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Studying the role of expertise in poetry reading, we hypothesized that poets’ expert knowledge comprises genre-appropriate reading- and comprehension strategies that are reflected in distinct patterns of reading behavior.
We recorded eye movements while two groups of native speakers (n=10 each) read selected Russian poetry: an expert group of professional poets who read poetry daily, and a control group of novices who read poetry less than once a month. We conducted mixed-effects regression analyses to test for effects of group on first-fixation durations, first-pass gaze durations, and total reading times per word while controlling for lexical- and text variables.
First-fixation durations exclusively reflected lexical features, and total reading times reflected both lexical- and text variables; only first-pass gaze durations were additionally modulated by readers’ level of expertise. Whereas gaze durations of novice readers became faster as they progressed through the poems, and differed between line-final words and non-final ones, poets retained a steady pace of first-pass reading throughout the poems and within verse lines. Additionally, poets’ gaze durations were less sensitive to word length.
We conclude that readers’ level of expertise modulates the way they read poetry. Our findings support theories of literary comprehension that assume distinct processing modes which emerge from prior experience with literary texts.
We report results from an exploratory study of college students’ conceptions of poetry in which we asked them to name three things they expect from a poem. Frequency- and list-based analyses of their responses revealed that they primarily expect poems to rhyme, but they also identified a number of form-, content-, and reception-related genre expectations, which we discuss in relation to relevant previous research. We propose that rhyme’s predominance in college students’ genre expectations reflects its perceptual and cognitive salience during incremental poetry comprehension rather than its frequency in contemporary poetic practice. Our results characterize the genre conceptions of the population that empirical studies of poetry comprehension typically investigate, and thus provide relevant background information for the interpretation of empirical
findings in this field.
We examined genre-specific reading strategies for literary texts and hypothesized that text categorization (literary prose vs. poetry) modulates both how readers gather information from a text (eye movements) and how they realize its phonetic surface form (speech production). We recorded eye movements and speech while college students (N = 32) orally read identical texts that we categorized and formatted as either literary prose or poetry. We further varied the text position of critical regions (text-initial vs. text-medial) to compare how identical information is read and articulated with and without context; this allowed us to assess whether genre-specific reading strategies make differential use of identical context information. We observed genre-dependent differences in reading and speaking tempo that reflected several aspects of reading and articulation. Analyses of regions of interests revealed that word-skipping increased particularly while readers progressed through the texts in the prose condition; speech rhythm was more pronounced in the poetry condition irrespective of the text position. Our results characterize strategic poetry and prose reading, indicate that adjustments of reading behavior partly reflect differences in phonetic surface form, and shed light onto the dynamics of genre-specific literary reading. They generally support a theory of literary comprehension that assumes distinct literary processing modes and incorporates text categorization as an initial processing step.
We present a simple tool for extracting text and markup information from printouts of (not only) scientific documents. While the heavy-lifting OCR is done by off-the-shelf tesseract, our focus is on detection, extraction, and basic categorization of color-highlighted text sections, as well as on providing a framework for downstream processing of extraction results. The tool can be useful for document analysis tasks that must, or benefit from being able to, use printed paper.
The article analyzes communicative deviations that occur during the communication between German native speakers and non-native speakers, particularly Ukrainians. Despite existing intercultural and sociolinguistic studies, the analysis of language specificity that causes communicative deviations, failures and misunderstandings remains relevant and understudied. The purpose of this article is to identify and explore the German language peculiarities that cause misunderstandings in communication for non-native speakers, in particular Ukrainian speakers, and offer the algorithm for the representatives of different ethnic communities to help them avoid and resolve possible conflicts given the study of German as a foreign language. The status of the concept of communicative deviation in intercultural communication under conditions of insufficient communicative competence is determined in this article. The study uses the term communicative deviation in favor of a generalized term, a broad concept of linguistic, speech and communicative deviations in dialogic speech, in particular between native German speakers and non-native speakers. The empirical research was based on the speech activity of Ukrainian students during classes at the Department of German Studies and Translation (levels B2–C1) of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv in 2019–2021 academic years and definitions from the Universal Dictionary of German Duden, in addition to the materials reflected in textbooks and teaching manuals as well as from authentic German-language sources. Communicative deviations are identified and analyzed in phonological, lexical, syntactic and pragmatic aspects.
