Fuzzy Word Meaning Analysis And Representation In Linguistic Semantics. An Empirical Approach To The Reconstruction Of Lexical Meanings In East- And West-German Newspaper Texts

Word semantics is gaining increasing interest within linguistics in view of both, more adequate representational structures of the semantic system and methods and procedures to analyse it empirically. Due to the fact formal and operational means have been devised to describe and represent word connotation and/or denotation, this paper discusses some of the empirical problems connected with natural languages' varying and vague meanings, how these can be analysed statistically from discourse data, and represented formally as fuzzy system of vocabulary mappings. Some examples computed from Eastand West-German newspaper texts will be given at the end to illustrate the approaches feasibility.