1887
Volume 13, Issue 4
  • ISSN 1384-6655
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9811
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

Each instance of language comparison requires observations on semantic equivalence. Meaning is by far the most popular tertium comparationis in contrastive and typological research. However, the question of how semantic equivalence is to be determined remains extremely difficult to solve. This paper presents an approach to detect semantic relatedness between a limited range of lexical items from different languages on the basis of monolingual data. Applying distributional similarity (Dagan et al. 1999) cross-linguistically, it identifies semantically related verbs governing embedded interrogatives by looking at the frequency of the question words (i.e. wh-items) that are used in the embedded interrogatives in monolingual corpora. Convincing results are obtained for six different language pairs: English-French, English-Dutch, English-Spanish, French-Dutch, French-Spanish and Dutch-Spanish.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.13.4.04def
2008-01-01
2025-02-17
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.13.4.04def
Loading
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error