New (Re)search Possibilities for Wittgenstein's Nachlass

Abstract

„Nur der Satz hat Sinn; nur im Zusammenhang des Satzes hat ein Name Bedeutung“ Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus (3.3). But how does Wittgenstein use words himself, what context does he choose in his own sentences? In this paper we present to the Wittgenstein research community a new Web-based computational linguistic access to the Big Typescript Ts-213 (BT). We developed a special electronic full-form lexicon WiTTLex and the tool WiTTFind to search within the BT for special words, sequences of words, parts of sentences and special sentence structures using methods of computational linguistics. Like usual search machines the user communicates via an internet browser with WiTTFind. However the query possibilities of our tool exceed the possibilities of search engines by far. Our user queries are not limited to word based queries, they can be lemmatized and grammatically structured.