Behavioral profiles: A fine-grained and quantitative approach in corpus-based lexical semantics

Gries, Stefan Th.

doi:10.1075/ml.5.3.04gri

Article published In: Methodological and Analytic Frontiers in Lexical Research (Part I)
Edited by Gonia Jarema, Gary Libben † and Chris Westbury
[The Mental Lexicon 5:3] 2010
► pp. 323–346

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Behavioral profiles

A fine-grained and quantitative approach in corpus-based lexical semantics

Stefan Th. Gries | University of California, Santa Barbara

Published online: 17 February 2011

https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.5.3.04gri

This paper introduces a fairly recent corpus-based approach to lexical semantics, the Behavioral Profile (BP) approach. After a short review of traditional corpus-based work on lexical semantics and its shortcomings, I explain the logic and methodology of the BP approach and exemplify its application to different lexical relations (polysemy, synonymy, antonymy) in English and Russian with an eye to illustrating how the BP approach allows for the incorporation of different statistical techniques. Finally, I briefly discuss how first experimental approaches that validate the BP method and outline its theoretical commitments and motivations.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, behavioral profiles, polysemy, semantics, antonymy, cluster analysis, synonymy, correlation/regression

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