Quantifying polysemy: Corpus methodology for prototype theory
Abstract This study addresses the methodological problem of result falsification in Cognitive Semantics, specifically in the descriptive analysis of semasiological variation, or "polysemy" It argues that manually analysed corpus data can be used to describe models of semantic structure. The method proposed is quantified, permitting repeat analysis. The operationalisation of a semasiological structure employed in the study takes the principle of semantic features and applies them to a contextual analysis of usage events, associated with the lexeme under scrutiny. The feature analysis, repeated on a large collection of occurrences, results in a set of metadata that constitutes the usage profile of the lexeme. Multivariate statistics are then employed to identify patterns in those metadata. The case study examines 500 occurrences of the English lexeme annoy. Three basic senses are identified as well as a more complex array of semantic variations linked to morpho syntactic context of usage.