Words receive a signiicant part of their meaning from use in communicative settings. The formal mechanisms of lexical acquisition, as they apply to rich situational settings, may also be studied in the limited case of corpora of written texts. This work constitutes an approach to deriving semantic representations for lexemes using techniques from statistical induction. In particular, a number o...

This paper is concerned with the possibility of quantifying and comparing the productivity of similar yet distinct syntactic constructions, predicting the likelihood of encountering unseen lexemes in their unfilled slots. Two examples are explored: variants of comparative correlative constructions (CCs, e.g. the faster the better), which are potentially very productive but in practice lexically...

The article analyzes the linguistic nature of some nuclear lexemes (power, control, authority, influence) verbalizing the basic concept of the English-language political discourse – the concept of “Power”. The paper reveals the structure of the concept, its conceptual features, as well as the main characteristics of the concept representatives at the language and functional levels.

We present a new method to automatically merge lexicons that employ different incompatible POS categories. Such incompatibilities have hindered efforts to combine lexicons to maximize coverage with reasonable human effort. Given an "original lexicon", our method is able to merge lexemes from an "additional lexicon" into the original lexicon, converting lexemes from the additional lexicon with a...

The Aymara of the Andes use absolute (cardinal) frames of reference for describing the relative position of ordinary objects. However, rather than encoding them in available absolute lexemes, they do it in lexemes that are intrinsic to the body: nayra ("front") and qhipa ("back"), denoting east and west, respectively. Why? We use different but complementary ethnographic methods to investigate t...

This paper describes an experiment on extracting Hungarian multi-word lexemes from a corpus, using statistical methods. Corpus preparation—the addition of POS tags and stems—was done automatically. From the corpus, 〈verb+noun+casemark〉 patterns were extracted as collocation candidates. Evaluation shows that the statistical methods used by Villada Moirón (2004a) to identify Dutch V + PP collocat...