Contextual Clues to Word-Meaning

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 were able 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: