Pratiques sémantiques et différences interindividuelles à l’ère des corpus informatisés

Large computerized corpora facilitate the observation of less-described semantic phenomena. However, the significance of statistical tendencies emerging from the analysis of senses within corpora must be evaluated with respect to the nature of linguistic facts (« authenticity » and referential entrenchment), their effective significance (perceived phenomena), and their variability (mutability). Outside of intuition, linguistic meaning is accessed via the forms that the subjects choose to use in their utterances. At the same time, analyzing a large amount of data forces the linguist, for methodological reasons, to isolate lexical stretches from texts, thus separating the empirical objects from the speakers’ original meaning. Since the data from any given corpus are a product of particular speakers’ systematization of their language, they should be analyzed through the lens of those speakers’ referential habits; only then will the linguists succeed in identifiying and explaining different types of semantic variability. We shall see that the study of spontaneous communication on Internet discussion forums can reveal semantic variabilty resultig from each speaker’s referential universe.