Abstract:

This paper explores how to gather information from the Internet and transform it into lexical knowledge. The focus is on the case study of discovering the features that distinguish FLAMMABLE from its near-synonyms. First, the origin and morphological structure of the adjectives flammable and inflammable are analyzed to identify how they are related semantically. Next, the diachronic changes in the frequency counts and the present status of the two words are examined. Then, the subtle difference between flammable and combustible is revealed by comparing the definitions of the two words, their collocations and co-occurrence tendency. In addition,according to corpus examples and word frequency, we also found out the morphological features of flammable and combustible used as nouns. Our study demonstrates that lexical knowledge can be extracted, by means of computer-assisted analysis and information transformation, from informative resources on the Internet such as online English dictionaries, English corpora and specialized websites. The lexical knowledge obtained can be used for reference in translation, dictionary compilation and vocabulary teaching.

Key words: lexical knowledge, flammable, translation, online dictionary, corpus, diction