Weigand Edda (ed.) Contrastive Lexical Semantics

John Benjamins, 1998. — ix, 270 pages. — (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 171). — ISBN: 90-272-3676-3; 1 55619 887 6.Статьи на английском и немецком языках.This volume contains most of the papers given at an International Workshop on "(Contrastive) Lexical Semantics" at the University of Münster in May, 1997. A few papers on the same topic are added. Questions of lexical semantics in general and of contrastive lexical semantics in particular were addressed from different perspectives, from the pragmatic perspective of a corpus-oriented approach as well as from the model-oriented perspective of sign theoretic linguistics. The pragmatic perspective is crucial to a project on language comparison which aims to analyse and describe the whole vocabulary-in-use in the area of emotion (see the papers by Weigand, Schmitt, Dem'jankov, Westheide, in part also Hauenherm and Gruaz). After the pragmatic turn, lexical semantics can no longer be seen as a discipline on its own but has to be developed as an integral part of a theory of language use. Essential features of individual languages can be discovered only by looking beyond the limits of our mother languages and including a contrastive perspective. Thus also lexical semantics of individual languages is considered to be in part contrastive semantics. The project is characterized not only by the features 'pragmatic' and 'contrastive' but also by the feature 'corpus-based' which has been gaining ground in recent years. Semantic conventions can no longer be justified by native competence alone; instead, they have to be verified by "hard, measurable evidence" (Sinclair, Introduction to the Cobuild Dictionary) on the basis of representative text corpora of languages-in-use.Within a pragmatic, corpus-oriented approach essential new ideas are discussed, mainly the insight that single words can no longer be considered to be the lexical unit. It is the complex multi-word lexical unit a pragmatic approach has to deal with. The papers by Sinclair and Weigand address this multi-word lexical unit from different starting points: from the point of a formally and automatically retrievable unit and from the point of a functionally and syntactically defined unit of use.The Lexical Item
Contrastive Lexical Semantics
The Vocabulary of Emotion A contrastive analysis of ANGER in German, English, and Italian
Sprachvergleich als Textvergleich
Zur kontrastiv-semantischen Analyse von Emotionen Semantische 'Ärgerdörfer' im Russischen und im Deutschen
Equivalence in Contrastive Semantics The effect of cultural differences
Sprachsystem und Sprachgebrauch in der kontrastiven lexikalischen Semantik
Composition Principles within the Word and within Ways of Use of Words
Lexical Items and Medium-Transferibility in English and German
Types of Lexical Variation
Non-overt Categories in Russian Partitive and Pseudo-partitive Constructions
Russian and German Idioms from a Contrastive Perspective
Word Sense Disambiguation An experimental study for German