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Tutorial (Marie-Louise Brunner) Di 14-15
What is a word? This superficially simple question has been at the heart of
the linguistic discipline of lexicology, the study of meaning and word use.
Lexicology tries to describe, quantify and explain the vocabulary of a
language by various means, such as dictionaries, thesauri or corpora. During
the last 20 years, this field of research has been fundamentally changed by
new technology and methods. Since the advent of corpus linguistics, we have
been using larger and larger corpora to catalogue the lexicon of English and
other languages. In addition, new trends in linguistic theory such as the
rediscovery of onomasiology or the increasing importance of pragmatics mean
that our perspective has changed, moving from the analysis of pure lexical
items to larger units of meaning, including extra-linguistic features and
diachronic aspects.
This seminar will deal with general features of lexicology, such as models
of the linguistic sign, types of meaning and classification of morphemes,
words or lexemes. We will discuss the internal structure of words, look at
word-formation and componential analysis, examine different approaches such
as feature and prototype semantics and investigate semantic rules and
processes. In the second part of the course, the structure of the lexicon
will be discussed using different proposals for the creation of units and
classes, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. How are dictionaries,
thesauri and corpora designed and how can they be adapted to different
purposes? How do new linguistic approaches, such as corpus or cognitive
linguistics, challenge the traditional notion of the lexicon by introducing
psychological categories, frames, cultural models and quantity aspects? What
are the most recent trends in this field?
Research topics can be found in the areas described above, e.g.
investigating the models of the linguistic sign, dictionary, thesaurus and
corpus design, word structure, polysemy, morphological structures and
processes such as compounding, suffixation, zero-derivation, nominalization,
lexicalization and grammaticalization, semantic processes such as metaphor
and metonymy or categorization. A list of topics for presentations and
research will be available in the first seminar session. The accompanying
voluntary tutorial offers students the opportunity to further explore the
topics discussed in the seminar. Near the end of the semester, a paper
conference will be held to make sure students are headed in the right
direction with their term papers. For detailed course requirements please
also consult the respective module descriptions. Participants must register
online via CLIX. For further questions please contact me at
s.diemer@umwelt-campus.de. |
