Questions tagged [lexicon]
Questions relating to lexicons: the catalogue of a language's words.
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What language has a small difference between word length of advanced VS basic vocabulary?
word length on Swadesh list
Zipf's Law
Basic vocabulary is used more frequently and the word length (#syllables/#segments) is generally shorter than advanced/technical/formal vocabulary.
In English:
...
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Are open-ended questions allowed for an interview focused on corpus creation?
NOTE: I am not a linguist, but my interest is in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field.
I am doing a research which is focused only on gathering new or distinct words on a recently described ...
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How similar are Bulgarian and Serbian compared to how Icelandic is to Danish (all of them in their written form)?
First, just to clarify, here I'm referring to the written forms of all these languages, not the speech (as it can hamper the intelligibility between languages such as in the case between Norwegian and ...
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What types of Arabic word were never adopted in Persian?
The Persian lexicon has a very large number of Arabic borrowings, including a small portion of very frequently used ones, and a larger portion of Arabic vocables seemingly spanning across all semantic ...
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Are auxiliaries not lexical?
Anderson's Essentials of Linguistics says:
Auxiliaries are what you might have called “helping verbs” when you
first learned about grammar: they help a lexical verb by providing
grammatical ...
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Similarity between Norwegian and Danish compared to other languages?
I had one question about a very interesting map showing the lexical distances between different languages of Europe (https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/34/). I am studying the ...
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Are there any natural languages that have one or more morphemes that each stand for both "other(s)" and "more"?
I've been working on the quantifiers for a conlang of mine and noticed that the concepts "other" and "more" are each related to the notion of additional quantities. So, we have ...
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How to create a generic model for terms that works cross-linguistically?
I am thinking how to create a "dictionary term" data model, and notice I don't have a real clear definition of a "term" which works across languages. Focusing on a "term" ...
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What transliteration/romanization scheme does Strong's Hebrew Dictionary use?
I can't find anywhere a description of how to convert the Strong Hebrew Dictionary pronunciation transliteration entries into IPA, or a close approximation to IPA. What romanization scheme are they ...
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Is compounding a universal word-formation strategy?
From what I've read, compounding is one of a number of word-formation processes. By word-formation, I mean "the process of creating new lexemes in a language."
One common process is the ...
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What is the difference among root, stem and base in English word-formation? Possible answer provided to check
Is the following text correct and updated?? It is based on Bauer (1983) but I don't know if this may have changed recently. Thanks in advance!
A root is the primary lexical unit of a word which is not ...
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Why are "eat" and "drink" different words in languages?
In theory, the words "eat" and "drink" are fundamentally the same action to me: putting something (...edible?) in your mouth. Oftentimes when speaking English, I confuse the words &...
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Is there a list of common English verbs with all of the inflectional "principal parts"?
I am looking for a list of common English verbs (1000 to 2000 most-frequent) which gives the distinct inflectional forms (spelled: pronunciation is irrelevant). For example, "sits, sit, sat, sat, ...
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How do we shape our language's lexicon?
Society always drops, creates and re-uses words. But how does that happen? When do we get to decide what word to use, dump, or create, and in what method does that occur? Does someone invent a new ...
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Why are the organization of mental lexicon and lexical access interdependent?
I read in Carroll ("Psychology of Language") that how the mental/internal lexicon is organized and how we access lexical information are interdependent issues.
However, he does not really ...
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How can an endonym for a specific group mean "people" or "humans" in this group at the same time?
I understand that some people who speak Inuktitut self-designate as "Inuit" which allegedly means "people", or "human beings" or something similar. I've heard the same ...
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Measuring lexical similarity between two arbitrary languages
Pardon me if this question is naive, but I am wondering if there is a way to quantify lexical similarity between two corpora of text, each written in different languages whose alphabets differ greatly....
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Are there languages with separate words for 'mouth opening' and 'mouth cavity'?
I am looking for languages which have separate words for the visible opening of the mouth (the external part, including or not including the lips), and the cavity (the internal part). Put another way, ...
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Does the lexical path get slower with more entries
The lexical path of the dual-route hypothesis of reading states that people recognize whole words from memory. Does this theory assume the search time becomes greater with more words in the lexicon?? ...
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Are adpositions lexical or grammatical morphemes?
In English, prepositions have something in common with most grammatical morphemes: they're a closed class. However, some phrasal prepositions in English contain lexical morphemes: "on top of," "on ...
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Resources for Bantu Language IPA
I am a developer for a Bantu language, Shona to be specific.
Where can I find resources that allow me to learn the IPA for this language.
Is there an IPA alphabet that I can use.
Thank you
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Subcategorisation Frame with DPs
I want to construct a subcatagorisation frame for some words, for example that take a DP complement. Take the preposition "between" as example. I arrive at this point:
Form: "...
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What can these verbs be called as a group?
I'm going to teach my students about different patterns of usage of these verbs: marry (e.g. get married, marry sb, marry to), die (e.g. die of , die from, die for), match (e.g. match (something), ...
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Need data on # of syllables per word in languages with CV & CVC syllables only
In languages with limited syllable structures (CV and CVC), how can I get data on the respective percentages of words in the known vocabulary that have 1 syllable, 2 syllables, 3 syllables, and 4 ...
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Which (australian aboriginal?) language classifies nouns in "upright" things and "lying" things?
