Meaning as use: exploitation of aligned corpora for the contrastive study of lexical semantics

Abstract

The paper discusses the use of corpora for experimental studies in contrastive lexical semantics, in particular, for comparing how a state of affairs is expressed in different languages and by different translators. Three topics are addressed: (1) a lexicographic database, which is aimed at storing and maintaining contrastive descriptions of a class of lexical items in several languages; (2) an aligned parallel English-Russian corpus, including several literary texts and software manuals (the total size is about one million words), together with tools for querying the corpus by means of Perl-based regular expressions; and (3) an example of development of a lexicographical database of the most frequent size adjectives in English, German and Russian.

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