[Corpora-List] Moving Lexical Semantics from Alchemy to Science

[amsler at cs.utexas.edu]

I have been thinking about the following possible experimental method.

If we take the open compounds from a machine-readable dictionary and  
split out of them two lists of first words and second words, and then  
create a matrix with the first words as the x-axis and the second  
words as the y-axis and the individual cells as a 1 or a 0 dependent  
upon whether that compound exists in the dictionary/language or not...  
What would a factor analysis of that very sparse binary matrix reveal?  
Could it indicate the existence of primitive properties shared by  
groups of words? (Say scalar traits for temperature words such as  
'hot', 'cool', 'cold').

Clearly there are difficulties with what compounds should be used.  
Dictionaries tend to record more compounds that are idiosyncratic  
combinations whose components don't take on their usual meanings,  
(e.g., 'ice cream' isn't really related to 'ice' and would have been  
more appropriately have been called 'iced cream'). It might be that  
the compounds needed for the experiment would have to be corpus based  
rather than dictionary based to include enough of the commonplace  
combinations reflecting the indivdual component words everyday  
meanings...

But what I find appealing here is that it could serve as evidence  
toward a predictive theory of lexical combinatorics.

I still think alchemy is applicable. What I imagine was the biggest  
problem in going from alchemy to science was in deciding what were  
elemental substances. What I think may have assisted in that quest was  
breaking apart multiple substances into components and finding that  
many of the same reduced substances came out as well as managing to  
predict that recombination of these proposed 'elemental' substances  
could be carried out resulting in known compounds being created.

The best theoretical explanations are predictive, not merely analytic.  
Either predictive of what compounds do exist based on the components  
or predictive of the meaning of compounds based on knowledge of the  
meanings of the components.

To some degree dictionaries are responsible for handling the  
exceptions to those general rules... but often also include entries  
that have just acquired a more specific set of properties than the  
general combination rules would predict they would possess.

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