[Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography)

[Adam Kilgarriff]

Lothar,

yes, I'm very happy to own that position!

I'd add to it, the kind of thing that Ken Litkowski mentioned and Patrick
Hanks has explored most deeply: that we make sense of unfamiliar uses of
words by working out how what we already know of the word (its norms) can be
made sense of in the context.  (My own enlightenment on this front came from
Geoff Nunberg's thesis, see his 'Pragmatics of Reference').  That is the
cognitive process of interpreting an exploitation of the word's norms.  A
word's senses are then just those interpretations, which are commonly enough
understood across a speech community, and over time.  What counts as 'common
enough', and 'the speech community' and the timespan, depends on the
purposes for which we want to catalogue them

Adam

On 7 September 2010 09:27, Lothar Lemnitzer <lemnitzer at bbaw.de> wrote:

> Dear Laura
>
> I do not think that this insight is so spectacular. Word senses are
> artifacts and lexicographers are the experts (and are perceived by society
> as such) in finding and defining these artifacts.
>
> If I am allowed to give a guess I would assign this position to Adam
> Kilgarriff (I don't believe in word senses).
>
> Adam, sue me if I am wrong.
>
> Regards
>
> Lothar Lemnitzer
>
> 2010/9/7 Laura Lofberg <Laura.Lofberg at uta.fi>
>
> 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Corpora mailing list
>> Corpora at uib.no
>> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Lothar Lemnitzer
> DWDS
> Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
> Jägerstr. 22/23
> 10117 Berlin
>
> _______________________________________________
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora
>
>


-- 
================================================
Adam Kilgarriff
http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk
Lexical Computing Ltd                   http://www.sketchengine.co.uk
Lexicography MasterClass Ltd      http://www.lexmasterclass.com
Universities of Leeds and Sussex       adam at lexmasterclass.com
================================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20100912/ca6b9309/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora