meaningsused

Meaningsused is a term used in linguistics and lexicography to denote the set of senses of a word that are attested in actual usage within a specific corpus, discourse community, or time period. It is intended to capture the actively used meanings, as opposed to potential, historical, or hypothetical senses that might exist in dictionaries or theoretical models.

Origin and usage: The term is a portmanteau of meanings and used, and is employed in discussions of sense inventories and usage-based semantics to emphasize empirical attestation rather than prescriptive listings.

Definition: Meaningsused encompasses senses that have been activated by real examples in the data set, including polysemous relations and recent semantic shifts. It can be dynamic, expanding or contracting with new data.

Measurement and methodology: Analysts derive meaningsused from sense-annotated corpora, aligned lexical resources, or unsupervised clustering of usage. Inclusion criteria vary, but commonly require sufficient attestation within the data and relevance to the target language or register.

Applications: The concept informs lexicography, where dictionaries may reflect meaningsused for current users, and NLP tasks such as word sense disambiguation, semantic search, and lexical upgrading. It also supports diachronic studies of semantic change.

Limitations: Representativeness of the data sample is crucial; meaningsused may differ across genres, dialects, and time. Rare or emerging senses may be undercounted.

See also: Polysemy, Homonymy, Word sense disambiguation, Lexicography.