The CLARIN Concept Registry (CCR) is the common semantic ground for most CMDI-based profiles to describe language-related resources in the CLARIN universe. While the CCR supports semantic interoperability within this universe, it does not extend beyond it. The flexibility of CMDI, however, allows users to use other term or concept registries when defining their metadata components. In this paper, we describe our use of schema.org, a light ontology used by many parties across disciplines.
It was recently suggested in a study published in Nature Human Behaviour that the historical loosening of American culture was associated with a trade-off between higher creativity and lower order. To this end, Jackson et al. generate a linguistic index of cultural tightness based on the Google Books Ngram corpus and use this index to show that American norms loosened between 1800 and 2000. While we remain agnostic toward a potential loosening of American culture and a statistical association with creativity/order, we show here that the methods used by Jackson et al. are neither suitable for testing the validity of the index nor for establishing possible relationships with creativity/order.
In a previous study published in Nature Human Behaviour, Varnum and Grossmann claim that reductions in gender inequality are linked to reductions in pathogen prevalence in the United States between 1951 and 2013. Since the statistical methods used by Varnum and Grossmann are known to induce (seemingly) significant correlations between unrelated time series, so-called spurious or non-sense correlations, we test here whether the statistical association between gender inequality and pathogens prevalence in its current form also is the result of mis-specified models that do not correctly account for the temporal structure of the data. Our analysis clearly suggests that this is the case. We then discuss and apply several standard approaches of modelling time-series processes in the data and show that there is, at least as of now, no support for a statistical association between gender inequality and pathogen prevalence.
Annotated dataset consisting of personal designations found on websites of 42 German, Austrian, Swiss and South Tyrolean cities. Our goal is to re-evaluate the websites every year in order to see how the use of gender-fair language develops over time. The dataset contains coordinates for the creation of map material.
Words originating from shortening, including acronyms and clippings, constitute a treasure trove of insight into phonological grammar. In particular, they serve as an ideal testing ground for Optimality Theory (OT) and its view of grammar as an interaction of markedness constraints, which express (dis-) preferences regarding phonological structure in output forms, and faithfulness constraints, which require output forms to correspond to input structure (Prince and Smolensky 1993). This is because shortenings are characterised by a sharply diminished role of faithfulness, allowing for markedness constraints to make their force felt (“The Emergence of the Unmarked”). This article aims to demonstrate the heuristic value of shortening data for testing the OT model and for shedding light on various controversies in German phonology. A particular concern is to draw attention to the need for properly sorting the shortening data, to identify influences on phonological structure due to internal domain boundaries or to special correspondence effects potentially obscuring the view on the maximally unmarked patterns.
Comprehending conditional statements is fundamental for hypothetical reasoning about situations. However, the online comprehension of conditional statements containing different conditional connectives is still debated. We report two self-paced reading experiments on German conditionals presenting the conditional connectives wenn (‘if’) and nur wenn (‘only if’) in identical discourse contexts. In Experiment 1, participants read a conditional sentence followed by the confirmed antecedent p and the confirmed or negated consequent q. The final, critical sentence was presented word by word and contained a positive or negative quantifier (ein/kein ‘one/no’). Reading times of the two quantifiers did not differ between the two conditional connectives. In Experiment 2, presenting a negated antecedent, reading times for the critical positive quantifier (ein) did not differ between conditional connectives, while reading times for the negative quantifier (kein) were shorter for nur wenn than for wenn. The results show that comprehenders form distinct predictions about discourse continuations due to differences in the lexical semantics of the tested conditional connectives, shedding light on the role of conditional connectives in the online interpretation of conditionals in general.
