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Within-concept similarities in a taxonomy: a corpus linguistic approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2014

STIJN STORMS ,
DIRK SPEELMAN ,
DIRK GEERAERTS  and
GERT STORMS
STIJN STORMS*
Affiliation:
QLVL, KU Leuven, Belgium
DIRK SPEELMAN*
Affiliation:
QLVL, KU Leuven, Belgium
DIRK GEERAERTS*
Affiliation:
QLVL, KU Leuven, Belgium
GERT STORMS*
Affiliation:
Experimentele Psychologie, KU Leuven, Belgium
*
*Addresses for correspondence: Stijn Storms: stijn.storms@arts.kuleuven.be; Dirk Speelman: dirk.speelman@arts.kuleuven.be; Dirk Geeraerts: dirk.geeraerts@arts.kuleuven.be; Gert Storms: stijn.storms@telenet.be.
*Addresses for correspondence: Stijn Storms: stijn.storms@arts.kuleuven.be; Dirk Speelman: dirk.speelman@arts.kuleuven.be; Dirk Geeraerts: dirk.geeraerts@arts.kuleuven.be; Gert Storms: stijn.storms@telenet.be.
*Addresses for correspondence: Stijn Storms: stijn.storms@arts.kuleuven.be; Dirk Speelman: dirk.speelman@arts.kuleuven.be; Dirk Geeraerts: dirk.geeraerts@arts.kuleuven.be; Gert Storms: stijn.storms@telenet.be.
*Addresses for correspondence: Stijn Storms: stijn.storms@arts.kuleuven.be; Dirk Speelman: dirk.speelman@arts.kuleuven.be; Dirk Geeraerts: dirk.geeraerts@arts.kuleuven.be; Gert Storms: stijn.storms@telenet.be.
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Abstract

This paper looks at a hitherto unexplored aspect of taxonomically organized concepts which has to do with word distributions in corpora of actual language use. In parallel to the psychological informativeness claim of the differentiation explanation, the question is addressed if concepts are internally more similar than their higher-ranked taxonomical relatives. This internal similarity is measured by making use of token-based vector space models. For each occurrence of a concept in the corpus a context vector can be calculated, which then serves as input for the internal similarity measure. Experiments are conducted for taxonomies taken from the Dutch counterparts of the English semantic domains animal and means of transportation. Results do not wholeheartedly agree with the imposition of a strict taxonomical order, but give rise to a new behavioural measure of the basic level.

Keywords

basic levelcategorizationcorpus linguisticslexical semanticstaxonomy
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 194 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

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