Identity's identities: An empirical study of the distributional effects of polysemy

The word identity is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, it covers a number of specialized functions stemming from decades of research into both identity as a theoretical concept itself and into various identities and types of identity. Secondly, it also figures in non-specialized language in which it also serves a number of functions – some of which are quite fundamental to society as such. In other words, the lexeme identity is a polysemic word and has multiple, well, identities. Given that it appears to have a number of functions in a variety of registers, including terminologies in Academic English and more everyday-based English, identity as a lexeme is definitely worth having a look at. This paper presents a lexicological study of identity in which some of its senses are identified and their behaviors in actual discourse are observed. Drawing on data from the 2011 section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, a behavioral profile of the distributional characteristics of identity is set up. Behavioral profiling is a lexicographical method developed by the corpus linguist Stefan Th. Gries which, by applying semantic ID tagging and statistical analysis, provides a fine-grained insight into the semantic affinities of one or more lexemes. The main premise is that the semantic properties of a linguistic unit are reflected in its distributional characteristics, and, thus, by observing association patterns of a lexeme we can gain useful insights into its semantic affinities. Thus, via our behavioral profile, we will hopefully unmask some of identity's identities.