[Lexicog] Lexical polysemy and prototype semantics

[Mali Translation]

Dear Dirk,

I am certainly interested in your article. Unfortunately it is not one of
those
articles from your impressive list of publications which can be downloaded.
Can you send me an electronic copy to my personal address?

Fritz_Goerling at sil.org

Best wishes,

Fritz


  Dear Fritz,
  There's lots of work on prototype analyses of polysemous words in the
linguistic (rather than lexicographical or metalexicographical) literature.
If you're interested in an attempt to systematically chart the relevance of
prototype theory for lexicography (in a somewhat more theoretical mode than
Patrick's reply), you might have a look at my paper "The definitional
practice of dictionaries and the Cognitive Semantic conception of polysemy".
Lexicographica 17: 6-21, 2001.
  Best wishes,
  Dirk Geeraerts


  At 15-4-2004 13:38, you wrote:

    Patrick,

    I am glad to hear that kind of sceptical note from someone
    who seems to be a professional dictionary-maker. Most
    dictionaries try to be precise, as you say, or try "to
    nail down", as I say. That way of approaching meaning
    is, indeed, questionable and fraught with difficulties.
    It also does not take into account the creativity of
    language by its users.
    You are right about "spurious" precision. Often componential
    analysis which is a controversial heuristic device has been
    used to establish and number these senses. Meanings are
    fuzzier. I recommend Bart Kosko's "Fuzzy Thinking. The New
    Science of Fuzzy Logic" (New York: Hyperion).
    Your example of "to abandon" points to the need of prototype
    semantics to deal with word meaning(s). What is the proto-
    typical meaning of "to abandon?"
    Has anyone on the list applied prototype semantics to a
    polysemous term? (I have applied it to Greek CHARIS for those
    who are interested). There is some literature out there about
    "What is a prototypical 'lie'?"

    Fritz Goerling




    My view is that English monolingual dictionaries (of the kinds that I
    have been editing all my life) give a very distorted picture of
polysemy.
    Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that word meaning is vague,
    while dictionaries try to be precise. Numbered senses improve clarity,
    accessibility, readability, etc., but they imply a kind of spurious
    precision, I think

    Consider a simple verb at the start of the alphabet -- "abandon".
    MWIII offers 7 senses and 3 subsenses.  CED also has 7 senses.
    NSOED has 6.  These appear to be mutually exclusive, but in fact
    they are not.  For example, it could be argued that only the context,
    not the sense of the verb, is different in "abandon a site", "abandon
    a person", and "abandon a vehicle".  The 6 or 7 senses could easily
    be reduced to 3 or 4 senses by rewriting some of the definitions at
    a more general level.   Alternatively, one could further split "abandon"
    into a dozen or more senses by treating, say, "abandon a refrigerator"
    as different from "abandon a car".

    NSOED lumps "Parisians abandoning their city to scalding sunshine"
    in with "a schoolgirl abandoning herself to grief" (because of the
to-PP).
    But other dictionaries make the split differently, giving a higher
    priority to the reflexive pronoun and a lower priority to the PP.
    If you do this, "abandoning the city to something" ends up with
    "abandoning a site".

    So my first point is that there is no one "correct" way to split up the
    different uses of a word into meanings.  Definition writing is more a
    matter of market forces (how big do we want our dictionary to be?),
    and (dare I say it) of art, taste, and judgement, rather than the
    application of data-driven rules.

    My second point is that it's often better to read a group of different
    definitions as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. I don't
    know of any dictionary users who are taught to read definitions in
    this way, and even if they were, there is nothing in the dictionary text
    to tell them which definition groups are mutually exclusive and which
    are complementary.   (If I remember rightly, in the first edition of
COD,
    1911, the Fowlers used numbers only for mutually exclusive sense
    groups.)

    My third point is that, even when splitting is well justified (i.e. when
    senses really are mutually exclusive), there is no indication of
    relative frequency.  For many polysemous words, one sense (or
    sometimes one group of complementary senses) accounts for 80%
    or 90% of the uses, while the remainder are quite rare.   So, for
    example, "abandoning oneself to something" accounts for only
    around 1% of all uses of  "abandon" in the British National
    Corpus -- a balanced and representative collection of texts.
    Some dictionaries record an even rarer use of "abandon", a
    domain-specific term in the insurance world, defined in NSOED
    as "relinquish a claim to (property insured) to underwriters."  This
    is the sort of sense that is supported by citations collected from
    domain-specific reading, rather than from corpus analysis of a
    general corpus. I think it's fair to say that this specialist sense
    accounts for much less than 0.1% of uses of "abandon" in general
    English, but of course it's just the sort of use that users of a large
    monolingual dictionary like to have explained.

    Patrick Hanks













    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Rusmadi Baharudin" <rusmadi at dbp.gov.my>
    To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
    Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 1:22 AM
    Subject: RE: [Lexicog] Other topics?


    > What about the treatment of polysemous word in the dictionary?
Polysemy
    > - a multiple but related meanings for a single form - poses a problem
in
    > semantic theory and the semantic applications such as lexicography and
    > natural language processing system. It seem that in lexicographic
    > practice there is no objective criteria for the analysis and the
    > treatment of this polysemous word. Anyone out there to share a comment
    > on this matter?
    >



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