Una bella esperienza, una buona prova. A Corpus Analysis of Purely Evaluative Adjectives in Italian

By November 17, 2016,
Page 1409-1420
Author Irene Russo
Title Una bella esperienza, una buona prova. A Corpus Analysis of Purely Evaluative Adjectives in Italian
Abstract It is questionable how much pragmatic information should be included in a dictionary entry. In a native-speaker's dictionary such information is considered unnecessary, but nevertheless, a certain amount of it could be included as multiword expressions - fixed and semi-fixed - that are regarded as holistic units rather than compositional strings. In this work a corpus analysis of two purely evaluative adjectives in Italian - bello, buono - will shed light on substitutability among them in noun phrases. Mutual Information (Church & Hanks1990) as a measure to compare and contrast the distribution of words in context highlights nouns for which bello and buono are interchangeable in NPs. We propose to manage adjectival polysemy clustering word senses according to similar evaluative functions. A dictionary entry for bello can be partially structured on the base of its strong similarity with buono in NPs contexts: bello and buono usages are informed by evaluative attitudes displayed by speakers.
Session 8. Phraseology and Collocation
Keywords
BibTex 
@InProceedings{ELX08-145,
	   author = {Irene Russo},
	   title = {Una bella esperienza, una buona prova. A Corpus Analysis of Purely Evaluative Adjectives in Italian},
	   pages = {1409-1420},
	   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th EURALEX International Congress},
	   year = {2008},
	   month = {jul},
	   date = {15-19},
	   address = {Barcelona, Spain},
	   editor = {Elisenda Bernal, Janet DeCesaris},
	   publisher = {Institut Universitari de Linguistica Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra},
	   isbn = {978-84-96742-67-3},
	}
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