[Corpora-List] Quotation (lexicography)

[Yorick Wilks]

Bob
Thanks, but I didnt mean the work reported in Electric Words---that was all much later (80s-90s) and was already using electronic dictionaries as corpora. I meant the 70s!
And, Hanks and Pustejovsky and others are still continuing that tradition of early work, which they know well.  It was Adam's provocation I was rising to!
Best
Yorick


On 13 Sep 2010, at 14:43, Robert Parks wrote:

> Yorick,
> Your "Electric Words" was indeed an enlightening work and a worthy read for lexicographers.  The practical work of analysis has been mostly enriched by corpus tools, but as you note could also benefit from a close reading of AI work (as well as other developments, such as cognitive linguistics).  Could you give an example of lexicographic work that might point the way toward exploiting those AI insights?
> Thanks,
> Bob
> 
> At 1:18 PM -0400 9/13/10, Yorick Wilks wrote:
>> All true, but the notion was pretty well explored by Ai work in the seventies, and has
>> been missed by the lexicographic community (if not by Hanks himself!)--it's all there really, the norms, the extensions in context based on what we know about the word and the world--all that was missing was the hard work of the sort lexicographers are said to be good at!
>> Yorick
>> 
>> On 12 Sep 2010, at 17:16, Adam Kilgarriff wrote:
>> 
>>> 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
>>> 
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>>> --
>>> Lothar Lemnitzer
>>> DWDS
>>> Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
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>>> --
>>> ================================================
>>> 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
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>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> --
> *  The best dictionary and integrated thesaurus on the web: http://www.wordsmyth.net
> *  Robert Parks - Wordsmyth - (607) 272-2190
> * "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life."  (LW) "Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it." (KM)
> * Community grows as we communicate, honing our words till their meanings tap the rich voice of our full human potential.
> *  A meaningful life is more important than happiness.  But how can I live a meaningful life if I'm not sure of the meaning of "meaning"? 
> 
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