The question of whether a letter is a grapheme or not is a perennial issue in writing research. The answer depends on which criteria are used to differentiate between letters and graphemes and, ultimately,how the unit ‘grapheme’ is defined. This problem is particularly relevant to complex graphemes, i.e. sequences of letters that behave like a single grapheme in certain respects. Typical for German is the ‹ch›. This paper argues for a scalar concept of graphemes, which compares the grapheme status of each of the units under investigation. For this purpose, new criteria for the identification of complex graphemes are used, which originate from handwriting analysis. There, it is shown that complex graphemes are connected with each other disproportionately often and also have deviating letter forms disproportionately often.
So far, Sepedi negations have been considered more from the point of view of lexicographical treatment. Theoretical works on Sepedi have been used for this purpose, setting as an objective a neat description of these negations in a (paper) dictionary. This paper is from a different perspective: instead of theoretical works, corpus linguistic methods are used: (1) a Sepedi corpus is examined on the basis of existing descriptions of the occurrences of a relevant verb, looking at its negated forms from a purely prescriptive point of view; (2) a "corpus-driven" strategy is employed, looking only for sequences of negation particles (or morphemes) in order to list occurring constructions, without taking into account the verbs occurring in them, apart from their endings. The approach in (2) is only intended to show a possible methodology to extend existing theories on occurring negations. We would also like to try to help lexicographers to establish a frequency-based order of entries of possible negation forms in their dictionaries by showing them the number of respective occurrences. As with all corpus linguistic work, however, we must regard corpus evidence not as representative, but as tendencies of language use that can be detected and described. This is especially true for Sepedi, for which only few and small corpora exist. This paper also describes the resources and tools used to create the necessary corpus and also how it was annotated with part of speech and lemmas. Exploring the quality of available Sepedi part-of-speech taggers concerning verbs, negation morphemes and subject concords may be a positive side result.
This paper presents the decisions behind the design of a maths dictionary for primary school children. We are aware that there has been a considerable problem regarding Mexican children’s performance in maths dragging on for a long time, and far from getting better, it is getting worse. One of the probable causes seems to be the lack of coordination between maths textbooks and teaching methods. Most maths textbooks used in primary schools include lots of activities and problem-solving techniques, but hardly any conceptual information in the form of definitions or explanations. Consequently, many children learn to do things, but have difficulty understanding mathematical concepts and applying them in different contexts. To help solve this problem, at least partially, the project of the dictionary was launched aiming at helping children to grasp and understand maths concepts learned during those first six years of their formal education. The dictionary is a corpus-based terminographical product whose macrostructure, microstructure, typography, and additional information were specifically designed to help children understand mathematical concepts.
To effectively design online tools and develop sophisticated programs, for the teaching of Ancient Greek language, there is a clear need for lexical resources that provide semantic links with Modern Greek. This paper proposes a microstructure for an online Ancient Greek to Modern Greek thesaurus (AMGthes) that serves educational purposes. The terms of this bilingual thesaurus have been selected from reference Ancient Greek texts, taught and studied during lower and upper secondary education in Greece. The main objective here is to build a semantic map that helps students find relevant and semanti- cally related terms (synonyms and antonyms) in Ancient Greek, and then provide a rich set of suitable translations and definitions in Modern Greek. Designed to be an online resource, the thesaurus is being developed using web technologies, and thus will be available to every school and university student that pursues a degree in digital humanities.
The paper presents the results of empirical research conducted with students from the Faculty of Translation studies of Ventspils University of Applied Sciences (VUAS) in Latvia. The study investigates the habits and practices concerning the use of dictionaries on the part of translation students, as well as types of dictionaries used, frequency of use, etc. The study also presents an insight into the evaluation of the usefulness of dictionaries by Latvian students. The research describes the advantages and disadvantages of dictionaries used by the respondents, the importance of the preface and the explanation of the terms and abbreviations used in dictionaries. The research conducted, as well as the insights, results and recommendations presented, will be relevant for the lexicographic community, as it reflects the experience of one Latvian University to improve the teaching of dictionary use and lexicographic culture in this country and to complement dictionary use research with the Latvian experience.
