Behavioral profiles: a corpus-based approach to cognitive semantic analysis

1. Introduction In this paper we will look into questions that concern what may be considered two of the central meaning relations in semantics, i.e. polysemy or the association of multiple meanings with one form and synonymy, i.e. the association of one meaning with multiple forms. In the domain of polysemy, cognitive semanticists typically face issues which center on the questions of how to determine whether two usage events are sufficiently similar to be considered instantiations of a single sense and how to establish the prototypicality of a sense/ several senses; we adopt Evans's (2005: 33, n. 2) definition of sense as those meanings which have achieved conventionalization and are instantiated in semantic memory. In the domain of near synonymy, semanticists need to uncover among other things what syntactic, semantic and/ or pragmatic differences there are between near synonyms and what the semantic and/ or functional relation is between near synonyms in a semantic space. In order to solve these problems they need to be able to measure the degree of similarity between senses and/or words and to decide how and where to connect a sense/ word to another sense/ word in a network. Several solutions to these problems have been put forward in the literature, in particular for polysemy-related issues. One such solution for polysemy-related issues is the full-specification approach inspired by Lakoff and his collaborators (c.f. e.g.