Five English Verbs: A Comparison between Dictionary meanings and Meanings in Corpus collocations 2005 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (One Year))Student thesis

Abstract [en]

In Norstedts Comprehensive English-Swedish Dictionary (2000) it is said that the numbered list of senses under each headword is frequency ordered. Thus, the aim of this study is to see whether this frequency order of senses agrees with the frequencies appearing in the British National Corpus (BNC). Five English, polysemous verbs were studied. For each verb, a simple search in the corpus was carried out, displaying 50 random occurrences. Each collocate was encoded with the most compatible sense from the numbered list of senses in the dictionary. The encoded tokens were compiled and listed in frequency order. This list was compared to the dictionary's list of senses. Only two of the verbs reached agreement between the highest ranked dictionary sense and the most frequent sense in the BNC simple search. None of the verbs' dictionary orders agreed completely with the emerged frequency order of the corpus occurrences, why complementary collocational learning is advocated.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages

2005.

Keywords [en]

word convention, verbum, utterance, polysemy, polysemous verb, lexical item, prototypical semantics, computational linguistics, monosemous units of meaning, principle of lexical contrast, valency pattern, selectional restrictions, collocational string, collocational profile, disambiguation

Identifiers

URN: urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-13295Local ID: U12391OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hh-13295DiVA, id: diva2:368476

Uppsok

Humanities, Theology

Note

Denna uppsats kan beställas från arkivet / This paper can be ordered from the archive. Kontakta / Contact: arkivet@hh.seAvailable from: 2010-11-09 Created: 2010-11-09Bibliographically approved

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