Archive for the ‘Usage examples’ Category

Fulfilling the Firthian Maxim

J. R. Firth’s famous quotation, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps,” is cited as the beginning of corpus linguistics, the study of language as expressed in samples. This approach had great success in the growth of English lexicography. In 1990, the advent of computerized samples (corpora) brought about the emergence of […]

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Electronic dictionaries of the future

Current electronic dictionaries are presently little more than transcriptions of paper dictionaries. To be sure, they have a lot more information than is present in the print versions. But, they are not really designed to support natural language processing. The major needs of the future are: (1) a set of instances illustrating each sense of […]

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