Art for dictionaries sake: Comparing cultural outlooks through dictionaries and corpora

(1) The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. (ODE) (5) Ensemble des usages, des coutumes des manifestations artistiques, religieuses, intellectuelles qui définissent et distinguent un group, une société (Larousse) A collection of usages, customs, artistic, religious and intellectual manifestations that define and distinguish a group or a society It is a strange fact that dictionaries originally arose as bridges between cultures and languages, as much in the early Chinese dictionaries designed to help users navigate between different character sets and in the European tradition of glossaries. Although the origins were bilingual, the increasing role of monolingual dictionaries has tended to relegate bilingual dictionaries to simple sources of translation equivalents on a word to word basis. This work intends to explore how use of corpora can lead to better understanding of different language cultures by presenting the usage of given meaning units in different languages by exploring the notion of culture and language related to the arts. Culture is a wonderful word. We are so certain as to what it means as to forget its etymology and are textual uses in current day language. Simply looking at dictionaries within a language and in different languages will reveal very different attitudes to this phenomenon, and very different lexicographical cultures as well. Previous studies have shown how the word differs in connotation in English, French and Italian. This paper seeks to go further into the nature of culture in English and French dictionaries and corpora by looking at how various constituents of intellectual culture are handled in different languages. Two sets of corpora will be used; the IntUne comparable corpora for French and English and the WaC corpora from Sketch Engine. The aim is to compare the output of the different corpora and explore the meaning networks in each dataset so as to build bottom up entries that can then be added to a mini-dictionary of culture. The dictionary will grow organically using collocational networks and seeks also to compare usage in each language by applying the principle of bridge dictionaries. The aim of bridge dictionaries is to present information in one language, for instance, in English through a translated definition that will show the user what the word or phrase actually means in the other language rather than relying on simple translation equivalents. The first dictionaries of the type were developed within the context of the COBUILD project. In this cases we use lexicographical prototypes to build bridges between languages rather than simply moving from English to another language