The demise of the lemma?

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• Dominic Stewart, Università di Trento

Descrizione

One of the many important lessons imparted by corpus linguistics is that the information supplied in dictionaries and grammars represents no more than the tip of the iceberg. In lexicography, the object of description is fundamentally the lemma. When more specific details are not supplied, the assumption on the part of the average dictionary user may well be that the various forms of any given lemma show not only similar frequency and lexical environment, but also similar meaning. However that may be, inflectional forms are under-represented in dictionaries. In the literature very little attention has been devoted to inflectional forms, in particular to their raw frequency. The frequency rates of the forms of a single lemma can not only differ markedly from each other, but can also prove to be far higher or lower than the average for single inflectional forms, something which has important implications for language learners and which could therefore claim more emphasis in language-learning materials. The main focus in this paper will be on the frequency of inflectional verb forms as represented in dictionaries, including a final analysis of the frequency of such forms within certain idiomatic expressions. The question lying at the heart of this research is whether the raw frequency of inflectional forms should occupy a more important position in language-learning materials, but whether it should or not, there is no doubt that the counting of such forms can reveal new and surprising insights into the vast and mostly untamed wilderness of language.

Modalità di partecipazione

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