Comparable or Parallel Corpora

International Journal of Lexicography

Volumn 9, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 238-264

  Teubert, Wolfgang ^a  

^a INSTITUT FÜR DEUTSCHE SPRACHE   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248781057     PISSN: 09503846     EISSN: 14774577     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/ijl/9.3.238     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. At recent conferences on lexicography and particularly on lexicology, Aristotelian qualia has become an indispensable buzz-word in the context of lexical semantics.
2. James Pustejovsky's reanimation of a focal scholastic discussion is based on the assumption that semantic categories reflect some metaphysical reality (or at least a universal cognitive structure).
3. Such semantic categories are certainly worth discussing, but they tell us little about the actual behaviour of words, of word usage and word sense.
4. Empirical evidence shows that meanings of words 'are not so much construed according to the laws of cognition, but are rather the random results of the idiosyncratic communication history of a language community.
5. These two opposite views of language are represented by Pustejovsky (1991) and Baker (1986) respectively.
6. It goes without saying that lexicology cannot do without semantic categories, and this is also true for multilingual lexicography.
7. But unstable, ontological categories are needed. Operational categories will be ad hoc, construed to reflect unpredictable semantic contrast between the vocabularies of the languages at stake.
8. It is well known, e.g., that German Strafie is in English both road and street.
9. The distinction can be marked by +/-built-up area
10. which is probably an unnecessary distinction for most language pairs.
11. Ad hoc categories of this kind, fit to be used in multilingual lexicography, are being developed at the C.N.R.S.-INALF in Paris
12. see Gross (1995). 2 We have to remember that an arbitrary collection of citations used to be the main basis for dictionary making until quite recently.
13. In a preface to a small English-German dictionary of 1929 (Langenscheidts Taschenworterbuch) we find this typical statement:
14. The basis for this revision is . . . an extensive collection of the author's gleanings from books' (my translation).
15. In a survey recently conducted by Peter Bassola, University of Szeged, Hungary, a number of German sentences, based on students' translations from the Hungarian
16. were assessed by native German speakers. Quite a high percentage (perhaps about 40%) were classified as: syntactically correct, but you would not use it (in this context).
17. Of course, correctness here (and quite commonly) is defined as being in accordance with the rules explicitly stated in grammar books (or in dictionaries, for that matter).
18. But we all know there is a lot more to the acceptability of utterances than grammars and dictionaries tell us.
19. The gap between correctness and acceptability is the major (and theoretically widely unresolved) problem of foreign language teaching and of translation into a foreign language.
20. It is to be hoped that working with corpora can make this gap manageable.
21. This is the main lesson to be learned from Searle (1992).
22. A remarkable exception is the work of Sinclair, Perez and Tognini-Bonelli in this volume.
23. For a brief overview on bilingual studies based on parallel corpora, see Hartmann(1995).
24. For example, the MULTEXT and MECOLB projects, which both aim, among other things, at the creation of parallel corpora.
25. Wildhagen/Heraucourt: English-German/German-English Dictionary in Two Volumes. 14th unchanged edition, Wiesbaden 1965/1970.
26. Our examples are taken from the relevant entries for each headword.
27. These are referred to as delexical verb constructions elsewhere in this collection (Eds.).