?

   Mike Maxwell

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Message: 9

Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2010 15:26:11 -0700 (PDT)

From: Bill Louw <louwfirth at yahoo.com>

Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography)

To: maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu>

Cc: corpora at uib.no

Maxwell is correct. But the quote that Laura is searching for implies that lexicographers' discretion may be excessive or irresponsible. We may need to ask her about that if we are to unpack the problem without moving into the checks and balances offered by modern lexicography. She seems to want to make a point about 'anything goes' attitudes. Bill

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Message: 10

Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2010 08:13:38 +0530

From: Upali Kohomban <kohomban at gmail.com>

Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography)

To: Laura Lofberg <Laura.Lofberg at uta.fi>

Cc: corpora at uib.no

That quote reminded me also of Adam Kilgarriff. A simple google search yielded, a page from "The Lexicography of English  By Henri Béjoint" p 293

A word in dictionary 'can have as many senses as the lexicographer cares to perceive'

which is from to a certain [Hanks 2002], page 159.

[

http://books.google.com/books?id=jq-izE-sWD0C&pg=PA293&lpg=PA293&dq=%27a+word+has+as+many+meanings+as+a+lexicographer+cares+to+perceive&source=bl&ots=-msyneHaze&sig=ocCbObcUfSvR3KjOwfo0s2CRGJk&hl=en&ei=IfSGTJXuE46AvgP38cmZBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CDUQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false

]

This is *possibly*

Patrick W Hanks 2002 ?Mapping Meaning onto Use? in Marie-Hélène Corréard

(ed.): *Lexicography and Natural Language Processing: a Festschrift in honour of B. T. S. Atkins*. Euralex [http://www.patrickhanks.com/publications.htm]

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Message: 11

Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2010 21:12:03 -0700 (PDT)

From: Bill Louw <louwfirth at yahoo.com>

Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography)

To: Laura Lofberg <Laura.Lofberg at uta.fi>, Upali Kohomban

      <kohomban at gmail.com>

Cc: corpora at uib.no

Well done Upali! Now all that remains to be done is a stylistic analysis of Hanks's attitude. As members of the corpora list we are honour-bound to find it in a corpus rather than call it intuitively 'illocutionary force'. It is in subtext and semantic prosody that we shall find it, but if and only if, we are allowed the Bank of English in a form that allows wildcard/skip searches. For details of how you do it, see my 2010 article in Zyngier et al Eds. _Digital Learning..._ IGI Global. (logical semantic prosody). Hope Laura is happy that Upali came through with the answer. Bill

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