β Scribed by Dirk Geeraerts, Dirk Speelman, Kris Heylen, Mariana Montes, Stefano De Pascale, Karlien Franco, Michael Lang
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
This book introduces a systematic framework for understanding and investigating lexical variation, using a distributional semantics approach. Distributional semantics embodies the idea that the context in which a word occurs reveals the meaning of that word. In contemporary corpus linguistics, that idea takes shape in various types of quantitative analysis of the corpus contexts in which words appear. In this book, the authors explore how count-based token-level semantic vector spaces, as an
advanced form of such a quantitative methodology, can be applied to the study of polysemy, lexical variation, and lectometry. What can distributional models reveal about meaning? How can they be used to analyse the semantic relationship between near-synonyms, and to identify strict synonymy? How can
they contribute to the study of lexical variation as a sociolinguistic variable, and to the use of those variables to measure convergence or divergence between language varieties? To answer these questions, the book presents a comprehensive model of lexical and semantic variation, based on the combination of a semasiological, an onomasiological, and a lectal dimension. It explains the mechanism of distributional modelling, both informally and technically, and introduces workflows and corpus
linguistic tools that implement a distributional perspective in lexical research. Combining a cognitive linguistic interest in meaning with a sociolinguistic interest in variation, the authors illustrate this distributional methodology using case studies of Dutch and Spanish lexical data that focus on
the detection of polysemy, the interaction of semasiological and onomasiological change, and sociolinguistic issues of lexical standardization and pluricentricity. Throughout, they highlight both the advantages and disadvantages of a distributional methodology: on the one hand, it has great potential to be scaled up for lexical research; on the other, its outcome does not necessarily neatly correspond with what would traditionally be considered different senses.
Cover
Titlepage
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Introduction
Part I Theoretical preliminaries
1 Lexical variation and the lexeme-lection-lect triangle
1.1 Choices of lexicological perspective
1.2 Semasiology, conceptual onomasiology, formal onomasiology
1.3 Onomasiological profiles and lectometry
1.4 The lexicon in language variation research
1.5 From cognitive linguistics to cognitive sociolinguistics
The bottom line
2 Distributional semantics and the fog of meaning
2.1 From contexts to clusters
2.2 The diversity of distributional semantics
2.3 Sense determination and semantic indeterminacy
2.4 Semantics without meaning
The bottom line
Part II Distributional methodology
3 Parameters and procedures for token-based distributional semantics
3.1 From text to vector space
3.2 Linguistically informed parameters
3.3 Statistical parameters
3.4 From vector space to token clouds
3.5 Overview of implemented settings
The bottom line
4 Visual analytics for token-based distributional semantics
4.1 Dimensionality reduction for visualization
4.2 Selecting representative models
4.3 The NephoVis visualization tool
4.4 A ShinyApp extension for NephoVis
The bottom line
Part III Semasiological and onomasiological explorations
5 Making sense of distributional semantics
5.1 No single optimal solution
5.2 Types of information
5.3 Semantic heterogeneity
5.4 One cloud, one sense
5.5 Prototypical contexts
5.6 Semantic profiling
The bottom line
6 The interplay of semasiology and onomasiology
6.1 Onomasiology and token clouds
6.2 Verbs of destruction in Dutch
6.3 Destruction in contemporary Dutch
6.4 Destruction across the centuries
6.5 The evolution of onomasiological sets
The bottom line
Part IV Lectometric methodology
7 Quantifying lectal structure and change
7.1 Measuring lectal distances
7.2 Standardization and informalization
7.3 Lexical diversity and lexical success
The bottom line
8 Lectometry step by step
8.1 Selection of near-synonyms
8.2 Demarcation of the model space
8.3 Fine-tuning profiles
8.4 Selection of pruned models
8.5 Lectometric measures
The bottom line
Part V Lectometric explorations
9 Dimensions of standardization
9.1 Corpora and concepts
9.2 Modelling of token spaces and selection of profiles
9.3 Hierarchical standardization and destandardization
9.4 Formalization and informalization
9.5 Homogenization and dehomogenization
9.6 The evolution of Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch
The bottom line
10 Pluricentricity from a quantitative point of view
10.1 Spanish as an international language
10.2 Corpus and concept selection
10.3 Distributional modelling
10.4 The impact of model retention
10.5 The impact of lexical fields
10.6 Pluricentricity and the plurality of models
The bottom line
Conclusions
Software resources
References
Index
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