Abstract
This paper is a theoretical and empirical investigation into the use of the notion “core vocabulary” in some areas of linguistics and related disciplines, originally prompted by the concrete task of compiling core vocabularies in two research projects growing out of two quite different research traditions: (1) lexicostatistics, where “core vocabularies” are used to measure the linguistic distance among languages in order to establish genetic and typological language groupings; and (2) computer-assisted language learning—a long-standing research interest of Lauri Carlson—where the “core vocabulary” is the most central vocabulary, to which language learners should be exposed first. In linguistics we also find a more theoretically motivated notion of “core vocabulary”, as so-called “semantic primitives”. In the paper, I compare the three kinds of “core vocabulary” and discuss their relationship to the formal knowledge-representation systems called “ontologies” (currently among Lauri Carlson’s research interests)—especially “core” ontologies such as SUMO—and the notion of “concept” central to the latter work: What is the relationship—if any—between concepts in such ontologies and lexical items in languages?
Published Version
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