8/19/2019 Clues to Meaning
1/15
Draft
Contextual Clues to Word-Meaning
ANTOINETTE
RENOUF
University of Liverpool
LAURIE BAUER
University of Liverpool and Victoria University of
Wellington
1. Introduction
How do native speakers interpret new words when they read or
hear them? How
much help and what kind of help are they given by the immediate
context in
which the new word occurs? These are questions which we set out
to investigate
on the basis of a large corpus of newspaper English. We were
working within the
framework of the APRIL project, which is a three year,
EPSRC-funded research
project aimed at classifying the rare words (initially hapax
legomena) in text. We
had expected to find solid correlations between the type of
formation and the type
of help provided in the text, but no such results were obtained.
However, we wereable to classify the types of help provided within
the immediate context, and it is
this taxonomy which provides the core of the material for this
paper.
In a recent paper, Plag (1996: 774) makes the following
statement:
"Linguists who work with native-speaker informants often
experience that
words or sentences are first rejected by informants because
speakers fail to
make sense of them, and not because the data violate
morphological or syntactic
rules of their language. Presented with an appropriate context
that provides apossible interpretation, the same informants may
readily accept the data pre-
sented to them."
