Reading the Text's Mind: Lemmatisation and Interpretation from a Peircean Perspective

Abstract

In the narrow acceptation of the word, lemmatisation is a text-transforming process in which a dictionary headword is substituted for an occurrence of of its flexional forms (e.g., go, the dictionary headword, is substituted for went, gone, etc. in the source text). Even in this practical and narrow sense, lemmatisation is one of the most important and crucial steps in many non-trivial text-processing cycles (Choueka and Lusignan 1985: 147). In the more general and systematic framework of computational criticism, lemmatisation can be defined as the generation of a derivative text through an algorithm that combines a database (dictionary and tagging rules) and a source text. In this general acceptation of lemmatisation, the source text is interpreted -- reformulated -- in the context of the knowledge stored in the dictionary. How external information, both intratextual and extratextual, is used to generate such (re)categorisations is a fundamental problem that traverses all levels of the interpretative process. In this article Peirce's type/token/tone trichotomy is used to explore some of the ramifications of the text-generation model of lemmatisation. It is argued that interpretation in the new medium is ultimately founded on a kind of quotation, called an attestation. To know what a text means is to know how it may be involved in attestation generation. This semantic model establishes a practical, useful, and theoretically coherent junction between lemmatisation in the narrow sense and complex critical interpretation.