Mental Lexicon Investigating Word Meaning with Language Data

メンタルレキシコン： ことばの意味を言語データから探 る Mental Lexicon: Investigating Word Meaning with Language Data Victoria Muehleisen, Waseda University

たとえば、言語学者は次のような形 でネイティブに質問していました。 ◦ “How do you say X in your native language? ” ◦ “Is this sentence grammatical in your language? ”

She'd been alerted by our dog Brian who had barked her awake under the firm impression that his master was having a nervous breakdown.

おそらく、最初に思い浮かぶ定義は 次のようなものではないでしょうか。 　 　run: to move very quickly, by moving your legs more quickly than when you walk 　　　　　　　（ Longman Dictionary）

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Log into Sketch Engine. Choose the British National Corpus. Click on “Keywords”. In the box called “Lemma”, type in “run” and choose “verb” for “Po. S”. (Po. S = Part of Speech). Then click on “Make Concordance”.

What runs? And what is run? By sampling and sorting the concordance lines, we can see some interesting patterns. Try taking a sample of 250 lines, and sort them to the left. Go to the next page, until you are past the punctuation.

What runs or is run? people and animals BUT ALSO computer programs/applications businesses and services trains and buses emotions and many more. .

Word Sketch The Word Sketch summarizes information from a large corpus into a form that is easy to see and use.

Try Sketch Engine yourself Is 走る a good translation for run? It depends on the context! Compare the Word Sketch for 走る to the Word Sketch for run? In which cases are they equivalent, and in which cases are they different?

Thesaurus function shows words which have a similar Word Sketch to the search term. What other verbs are similar to run and to 走る?

Sketch Difference You can use this to directly compare two words within the same corpus. What is the difference between run and walk? What is the difference between 走る and 歩く?

Practice with Sketch Difference Try your own words, in English or in Japanese… heart 家 home きれい 美しい Pretty beautiful 心

Some other types of corpora and interfaces Brigham Young University (BYU) has an excellent web site with several different corpora. They are free to use, although after you use it a few times, you’ll be asked to register. You can find it at http: //corpus. byu. edu/.

TIME Magazine Corpus Contains all of the issues of the American magazine TIME from 1923 up through the present. You can use it to see changes in the use of words in American English over time.

Set sections to “yes”. Type in a word. Click on the numbers to see actual examples.

What are the changes in frequency of these words? Which are becoming more frequent? Which less? environment, global, keen, cool, hiphop, communist

Tracking changes in ideas How have women typically been described in America? 1. Type “woman” as the “Word”. 2. Then click on “Context”. Set the context numbers as 1 and 0. (This means one word to the left, and no words to the right). 3. For “POS”, pick “adj. ALL”.

For more detailed information, choose just two time periods. Compare the 1950 s to the 2000 s. What is different about how women are described?

Look at the verbs and other nouns that occur with woman. Do you find anything interesting? (You may want to change the context numbers in order to find something interesting. )

Compare words You can also compare two words in the TIMES corpus. Compare woman and girl, or woman and man.