| Title |
Meaning as use: exploitation of aligned corpora for the contrastive study of lexical semantics |
| Authors |
Serge Sharoff (Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft, Universität Bielefeld, Postfach 10 01 31, D-33501 Bielefeld, Germany) |
| Session |
WP1: Corpora & Corpus Tools |
| Abstract |
The paper discusses the use of corpora for experimental studies in contrastive lexical semantics, in particular, for comparing how a state of affairs is expressed in different languages and by different translators. Three topics are addressed: (1) a lexicographic database, which is aimed at storing and maintaining contrastive descriptions of a class of lexical items in several languages; (2) an aligned parallel English-Russian corpus, including several literary texts and software manuals (the total size is about one million words), together with tools for querying the corpus by means of Perl-based regular expressions; and (3) an example of development of a lexicographical database of the most frequent size adjectives in English, German and Russian. |
| Keywords |
Lexical semantics |
| Full Paper |