Like a Lexicographer Weaving Her Lexical Network

The title of our talk—an implicit reference to the English cliché like a spider weaving her web— intends to attract one’s attention to the metaphor that can be drawn between the dance of a spider weaving her web and a new lexicographic gesture that is gradually emerging from the work on Net-like lexical resources (Fellbaum, 1998; Baker et al., 2003; Gader et al., 2012). Our claim is that the inherent graph structure of natural language lexicons not only determine vocabulary acquisition and use (Wolter, 2006), but also lexicographic activity. In that respect, reflecting on new ways to implement the task of building lexical resources is essential for lexicographers themselves, but also for anyone interested is lexicons as mental structures. After all, lexicographers and language learners are those who have the most direct contact with lexical structures, through closely related activities: describing a natural phenomenon is a form of learning through explicit conceptualization. Lexicographers often experience the fact that by completing the description of a word they achieve a form of understanding and mastering of this word. They do not merely transcribe word knowledge and observations made on word behavior in speech and texts: they “acquire” the word. This makes them feel good and this explains why lexicography is indeed extremely addictive.