Hiponimy miejsca w polskiej Słowosieci i amerykańskiej bazie WordNet

Abstract

Hyponyms of place in Polish and American wordnets

The aim of the paper is to compare the sets of hyponyms of place in Polish and American wordnets. Polish “Słowosieć” and American WordNet are thesauri which define the meaning of an individual lexeme by the lexical-semantic relations existing between this and other lexemes. The researched material consists of several thousand of synsets (sets of lexemes referring to a common concept) which have been linked by interlingual, lexical-semantic relations to the synsets of English lexemes in a process of mapping of a fragment of the Polish wordnet to the American database. An analysis of particular cases illustrates the basic issues concerning the procedure of mapping, first of all the problem of choosing a foreign synonym for the original word. It also shows the incompatibility of the corresponding fragments of the Polish and English lexical systems, which is usually not reflected in dictionaries and other glottodidactical publications. Differences between the structures of semantic trees of the two languages result partly from different assumptions made by the authors of both wordnets, and partly from language-specific factors, such as different word-formation systems or different ways in which some objects from the real world are conceptualized.