Corpus Linguistics Forum

Corpus Linguistics Forum

Time: May 12^th, 2013

Place: Room 208

语料库与跨文化战略研究系列讲坛之十一

题目：Corpus Linguistics and Beyond: from Collocation to the Discovery of Meaning

专家：Wolfgang Teubert教授

时间：2013年5月14日15:30—17:00

地点：208

摘要：

The necessity to deal with collocation, i.e. the phenomenon of natural language that words co-occur in way that tells us something about the meaning of the words involved (the node and its collocate[s]) has been discussed since the thirties of last century, and it is foremost this language feature that made corpus linguistics so successful as a paradigm in applied linguistics. However, as much studying collocation can help us to disambiguate meaning, it does not tell us what words, or more commonly, combinations of words, actually mean.

It is not the linguists who are in charge of meaning, it is the language users themselves. Day-in day-out they talk about the meaning of (what is now often called) units of meaning. Meaning is never stable, and different groups of people have different ideas, and these ideas may change over time. The open question is also: How much meaning is there to a unit of meaning? How much do we have to know what it means, to become, as non-native speakers, active and passive language users ourselves. My lecture will throw light on these issues by discussing, among other words, the adjective friendly and the nouncheese.

语料库与跨文化战略研究院