Lexicometry is the quantitative study of the lexicon, using statistical methods, studying a corpus of texts, based mainly on the frequency of use of the words that are part of it. [1]
Lexicometrics arose from the interest of linguists and historians in the emerging computer sciences in the 1950s and 1960s and, from a theoretical point of view, reflects a focus on quantitative approaches in the humanities (in particular, quantitative history ) and research. for collective structures in language, under the influence of structuralism. [2] It developed in the history of France in the 1970s and 1980s, and took its place in the linguistic turn of the human sciences, in particular with the work of Régine Robin [3] and the work of historians such as Antoine Prost, who worked on the vocabulary of electoral proclamations, or medievalists such as Jean-Philippe Genet or Alain Guerreau. [4]
It inherits the work of linguists such as Charles Muller and Étienne Brunet, and is not to faraway to the French school of data analysis and the tools developed in particular by Jean-Paul Benzécri (such as factor analysis ). After a general period of decline of quantitative methods in the human sciences in the 1980s and 1990s, lexicometrics is making a comeback in the 21st century, as part of the development of digital humanities, among other methods of textual data analysis. [5]
A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically, which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.
Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries.
Corpus linguistics is an empirical method for the study of language by way of a text corpus. Corpora are balanced, often stratified collections of authentic, "real world", text of speech or writing that aim to represent a given linguistic variety. Today, corpora are generally machine-readable data collections.
In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word skyscraper has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example Wolkenkratzer in German, arranha-céu in Portuguese and gökdelen in Turkish.
Henning John Bergenholtz is a Danish linguist, who is head of Center for Lexicography at Aarhus School of Business in Denmark. Professor Bergenholtz has contributed to lexicography as a science with publications on theoretical lexicography as well as several printed and electronic dictionaries.
Sandro Nielsen is a Danish metalexicographer, Associate Professor at Centre for Lexicography at the Aarhus School of Business, Denmark, from where he received his PhD in 1992. Nielsen has contributed to lexicography as a theoretical and practical lexicographer with particular reference to bilingual and multilingual specialised dictionaries. He is the author and co-author of more than one hundred publications on lexicography, theoretical papers, printed and electronic (online) dictionaries.
A language-for-specific-purposes dictionary is a reference work which defines the specialised vocabulary used by experts within a particular field, for example, architecture. The discipline that deals with these dictionaries is specialised lexicography. Medical dictionaries are well-known examples of the type.
A specialized dictionary is a dictionary that covers a relatively restricted set of phenomena. The definitive book on the subject includes chapters on some of the dictionaries included below:
Specialized lexicography is an academic discipline that is concerned with development of theories and principles for the design, compilation, use and evaluation of specialized dictionaries. A specialized dictionary is a dictionary that covers a relatively restricted set of phenomena, usually within one or more subject fields. An alternative term for this type of dictionary is LSP dictionary.
Centre for Lexicography is a research centre affiliated with the Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus Denmark, and was established in 1996. The centre's aim is to carry out lexicographic research into needs-adapted information and data access, i.e. research work into dictionary theory in general and it has built a solid, international reputation in that field.
Ladislav Zgusta was a Czech-American historical linguist and lexicographer, who wrote one of the first textbooks on lexicography. He was the Hermann and Klara H. Collitz professor of linguistics and classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, starting in 1970 after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia ended his academic career at Prague's Oriental Institute. With his family he first escaped to India, "in a veritable cloak and dagger episode worthy of a movie" before making his way to the United States. Dutch lexicographer Piet van Sterkenburg referred to Zgusta as "the twentieth-century godfather of lexicography". He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, and in the same year awarded the Gold Medal of the Czech Academy of Sciences for his work in Humanities.
A bilingual dictionary or translation dictionary is a specialized dictionary used to translate words or phrases from one language to another. Bilingual dictionaries can be unidirectional, meaning that they list the meanings of words of one language in another, or can be bidirectional, allowing translation to and from both languages. Bidirectional bilingual dictionaries usually consist of two sections, each listing words and phrases of one language alphabetically along with their translation. In addition to the translation, a bilingual dictionary usually indicates the part of speech, gender, verb type, declension model and other grammatical clues to help a non-native speaker use the word. Other features sometimes present in bilingual dictionaries are lists of phrases, usage and style guides, verb tables, maps and grammar references. In contrast to the bilingual dictionary, a monolingual dictionary defines words and phrases instead of translating them.
Beryl T. "Sue" Atkins was a British lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data.
Patrick Wyndham Hanks was an English lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. He edited dictionaries of general language, as well as dictionaries of personal names.
English lexicology and lexicography is that field in English language studies which examines English lexicon, English word-formation, the evolution of vocabulary and the composition of English dictionaries.
Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, which define units syntactically and lexically, respectively, according to their contrast with the other units in the system. Other key features of structuralism are the focus on systematic phenomena, the primacy of an idealized form over actual speech data, the priority of linguistic form over meaning, the marginalization of written language, and the connection of linguistic structure to broader social, behavioral, or cognitive phenomena.
Reinhard Rudolf Karl Hartmann is an Austrian and English lexicographer and applied linguist. Until the 1970s, lexicographers worked in relative isolation, and Hartmann is credited with making a major contribution to lexicography and fostering interdisciplinary consultation between reference specialists.
Contrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of languages.
Doris Aileen Bartholomew is an American linguist whose published research specialises in the lexicography, historical and descriptive linguistics for indigenous languages in Mexico, in particular for Oto-Manguean languages. Bartholomew's extensive publications on Mesoamerican languages span five decades of active research. She has also published extensively on Zapotecan languages and the Otomi language. She has been editor-in-chief and publications director for the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano (ILV), the affiliate body incorporated in Mexico for SIL International.
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