wortelexudaten

Wortelexudaten is a theoretical construct in linguistics and language technology that refers to the aggregate of information a word tends to reveal in actual use. The term combines the German words Worte (word) and Exudaten (exudates) in a metaphorical sense, signaling the footprint or secretions that accompany a lexical item in discourse. It is not a standardized label, but is used in some discussions of lexical representation and discourse analysis to emphasize context-dependence.

A WortExudaten profile typically includes semantic fields and polysemy, common syntactic frames, collocations and their strength, pragmatic implicatures, register and genre associations, and even prosodic or orthographic cues when the word is encountered in spoken or written form.

In practice, WortExudaten guides analysis in corpus linguistics, where it helps model sense disambiguation and lexical choice, and in natural language processing, where it can inform enriched lexical representations and context-aware disambiguation. In language teaching, the concept offers a lens for illustrating how a single word can carry different nuances across domains. For example, the word bank has distinct exudates in financial, river-related, or storage senses, each with characteristic collocations and frames.

Critics note that WortExudaten is a metaphorical and informal label, with no single formal definition. Some linguists prefer related terms such as lexical footprint or contextual profile. The concept remains descriptive and analytical, useful for exploring how context shapes meaning but not a prescriptive taxonomy of senses.