Corpus Evidence and Electronic Lexicography

Corpus evidence opens up radical possibilities for lexicography. Traditional dictionaries tend to distort meaning because they pay insufficient attention to phraseology. Corpus evidence provides massive evidence for both normal and abnormal phraseology. For the proper analysis of meaning in text, a new theory of language is needed, along with new kinds of dictionaries. These will take account of prototype theory and stereotype theory and apply them to both phraseology and word meaning. Linguistic phenomena such as these are probabilistic, not deterministic. Electronic lexicography in future will have to take account of phraseological norms and statistical analysis of word use. Conventions of word meaning need to be associated with the word in its normal contexts (i.e. conventions of usage) rather than merely with the word in isolation. The chapter concludes by considering the pros and cons of Wiktionary as a possible model for electronic lexicography of the future.