Self-Organizing Lexical Feature Maps Semiotic Interpretation and Possible Application in Lexicography

Semiotic interpretation of lexical cohesion is a major research challenge both in theoretical and applied linguistics. From the point of view of usagebased language description, individual lexical units can be roughly characterized by their collocation profiles, i.e., by collections of condensed usage patterns extracted from very large corpora. It is posited that related lexical units tend to share portions of their respective collocation profiles. Selforganizing lexical feature maps (SOMs) have been used to analyze, cluster, and visualize the observed similarity relations among collocation profiles of written German. In this paper, the linguistic interpretation of these maps is discussed and it is shown that semiotic analysis can guide linguists in their choice of cogent indicators – those with a higher descriptive value – from a particular SOM layout. It is suggested that semiotic analysis of self-organizing lexical feature maps offers valuable insights into the collocational behavior of lexical units on the parole level. Several examples and outlined applications in practical lexicography are given.