Abstract Nouns in Cognitive Lexicography: Constructing a Dictionary Entry (Based on the English Language)

Abstract

Description of the meaning of polysemous abstract nouns remains one of the most difficult challenges in contemporary cognitive lexicography. This study aims to develop a methodology for constructing a dictionary entry for abstract nouns in contemporary English, with particular attention to their conceptual nature, semantic structure and cognitive mechanisms underlying polysemization. Abstract nouns are linguistic units that name intangible concepts such as qualities, emotions and states. They lack concrete referents and present difficulty for lexicographers. The research material was selected from a range of contemporary lexicographic sources (Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, WordNet 3.1, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, and Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s Dictionary) as well as major corpus databases, namely, the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, Sentence Stack, and News on the Web (NOW) Corpus. Analysing data from language corpora is one of the most important tools in lexicographic practice, allowing us to identify the most common and relevant cases of actualization of the meaning of lexical units as well as to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms for meaning recognition by participants in a communicative act in various types of discourse. Integrating classical lexicographic methods with the tools of artificial intelligence (large language models) allows us not only to identify and describe lexical meanings but also to forecast possible semantic evolution in the structure of polysemous abstract nouns. The article proposes a dictionary entry structure based on the principles of cognitive lexicography.