Learning from students. On the design and usability of an e-dictionary of mathematical graph theory
(2022)
We created a prototype of an electronic dictionary for the mathematical domain of graph theory. We evaluate our prototype and compare its effectiveness in task-based tests with that of Wikipedia. Our dictionary is based on a corpus; the terms and their definitions were automatically extracted and annotated by experts (cf. Kruse/Heid 2020). The dictionary is bilingual, covering German and English; it gives equivalents, definitions and semantically related terms. For the implementation of the dictionary, we used LexO (Bellandi et al. 2017). The target group of the dictionary are students of mathematics who attend lectures in German and work with English resources. We carried out tests to understand which items the students search for when they work on graph-theoretical tasks. We ran the same test twice, with comparable student groups, either allowing Wikipedia as an information source or our dictionary. The dictionary seems to be especially helpful for students who already have a vague idea of a term because they can use the resource to check if their idea is right.
Every Regional Dossier begins with an introduction about the region in question, followed by six chapters that each deal with a specific level of the education system (e.g. primary education). Chapters 8 and 9 cover the main lines of research into education of the minority language under discussion, and the prospects for the minority language in general and in education in particular, respectively. Chapter 10 provides a summary of statistics. Lists of (legal) references and useful addresses regarding the minority language are given at the end of the dossier.
There is a growing interest in pedagogical lexicography, and more specifically in the study of dictionary users’ abilities and strategies (Prichard 2008; Gavriilidou 2010, 2011; Gavriilidou/Mavrommatidou/Markos 2020; Gavriilidou/Konstantinidou 2021; Chatjipapa et al. 2020). Τhe purpose of this presentation is to investigate dictionary use strategy and the effect of an explicit and integrated dictionary awareness intervention program on upper elementary pupils’ dictionary use strategies according to gender and type of school. A total of 150 students from mainstream and intercultural schools, aged 10–12 years old, participated in the study. Data were collected before and after the intervention through the Strategy Inventory for Dictionary Use (SIDU) (Gavriilidou 2013). The results showed a significant effect of the intervention program on Dictionary Use Strategies employed by the experimental group and support the claim that increased dictionary use can be the outcome of explicit strategy instruction. In addition, the effective application of the program suggests that a direct and clear presentation of DUS is likely to be more successful than an implicit presentation. The present study contributes to the discussion concerning both the ‘teachability’ of dictionary use strategies and skills and the effective forms of intervention programs raising dictionary use awareness and culture.
In this paper, we propose a controlled language for authoring technical documents and report the status of its development, while maintaining a specific focus on the Japanese automotive domain. To reduce writing variations, our controlled language not only defines approved and unapproved lexical elements but also prescribes their preferred location in a sentence. It consists of components of a) case frames, b) case elements, c) adverbial modifiers, d) sentence-ending functions, and e) connectives, which have been developed based on the thorough analyses of a large-scale text corpus of automobile repair manuals. We also present our prototype of a writing assistant tool that implements word substitution and reordering functions, incorporating the constructed controlled language.
Thesauri have long been recognized as valuable structured resources aiding Information Retrieval systems. A thesaurus provides a precise and controlled vocabulary which serves to coordinate data indexing and retrieval. The paper presents a bilingual Greek and English specialized thesaurus that is being developed as the backbone of a platform aimed at enhancing and enriching the cultural experiences of visitors in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, Greece. The cultural component of the intended platform comprises textual data, images of artifacts and living entities (animals and plants in the area), as well as audio and video. The thesaurus covers the domains of Archaeology, Literature, Mythology, and Travel; therefore, it can be viewed as a set of inter-linked thesauri. Where applicable, terms and names in the database are also geo-referenced.
Lexicographers working with minority languages face many challenges. When the language in question is also a sign language, circumstances specific to the visual-spatial modality have to be taken into consideration as well. In this paper, we aim to show and discuss which challenges we encounter while compiling the Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Gebärdensprache (DW-DGS), the first corpus-based dictionary of German Sign Language (DGS). Some parallel the challenges minority language lexicographers of spoken languages encounter, e. g. few resources, no written tradition, and having to create one dictionary for all potential user groups, while others are specific to sign languages, e. g. representation of visual-spatial language and creating access structures for the dictionary.
