The OED first quotations as a source of diachronic reconstruction: dictionaries and queries for verbs and deverbal coinages

Journal article

The textual prototype which stands for the earliest use of a word could be of consequence for diachronic analysis. As the dating of morphologically conspicuous lexemes was made sufficiently reliable in the process of samples collection for the OED (cf. a survey of this problem in Brewer 1993: 321) we argue that the earliest citations of coinages provide a database from the corpus (Hoffmann 2004) of OED quotations suitable for reconstructing derivational processes or retracing the acceptance of ready-made loans. The present contribution is concerned with developing complementary queries into the lexicon's history that proceed from this source of evidence. The construed Historical Dictionary of Deverbal Families contains single/multiple category-divergent/suffix-variant (optionally) derivatives sharing a common root with over 17,700 parent verbs. Their mutual succession/precedence is measurable through binary/multiple age differential(s). The earliest uses of coinages provide their expansion widths beyond literal or arbitrary chronological homogeneity as well as a possibility of retrospective/prospective utimate/intermediate set reconstruction. Dated textual prototypes of verbs that are synonymous at the present time enable us to rearrange their sequence with a computable measure of permutation. Resembling the Historical Thesaurus of the OED the construed Dictionary of Strings of Verbs and Deverbal Coinages contains reflections of parent sequences in derived categories over time. An assessment of the similarity of the rise of such reflections with the appearance of parent verb sequences is accomplished through comparing the filled ordinal positions across the diagonal. About 350,000 similarity matrices for dated verbs and/or their coinages have been processed. The computation of mean expansion similarity values for strings of varied lengths proceeds from the textual prototypes' relative or absolute chronology. The framework of electronic (cf. Brewer 2004) queries to the evolving lexicon provides precedent or exhaustive exemplification in multiple partitioning of the compiled corpus as well as ample diagram visualisation.

Authors: Bilynsky, M

• Alternative title: Presented at Dictionaries and Text Corpora session
• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Edition: Author's Original
• Language: English
• Subjects: Lexicography