Semantic Relations in the Thesaurus of English Idioms: A Corpus-based Study

Page 157-162
Author Guzel Giztova, Leysan Ismagilova
Title Semantic Relations in the Thesaurus of English Idioms: A Corpus-based Study
Abstract This paper deals with the principles of constructing an Ideographic Dictionary of English Idioms (Thesaurus) based on corpus data. Idioms in the dictionary are arranged by their figurative meaning rather than alphabetically. The need for a new type of dictionary is motivated by the fact that at present there is no corpus-based dictionary of English idioms built on a thesaural principle. Ideographic description of idioms enables a reader to find the largest possible number of idiomatic word combinations of the language that express a given concept. The basic entry of the Thesaurus is called a taxon, consisting of a conceptual descriptor used as a label of a taxon, and a group of idioms expressing the respective taxon. English Web text corpus 2013 (enTenTen13) is used as an empirical basis of the study. The analysis of corpus data presents a range of syntactic patterns, idiom variation, synonymous and polysemous idioms which cannot be retrieved from the existing idiomatic and monolingual dictionaries of the English language, since they fail to register all meanings of an idiom. Today, as lexicography is experiencing “the corpus revolution” (Hanks 2012), this is a question of key importance. The use of corpora provides additional possibilities for compiling the idiom list and structuring entries.
Session Lexicography and Corpus Linguistics
Keywords thesaurus; idioms; corpus; variation; synonymy
BibTex
@inproceedings{ELX2020_2021-016,
address = {Alexandroupolis},
title = {Semantic {Relations} in the {Thesaurus} of {English} {Idioms}: {A} {Corpus}-based {Study}},
isbn = {978-618-85138-1-5},
url = {https://www.euralex.org/elx_proceedings/Euralex2020-2021/EURALEX2020-2021_Vol1-p157-162.pdf},
language = {en},
booktitle = {Lexicography for {Inclusion}: {Proceedings} of the 19th {EURALEX} {International} {Congress}, 7-9 {September} 2021, {Alexandroupolis}, {Vol}. 1},
publisher = {Democritus University of Thrace},
author = {Giztova, Guzel and Ismagilova, Leysan},
editor = {Gavriilidou, Zoe and Mitsiaki, Maria and Fliatouras, Asimakis},
year = {2020},
pages = {157--162},}
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