Using translation corpora to explore synonymy and polysemy
Thomas Egan · NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives · 2012
This paper investigates whether the Norwegian translation equivalents of the two English verbs begin and start and of the multi-polysemous preposition at can aid us in ascertaining the extent to which the former pair may be said to be synonymous and in tracing the polysemous semantic network of the preposition.The corpus data consist of tokens of the three forms in the English language original texts of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus.The study shows that begin and start are to all intents and purposes synonymous in some, but not all, syntactic frames.It also transpires that, with one significant exception (the Perception sense, instantiated by look at) the various senses of at cluster into two main semantic sub-networks.Using translation corpora to explore synonymy and polysemy -Thomas Egan