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Keywords:

Social Sciences, Language & Linguistics, Linguistics, 2002 Cultural Studies, 2003 Language Studies, 2004 Linguistics, Languages & Linguistics, 4703 Language studies, 4704 Linguistics

Abstract:

This article shows how new approaches in corpus analysis could enrich traditional lexicographic descriptions. We examine a set of trends verbs (i.e, denoting an increase), in English, French and Dutch, building on several analyses of parallel corpora and well-targeted monolingual corpora. Parallel corpora give information about the frequency and equivalence of translations. MDS (MultiDimensional Scaling) analyses on these quantitative data yield interesting results, in terms of translation profiles. Corpora in the target language allow us to refine these results and to extract salient collocates, and they show the combinatorial properties of trends verbs. The results of all these corpus analyses, by means of translation profiles and lexical profiles, can be used to enrich traditional lexicographic descriptions in translation dictionaries. The methodology and results of the corpus analyses, as well as some challenges for lexicography, will be presented.