[Lexicog] The DDP and corpora

[John Roberts]

Ron,

Your DDP seems to be excellent for "discovering" a large proportion of the vocabulary of a language in a short period of time. It is also excellent in that it involves native speakers directly in the discovery process. Your W&D article says, "It would take a text corpus of a million of words to equal the results in terms of numbers, and many words are so rare they may not show up in a text corpus." So, you can produce a large amount of vocabulary items without a corpus. But don't you still need a large corpus to generate collocational and combinatory fields and discover all the senses and uses of words, for example? Even a dictionary like the Longman Language Activator, which is organised around semantic domains, is corpus-based - and they indicate that sometimes the meaning of a word from an analysis of the corpus is different to what native speakers commonly assume a word means. Other corpus based dictionaries, such as NODE, also give some examples of this. I am also not clear how you would discover all the 'dog' metaphors in English you mentioned which do not include 'dog' in the expression. For example, an expression like "Go at it tooth and nail." doesn't immediately spring to my mind as a dog metaphor. What methodology do you use to work this out?

John Roberts


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