After data collection the actual case study in Abundantia Verborum is normally carried out in a workshop. Although workshops were designed to be suited for linguistic studies of several types, they were especially tailored for work that is at the heart of the research tradition of the team of professor Dirk Geeraerts, and that could be described as: corpus-based lexicological case studies within a cognitive linguistic framework. Some references are Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Bakema, 1994 and Geeraerts, Grondelaers and Speelman, forthcoming (although for mainly chronological reasons Abundantia Verborum was not used in the context of these particular studies).
In this chapter we sketch the position of Abundantia Verborum in relation to cognitive linguistics. Throughout the chapter we will use a small lexicological case study for illustration. You can find it in the file "c:\abundant\user\vers_wnt.wrk". For a taste of other linguistic use of workshops than the prototypical case treated in this chapter, we refer to the appendix Example case studies.
This chapter is the counterpart of chapter 4. It does for data analysis with Abundantia Verborum what chapter 4 did for data collection with Abundantia Verborum, namely:
Special about the structure of this chapter is that it is extremely biased in the sense that it is dedicated to one particular type of use, rather that summing up several possible applications. The use in question is that of a cognitive lexical-semantic case study. We chose it as means of illustration because it is a demanding application, and also because, as we said in the introduction, being the first in the list of applications that influenced the design of the program, it can be regarded as the prototypical use of the program.
A disadvantage of the choice is that exaggerated identification of the example with the program can blur the distinction 'feature of the particular application' versus 'feature of the program'. It simply could not be avoided that many of the statements made in this chapter apply to the explained type of study only, and not to the program in general. The appendix Example case studies serves as a compensation for this.
The first part of the current chapter gives some general information about cognitive linguistics. After a general sketch of the field we focus on two issues that are important in the context of Abundantia Verborum, namely the position of formal approaches in the field, and the conventions regarding representational formats in the field. Finally we present the case study that will be used throughout the rest of the chapter to illustrate one particular use of the program. In the second part we describe workshops, why the nature of cognitive lexicological studies creates the need for a workshop layer (next to a corpus layer) and how the representational formats in workshops relate to the traditional representational formats in cognitive linguistics. Afterwards some possible extensions of the program are mentioned. Finally we summarize the most important observations made in the chapter.
The structure of chapter Five is given below.