Systematic Polysemy of Nouns and its Lexicographic Treatment in Estonian

By November 17, 2016,
Page 1333-1339
Author Margit Langemets
Title Systematic Polysemy of Nouns and its Lexicographic Treatment in Estonian
Abstract The focus of the study of the polysemy of the Estonian noun (Langemets 2010) was on identifying the systematic patterns of noun polysemy with further perspective to elaborate the principles to encode and represent systematic polysemy of nouns in the database of the one-volume dictionary of Estonian (to appear in 2015) and in the EELex dictionary management system of the Institute of the Estonian Language.
The analysis was based on the lexical perspective, i.e. on the lexicographic representation of polysemy in the academic six-volume monolingual dictionary of Estonian (1st ed. 1988–2007, 2nd ed. 2009), and the supportive theory of generative lexicon by means of a qualia structure (Pustejovsky 1995). The sample of study consisted of simple nouns (843 headwords in all), the total of 1738 semantic units covered both the numbered senses and various subsenses. A hierarchy of the semantic types of nouns, adapted from the lexicographic projects SIMPLE1 and CoreLex2, as well as the Estonian Wordnet3, was used as an ancillary means of analysis enabling, in a way, to “measure” the regularity of alternating word senses.
A result of the analysis is the list of 40 systematically polysemous patterns, presented as the “golden standard” of systematic polysemy in Estonian (named after Peters 2004). In total the sample (843 headwords) contained 305 sense alternations that could be interpreted as revealing systematic polysemy. Of those, nearly every fourth (72 patterns) involves an ARTEFACT sense, while half (!) of the patterns involve ACTIVITY.
Session Lexicological Issues of Lexicographical Relevance
Keywords
BibTex
@InProceedings{ELX10-132,
author = {Margit Langemets},
title = {Systematic Polysemy of Nouns and its Lexicographic Treatment in Estonian},
pages = {1333-1339},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th EURALEX International Congress},
year = {2010},
month = {jul},
date = {6-10},
address = {Leeuwarden/Ljouwert, The Netherlands},
editor = {Anne Dykstra and Tanneke Schoonheim},
publisher = {Fryske Akademy},
isbn = {978-90-6273-850-3},
}
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