Informing Lexicographic Choices Through Corpus and Perceptual Data

Abstract

Lexicographers make many choices when compiling dictionary entries. Data-driven approaches can better inform such decisions. This paper proposes integration of two such sources, corpus data and perceptual survey data. A survey was distributed to 100 native speakers of English. Participants were asked to provide a definition and example sentence for 18 polysemous English words. After providing definitions, participants were presented with five definitions and asked to rank them by importance. Patterns in the rankings were analyzed to see what factors predicted higher ratings. Frequency was found to predict rankings, while concreteness was also shown to be moderate a predictor and have a potentially strong effect on certain words. Part of speech was not found to be a significant predictor of rank. Results suggest that crowdsourcing may be useful for certain linguistic tasks and that both corpus and perceptual data can be useful in making lexicographic choices.

Contemporary Perspectives on Language Standardization

“…The increased mass participation in the creation and reworking of language norms and practices, which has been facilitated by digital resources and Internet access, has been recognized in research on lexicography and online grammar resources (Schaffer 2010;Nelson 2019). Free and publicly accessible online lexicographical resources which rely on volunteers to create the content, such as Wiktionary (www.wiktionary.org) and Urban Dictionary (www.urbandictionary.com), continue to rise in usage since the inception of so-called Web 2.0.…”

“…Another feature which is simple to implement with an online resource such as the LOD is the opportunity to provide feedback channels from the public. The official online dictionary offers this possibility, which is illustrative of the 'democratizing turn' in language standardization heralded by the greater use of digital and online platforms for the process (Sajous et al 2018;Nelson 2019).…”