Quantitative analysis of verb Polysemy in modern German*

Address correspondence to: Prof. Levickij, V.V., Gogolstr. 4/4, 274000 Černovcy, Ukraine.

Abstract

Polysemy, the faculty of a word to have two, three or more meanings is a constant and typical peculiarity of language, which is regarded as a semantic universal. In recent years in native and foreign linguistics many works have appeared where the problem of the polysemy system is studied from the quantitative point of view. The high interest in the quantitative regularities of polysemy can be explained by the practical needs of lexicology and automatic text analysis (machine translation, information search). At the same time the analysis of quantitative‐systematic polysemy characteristics assists in elaborating new ideas about general regularities of the lexical‐semantic language system as a whole (Tuldava, 1987, p. 133). The purpose of this work is to analyze verb polysemy in modern German, specifically such characteristics as: (1) The average number of verb meanings in modern German; (2) the dependence between the number of verb meanings, word semantics and frequency of usage; and (3) the dependence between the number of verb meanings and the morphological structure. The analysis was based on Wahrig (1994), from which all verbs were written out, amounting in total to 11,445.

Notes

Address correspondence to: Prof. Levickij, V.V., Gogolstr. 4/4, 274000 Černovcy, Ukraine.