I'm quite sure I remember that in one class, while we were talking about aboriginal languages, the professor said that one language or more languages, classify nouns in the two categories from the ...
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Are synonyms belonging to different dialects "absolute synonyms"?
As in the words tin - can, taxi - cab, autumn - fall, lift - elevator, etc. Would these be considered as absolute synonyms?
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A term for the process of building a form which has never been used before
One of my friends has started using the word 'vying' more and more these days. He did not know the word before a certain date and there was a clear event which caused him to "acquire" it into his ...
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Is there a word in which the concept and its complement is expressed?
Is there a word in which the concept and its complement is expressed, for example if I would like to express "the dichotomy of truth and falsehood" in one word. Obviously, the construction need not ...
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Is there a source displaying when and where a word was first attested?
Is there a source at which one can find out when and where a word first came into use/print? Especially interested in scientific discourse.
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What to reference for grammatical features being more reliable than lexical features for diachronic research?
I often hear people mention in passing that grammatical features are more reliable than lexical features in diachronic research, specifically when detecting pseudepigraphs, because it is relatively ...
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Where can I find a lexicon of adjectives?
I am currently looking for a list of adjectives that I can use as a seed for a machine learning model. These do not need to be annotated. Are there any open source lexicons that exist which could be ...
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Edit Doron: Reflexivity in Syntax or the Lexicon
Perhaps I am missing something here, but does Edit Doron adopt:
1) a lexicalist view of morphology (as it seems from "A Unified Approach to Reflexivization in Semitic and Romance" by Edit Doron and ...
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How many words can be considered "core words"?
First of all I apologize but my English skills are by far below the complexity of the question I need to ask. I am not a specialist and my question is not related to a single language. I would like to ...
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Animal Species discrimination in languages
Making my own language, primitive, so I'm trying to figure out how much did primitive languages discriminate different species in the same families of animals.
For example;
Dog vs Wolf, Lion vs ...
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What is the minimal set of words that make a language "complete"?
In programming languages, there is a concept of turing completeness - whenever a system reaches "turing completeness", it is capable of emulating any programming language and, thus, as expressive as ...
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Principles and Parameters: projectionist?
The question/problem I have is related to the way recent generative approaches focus on the Lexicon and Syntax.
I would like to know if Principles and Parameters can be considered a projectionist ...
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Term for universally-used quote with additional, non-compositional meaning
There exist certain fixed expressions which people use to convey quite specific meanings and (at least to me) always invoke a famous saying which is assumed to be common knowledge, such as
I am not a ...
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Which linguists from the 1940s–1970s believed that language comprised two distinct parts, “lexis” and “grammar”?
I’m looking for information about the linguists and/or researchers from before the 1970s who at the time believed that vocabulary and grammar should be taught as two completely separate entities, that ...
Patter English
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Which language among South East Asia has the most and least loanwords from English? [closed]
Among different languages used in Southeast Asia, which language has the most and least loanwords from English in lexicon?
In different languages, I assume Tagalog, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese.
I know ...
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Lexical similarity among languages used in Southeast Asia
Among many languages used in Southeast Asia (especially I want to talk about Malay, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Thai), is there any study about which pair of languages is close to each other in ...
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Financial Slang and NLP for Sentiment Analysis
I am working on a Sentiment-Analysis/Opinion-Mining of Tweets, focused on Finance related tweets.
One of the biggest issue I am facing is the unability of my algorithm to detect equivalent entities (...
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Are there any publicly available spell checking corpora?
I need some corpora that contain sentences with misspelled word(s) in order to evaluate the performance of my own spell checking approach. So, the corpora should define the right word alongside the ...
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Bare-NP Adverbs in German
There is a special class of noun phrases in English that have the ability to function as adverbial modifiers, unaccompanied by a preposition or any other indicator of adjunct status. These are the so-...
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Is it possible to determine the number of words in a language?
Recently I got into a discussion with my friend concerning sizes of lexicons of different languages. He stated something about Japanese having considerably more words than English. (The exact ...
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Is the modern Latin lexicon productive?
So I was wondering, does Latin taught in schools today add/borrow content words to/for its lexicon for things that weren't around (like computer, LED etc.) when Latin was natively spoken? And also, ...
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In what languages do eleven start with /b/ and fourteen start with /e/? [closed]
How do I find a foreign word for a number that starts with a given sound?
I'm writing an article about what English might look like if its numerals were in hexadecimal (base sixteen). For this, I ...
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Monoclausality in dependency trees
I've read Alex Alsina's papers on complex predicates and I understand why they are a problem for the syntax-semantics interface. If we wanted to build a syntax tree for a complex predicate in Romance, ...
user8145
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Lexical density
I'm trying to work out the lexical density of a spoken text. My problem is with contractions that include a primary auxiliary verb as a main lexical verb.
E.g. She's intelligent.
From what I ...
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Is there an estimate for the typical number of morphemes in natural language?
Martinet's "double articulation of language": With phonemes we build morphemes, and with morphemes, words. I'd like to get a sense of how productive are these combinations: With only a few phonemes ...
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Systematic analysis of the Japanese lexicon (specifically, Kanji)
I'm wondering whether anyone has carried out an analysis of the Kanji (or Hanzi), the traditional Chinese characters used in Japanese and some dialects of Chinese.
For example, I wonder whether ...
user2194