Essen oder fressen? Eine Fallstudie zum Verhältnis von Korpusdaten und Intuition in der lexikalischen Semantik

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed an upsurge of interest in the link between theoretical linguistics and the different types of linguistic evidence that can be brought to bear in linguistic analysis (introspection, corpus data, experimental data, data from language acquisition, sociolinguistic data, historical data, etc.). In this article, the difference between introspection and intuition in lexical semantics is discussed against the background of their relationship with corpus data. Following an outline of the distinction between introspection and intuition in terms of psychological associations and subjectivity versus knowledge of language-specific, systemic meanings and intersubjectivity, the article proceeds to survey the results of a case study into the meaning differences between the verbs essen and fressen in present-day German. The meaning descriptions in a number of dictionaries and semantic analyses are compared and contrasted with corpus findings from the,Mannheimer Korpus` (Deutsches Referenzkorpus, DeReKo) and additional data extracted from German intemet sources via WebCorp, in order to evaluate the extent to which empirical corpus data and intuitive generalisations contribute to obtaining precise definitions of the two verb meanings.