15.3333, Review: Lexicography/Corpus Ling: Halliday et al. (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-15-3333. Tue Nov 30 2004. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 15.3333, Review: Lexicography/Corpus Ling: Halliday et al. (2004)                                                                                                                                                        

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1)
Date: 30-Nov-2004
From: Vergenica Mititelu < vergi at racai.ro >
Subject: Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction 
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 14:31:45
From: Vergenica Mititelu < vergi at racai.ro >
Subject: Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction 
 

Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 17:51:38 +0200 
From: Verginica Mititelu <vergi at racai.ro> 
Subject: Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction

AUTHOR: Halliday, M. A. K.; Teubert, Wolfgang; Yallop, Colin; Cermáková, Anna
TITLE: Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics 
SUBTITLE: An Introduction 
SERIES: Open Linguistics 
PUBLISHER: Continuum 
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1791.html


Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Romanian Academy Research Institute for 
Artificial Intelligence and Institute for Linguistics

This textbook addresses the beginners in the field of lexicology and of 
corpus linguistics, providing an introduction to their most important 
concepts.

The first chapter (Lexicology, by M. A. K. Halliday) is a presentation of 
the history of lexicology, since its origins, in different parts of the 
world. The study object of lexicology is difficult to grasp: sometimes 
words are not easy to identify, there are languages in the case of which 
one cannot speak about words (e.g. Chinese). That is why people tend to 
use the term lexical item instead.

The methods of study and, at the same time, the information sources in 
lexicology are the dictionary and the thesaurus. Halliday compares and 
contrasts them in what concerns their organization and the information 
contained. Halliday also presents the last achievements within the field, 
basically due to the existence of large electronic corpora and of tools 
for data and text processing, thus permitting putting together lexical and 
grammatical data. As they cannot be separated from each other, it is 
better to speak about lexicogrammar, as one discipline.

In the second chapter (Words and meaning) C. Yallop first considers the 
nature of meaning. Dictionaries as inventories of word meanings are 
criticized, as they decontextualise meaning and treat it as a distinct 
entity. This is characteristic of both traditional (printed) and 
electronic dictionaries. Semantic nets (such as WordNet) were also 
criticized for this (see Buitelaar 1998, Weinreich 1964, Apresjan 1973).

Meaning is a social phenomenon; it is shaped and negotiated in social 
interaction. That is why, the best way to deal with it is inside the 
context in which it is used. Usage can contradict ideas such as: the most 
frequent meaning is the oldest one (the original meaning may even be lost 
along the history of language, or it may not exist, as in the case of 
names becoming words), or: the most frequent meaning is the core one 
(sometimes the emotive meaning is more frequent than the core one).

Dictionaries have been conceived as prescriptive linguistic works. Yallop 
takes the position according to which "the social nature of language 
brings a normativity of its own". Change in language cannot be prevented, 
as it reflects the changes in societies and cultures. In connection with 
this, one can discuss about the link between language and reality, more 
precisely between language and the perspective taken on reality: the 
change in perspective may bring about changes in language: see the 
distinct areas of vocabulary pertaining to different domains, to different 
contexts in which language is used, and more or less revealing of reality.

The topic of meaning can be discussed either intralingually or 
interlingually. From the latter perspective, the main idea to be 
remembered is that different languages elaborate on reality differently. 
However, one can speak about universalism in language, but this has to do 
with the way language functions in social life, not with "universal 
concepts" or with Chomsky's universal "deep structure", nor with the 
postulation of a universal framework or inventory out of which each 
language makes its own selection. One cannot speak about meaning without 
bringing the matter of translation into the discussion. Yallop's point 
here is that the translator needs to paraphrase the meaning within the 
relevant languages, rather than abstracting away from them.

The opening subchapter of the this chapter of this book (Language and 
corpus linguistics, by Wolfgang Teubert) is meant to motivate the further 
presentation of facts: languages are similar in some respects, but they 
are different in others. Meaning and its relation to word are one of the 
aspects which differentiate among languages. Chomskyan linguistics is 
preoccupied with language generation, while corpus linguistics analyzes 
the discourse. Syntax does not make a topic of interest here; the whole 
discussion is organized around the notion of meaning. If the word is the 
minimal unit in syntax, it is not the same when dealing with meaning. 
Moreover, the notion of word is controversial, it has not received a 
satisfactory definition so far, one to be valid for different types of 
languages (cf. Stati 1967). Traditional dictionaries (which include some 
collocations, idioms, etc.) and the analyses of corpora show that the best 
solution is not dealing with words, but with units of meaning, which are 
the mere words (in case they are monosemous) or the word plus all the 
words within its textual context that are needed in order to disambiguate 
this (polysemous) word.

Collocations should find their place in lexicons, according to the facts 
exhibited by corpora. If a combination of words does not present 
compositionality of meaning any longer and has a certain frequency of co-
occurrence of its elements, then it should be treated as a collocation. 
The second part of this chapter gives the reader a short presentation of 
corpus linguistics and of its history. Corpus linguistics is the study of 
language by looking at discourse. Limitations are inherent: one can never 
study the whole language discourse; that is why, a selection is done on 
the material, taking care of the representativity of the material 
selected. The disadvantage of the method comes from the fact that the 
results obtained are approximations; the analysis of a new corpus can lead 
to (partially) different results.

The last chapter (Directions in corpus linguistics, by Wolfgang Teubert 
and Anna Cermáková) really motivates the title of the volume. The topics 
that the authors reach here are the following: representativity in 
language, typology of corpora (reference, special, opportunistic, monitor, 
parallel), meaning in discourse, meaning as usage and paraphrase, meaning 
in corpus linguistics, collocation, translation and parallel corpus.

The perspective taken on here (that of corpus linguistics) considers 
meaning a social phenomenon, negotiated by the members of the community 
using the language (see chapter 2). Meaning is both usage (i.e. what we 
found out about how it is used) and paraphrase (which serves to explain, 
to define the meaning).

A key-concept used when dealing with meaning from this perspective is that 
of collocation. It refers either to a fixed expression, with a certain 
grammatical structure and a fixed meaning, or to the immediate context of 
the target word. Evidence is brought from translations and from the 
analyses of parallel corpora that collocations should be dealt with 
separately in dictionaries, thus easing the interpretation (and of 
generation) process(es). The quality of this textbook is sustained by the 
clarity with which the chapters were written, by the examples provided for 
illustrating the ideas presented. Students are introduced to the current 
method(s) of studying meaning in corpus linguistics, which pays most 
attention to context. The short glossary of the terms of interest at the 
end of this book helps understanding the key-notions of the field.

REFERENCES

Apresjan, J. D. (1973) Synonymy and synonyms. In: Trends in Soviet 
theoretical linguistics, ed. by F. Kiefer, Dordrecht, Reidel.

Buitelaar, P. (1998) CORELEX: Systematic Polysemy and Underspecification, 
PhD dissertation, Brandeis University.

Stati, S. (1967) Teorie si metoda in sintaxa. Bucharest, Editura Academiei.

Weinreich, U. (1964) Webster's Third: A Critique of its Semantics. 
International Journal of American Linguistics, 30:405-409. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Verginica Barbu Mititelu is a researcher at the Romanian Academy Research 
Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Institute for Linguistics. She 
is interested in corpus linguistics, machine translations, natural 
language processing, and theoretical linguistics.





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