Speaker
Description
In an attempt to provide some background for the overall theme of the Euralex 21 conference, the talk explores the position of LLMs in the field of lexical studies from two angles, a lexicographic and a theoretical linguistic one. From a theoretical perspective, LLMs currently constitute the epitome of distributional semantics, and distributional semantics (for the reasons that I specified in Theories of Lexical Semantics, 2010) is eminently suited as a methodological basis for usage‐based cognitive semantics, allowing for a convergence of major theoretical trends in lexical semantics. But given that LLMs have taken distributional semantics well beyond the shape it had in 2010, does that evaluation still hold? For the lexicographical perspective, I will first draw attention to the too often ignored process through which lexicography not only gave a major descriptive impetus to the development of corpus linguistics, but also specifically contributed to an essential step in the emergence of computational methods for corpus research: LLMs are a tool with at least to some extent lexicographic roots. But again, given that the tool has grown well beyond its original format, how does that affect its relationship to lexicography?
