Running Head: Behavioral Profiles 1 Behavioral Profiles: A fine-grained and quantitative approach in corpus-based lexical semantics

This paper introduces a fairly recent corpus-based approach to lexical semantics, the Behavioral Profile (BP)approach. After a short review of traditional corpus-based work on lexical semantics and its shortcomings, I explain the logic and methodology of the BP approach and exemplify its application to different lexical relations (polysemy, synonymy, antonymy) in English and Russian with an eye to illustrating how the BP approach allows for the incorporation of different statistical techniques. Finally, I briefly discuss how first experimental approaches that validate the BP method and outline its theoretical commitments and motivations. Introduction In this paper, I will provide an overview of a recent approach towards corpus-based lexical semantics that tries to go beyond most previous corpus-based work, the so-called Behavioral Profile approach. This remainder of this first section provides a necessarily brief and general overview of previous traditional corpus-linguistic work in lexical semantics and mentions the shortcomings of such work and how the Behavioral Profile approach attempts to address them. Lexical semantics is the domain of linguistics that has probably been studied most with corpora. The main assumption underlying nearly all corpus-based work in lexical (and constructional) semantics is that the distributional characteristics of a linguistic expression reveal many if not most of its semantic and functional properties. The maybe most widely-cited statement to this effect is Firth's (1957:11) famous dictum that "[y]ou shall know a word by the company it keeps." However, other quotes may be actually even more explicit and instructive, such as Bolinger's (1968:127) statement that "a difference in syntactic form always spells a difference in meaning" or Cruse's (1986:1) statement that "the semantic properties of a lexical item are fully reflected in appropriate aspects of the relations it contracts with actual and potential contexts." Most explicit in this regard is Harris (1970:785f.):