Building on a corpus: A linguistic and lexicographical look at some near-synonyms*

This paper considers the lexicographical problem of descriptive coherence throughout a semantic field, using examples drawn from a large electronic corpus. A brief study summarizes the approach of three leading dictionaries of English as a foreign language to seven verbs which share many components of meanings and syntactic properties, and concludes that there is little attempt at systematicity within the individual accounts. Recent research in theoretical linguistics suggests some reasons for the similarities and differences in the behavior of these verbs, and we propose that a preliminary analysis within the framework of linguistics proper, but accessible to lexicographers, might help to systematize some aspects of their dictionary entries. (May 1994; Revised: October 1994)