Verba nozīmju nošķiršana: teorija un prakse
Verb sense distinction: Theory and practice

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the principles and process of creation of the electronic lexical database WordNet for the Latvian language. The focus is directed at elaboration of common criteria for word sense distinction. The theoretical part briefly describes key notions in lexical semantics as related to the semantic structure of polysemantic words, especially verbs. Special attention is paid to the types and mutual relations of senses, and their description in dictionaries. The main goal of this part is to elaborate common criteria for distinguishing verb senses according to semantic theory, lexicographic sources, and corpus data. In relation to this, the notion of subsense revealing subtle differences in meaning and its relations to the superordinate sense is described in detail. The empirical part of the article discusses the system of senses of three polysemantic verbs belonging to different semantic groups – domāt ‘to think’, spēlēt ‘to play’, and dot ‘to give’. Discussion reveals practical application of the main criteria of word sense distinction, also highlighting some basic problematic issues. It has been concluded that verb sense distinction should be based on a complex of criteria, and the dominating criterion is chosen according to the semantic group the verb under analysis belongs to.

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