"Mapping Syntax onto Semantics: A Lexicographical Approach"

5/26/1999: [time not recorded]
[location not recorded]

Abstract: According to dictionaries, many words have more than one sense. But a human being reading or hearing a text is rarely troubled by any awareness of ambiguity, and insightful linguists from Fillmore onwards have been sceptical of "checklist theories of meaning". In this talk I explore the notion that phraseology provides cues on which utterer and audience depend for activating meaning, without activating a checklist of word-by-word semantic choices. I assume that meanings are events rather than static abstract objects. Strictly speaking, therefore, what dictionaries show are meaning potentials not meanings. Dictionaries do a good job of identifying the meaning potentials of words, especially rare and unusual ones, but, with the exception of the Collins COBUILD project, they have made little attempt to show how meaning and use interact. This may not matter for human users, but it can be a fatal flaw for computer applications. Typically, a computer does not know how to tell one sense of a word from another, and dictionaries do not provide this information. It is no comfort to tell the computer that, for a human being, the ambiguity does not arise in the first place. I shall present a sample entry [for the lexical item SHAKE] from a robust phraseological dictionary designed to fill this gap. The aim is to provide a machine-tractable dictionary, based on painstaking corpus analysis, identifying all and only the normal, correct uses of each word in the language and showing how different components of a word's meaning potential are activated in different lexico-syntactic contexts. The dictionary must account not only for literal uses but also for metaphors and other exploitations, insofar as these are comprehensible to human users of the language and can be distinguished from mistakes. For this reason, in addition to a syntactic description of each word's normal behaviour linked to a semantic interpretation, it is assumed that the dictionary will in due course contain a set of "exploitation rules", showing how metaphors and other exploitations are generated from norms. The good news is that, even for a moderately complex verb such as SHAKE, all the normal uses are accounted for in a table of only three dozen phraseological patterns (five defaults and thirty variations). The bad news is that the notion of a LEXICAL SET is central to the lexicosyntactic analysis, and there is no known shortcut to identifying membership of lexical sets. Intensional criteria are suspect, and machine-readable thesauruses wreak havoc. (Any good thesaurus will tell you that, like FINGER, FIST is semantically related to HAND, but of course "shaking one's fist" does not activate the same meaning of SHAKE as "shaking someone's hand".) Turning to another entry, CLIMB, I shall show how different entailments are activated by the whole phraseological context, not by any one lexical item in it. "Climbing the steps" activates a slightly different set of implications from "climbing a mountain". Again, the norms can be schematized, and default semantic entailments attached. Finally, if time allows, I shall give further illustrations of the distinction between norm and exploitation, and I shall claim that all questions and negatives are exploitations. ("Youthful enthusiasm", for example, is a type of enthusiasm, but "feigned enthusiasm" is not: it is a negative.)

About Patrick Hanks: Patrick Hanks is chief editor of Current English Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. His latest contribution to English lexicography is the New Oxford Dictionary of English, published in August 1998, edited with Judy Pearsall and a world-wide team of lexicographers. Before joining OUP in 1990, he was chief editor of Collins English Dictionaries, having led the team that compiled the first edition of Collins English Dictionary (1979). From 1980 to 1983 he studied for a Ph.D. with Yorick Wilks at the University of Essex, having decided to put lexicography behind him. From 1983 to 1990 he was managing editor and subsequently editorial director of the Cobuild project in computational lexical analysis, working with John Sinclair. From 1987 to 1990 he also worked on lexical analysis with Ken Church at AT T Bell Labs. In 1991 he set up a collaboration ("the Hector Project") between Oxford University Press and Digital's Systems Research Center in Palo Alto CA, researching the relationship between word meaning and word use. He has done stints in Germany, Poland, and Sweden as a teacher of English as a foreign language -- experiences which led to co-authorship of a highly successful EFL textbook, Business Listening Tasks (Cambridge University Press, 1986). He has long had an interest in personal names, and is co-author of Dictionary of Surnames (1988), Dictionary of First Names (1990), and Concise Dictionary of First Names (1992, 1997), all published by Oxford University Press. He is currently chief editor of The Dictionary of American Family Names (four volumes, forthcoming).

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006