We present a corpus-based study of methods that have been proposed in the linguistics literature for selecting the semantically unmarked term out of a pair of antonymous adjectives.

This paper deals with the problem of structuring adjectives in a wordnet.

We present a corpus-based study of the sequential ordering among premodifiers in noun phrases. This information is important for the fluency of generated text in practical applications. We propose and evaluate three approaches to identify sequential order among premodifiers: direct evidence, transitive closure, and clustering. Our implemented system can make over 94% of such ordering decisions correctly, as evaluated on a large, previously unseen test corpus.

The domain of linguistics that has probably been studied most with corpora is lexical semantics. The main assumption underlying nearly all corpus-based work in lexical (and constructional) semantics is that the distributional characteristics of a linguistic expression reveal many if not most of its semantic and functional properties. The maybe most widely-cited statement to this

This paper introduces a fairly recent corpus-based approach to lexical semantics, the Behavioral Profile (BP)approach. After a short review of traditional corpus-based work on lexical semantics and its shortcomings, I explain the logic and methodology of the BP approach and exemplify its application to different lexical relations (polysemy, synonymy, antonymy) in English and Russian with an eye to illustrating how the BP approach allows for the incorporation of different statistical techniques. Finally, I briefly discuss how first experimental approaches that validate the BP method and outline its theoretical commitments and motivations.

corpus-based approach to acquisition

Incompatibility (or co-hyponymy) is the most general type of semantic relation between lexical items, the meaning of which entails exclusion. Such items fall under a superordinate term or concept and denote sets which have no members in common (e.g. animal: dog-cat-mouse-lion-sheep; example from Cruse 2004). Traditionally, these have been of interest to lexical semanticists for the description of the structure of the lexicon. However, incompatibility is not just a relation that signifies a difference of meaning. This paper is a critical corpus-assisted re-evaluation of the phenomenon of incompatibility which argues that the relation in question sometimes also functions as a discourse marker. Incompatibles indicate recurrent intertextual patterns. This holds particularly true for socially or politically controversial lexical items such as Flexibilität (flexibility), Mobilität (mobility) or Globalisierung (globalisation). Corpus investigations of such words have revealed that among other semantically related terms, incompatibles have a crucial discourse focussing function. For the German lexical item Globalisierung, I will show how its lexical usage can be studied through a corpus-driven analysis of corresponding incompatibles. Incompatible terms are not contingent co-words but often occur in close contextual proximity and participate in regular syntagmatic structures (e.g. Globalisierung und Rationalisierung; Globalisierung und Modernisierung; Neoliberalismus, Globalisierung und Kapitalismus). Hence, these are easily extracted by conducting a computational collocation analysis. Such significant collocates provide a good insight into the discursive and thematic contexts of the search word. Following Teubert (2004), I will demonstrate how the meaning of such lexical items is constituted in discourse and how the examination of these particular collocates reveals their senseconstructing function and their pragmatic-discursive force. I will provide a brief discussion of the methodology used for such analyses, and I will explain why the complex semantic-pragmatic and thematic-communicative patterns implied in sets of incompatibles should be given a stronger emphasis in lexicography. 1.

and Derryberry 1994) treat antonym pairs as either canonical (for example old/young, cold/hot and happy/sad) or non-canonical (aged/youthful, cool/hot, happy/miserable), while others assume or argue for a continuum between the two categories (e.g. Herrmann,