[Corpora-List] semantics and alchemy

[Anne-Kathrin Schumann]

Hi,   I am really interested in this experiment proposal by Mr Amsler:   "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')."   However, if the quest really is to find primitive semantic traits, shouldn't there be a multilingual perspective? In a multilingual view compounds are problematic because they vary both semantically and in their construction type and thus do not constitute a stable category of comparison ('ice cream' is a case in point). In my view, trying to find primitives by studying compounds is risky, because compounds seem to depend strongly on a language's morphology which should be considered arbitrary. Isn't it safer to study the collocational environment of lexical units as a whole instead of restricting efforts to noun compounds? One could, for example, construct a similar matrix for verbs that take 'ice cream' as object or adjectives that combine with the word. But I am not sure whether this is still the initial idea …?   Anne-Kathrin Schumann PhD student University of Leipzig/University of Vienna
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