The EMLex Dictionary of Lexicography (= EMLexDictoL) is a plurilingual subject field dictionary (in German, English, Afrikaans, Galician, Italian, Polish and Spanish) that contains the basic subject field terminology of lexicography and dictionary research, in which the dictionary article texts are presented in a sophisticated but comprehensible form. The articles are supplemented by a complex crossreferencing system and the current subject field literature of the respective national languages. Following the lemma position, the dictionary articles contain items regarding morphology, synonymy, the position of the definiens, additional explanations, the cross-reference position, the position for literature, the equivalent terms in the other six languages of the dictionary as well as the names of the authors.
This paper focusss on the first Slavonic-Romanian lexicons, compiled in the second half of the 17th century and their use(rs), proposing a method of investigating the manner in which lexical information available in the above corpus relates, if at all, to the vocabulary of texts from the same period. We chose to investigate their relation to an anonymous Old Testament translation made from Church Slavonic, also from the second half of the 17th century, which was supposed to be produced in the same geographical area, in the same Church Slavonic school or even by the same author as the lexicons. After applying a lemmatizer on both the Biblical text (Books of Genesis and Daniel) and the Romanian material from the lexicons, we analyse the results and double the statistical analysis with a series of case studies, focusing on some common lexemes that might be an indicator of the relatedness of the texts. Even if the analysis points out that the lexicons might not have been compiled as a tool for the translation of religious texts, it proves to be a useful method that reveals interesting data and provides the basis for more extensive approaches.
Given the relevance of interoperability, born-digital lexicographic resources as well as legacy retro-digitised dictionaries have been using structured formats to encode their data, following guidelines such as the Text Encoding Initiative or the newest TEI Lex-0. While this new standard is being defined in a stricter approach than the original TEI dictionary schema, its reuse of element names for several types of annotation as well as the highly detailed structure makes it difficult for lexicographers to efficiently edit resources and focus on the real content. In this paper, we present the approach designed within LeXmart to facilitate the editing of TEI Lex-0 encoded resources, guaranteeing consistency through all editing processes.
An ongoing academic and research program, the “Vocabula Grammatica” lexicon, implemented by the Centre for the Greek Language (Thessaloniki, Greece), aims at lemmatizing all the philological, grammatical, rhetorical, and metrical terms in the written texts of scholars (philologists and scholiasts) who curated the ancient Greek literature from the beginning of the Hellenistic period (4th/3rd c. BC) until the end of the Byzantine era (15th c. AD). In particular, it aspires to fill serious gaps (a) in the study of ancient Greek scholarship and (b) in the lexicography of the ancient Greek language and literature. By providing specific examples, we will highlight the typical and methodological features of the forthcoming dictionary.
Basnage’s revision (1701) of Furetiere’s Dictionnaire universel is profoundly different from Furetiere’s work in several regards. One of the most noticeable features of the dictionary lies in his in- creased use of usage labels. Although Furetiere already made use of usage labels (see Rey 1990), Basnage gives them a prominent role. As he states in the preface to his edition, a dictionary that aspires to the title of “universal” should teach how to speak in a polite way (“poliment”), right (“juste”) and making use of specific terminology for each art. He specifies, lemma by lemma, the diaphasic dimension by indicating the word’s register and context of use, the diastratic one by noting the differences in the use of the language within the social strata, the diachronic evolution by indicating both archaisms and neologisms, the diame- sic aspect by highlighting the gaps between oral and written language, the diatopic one by specifying either foreign borrowings or regionalisms.
After extracting the entries containing formulas such as “ce mot est...”, “ce terme est...” and similar ones, we compare the number of entries and the type of information provided by the two lexicographers1. In this paper, we will focus on Basnage’s innovative contribution. Furthermore, we will try to identify the lexi- cographer’s sources, i. e. we will try to establish on which grammars, collections of linguistic remarks or contemporary dictionaries Basnage relies his judgements.
Wortgeschichte digital (‘digital word history’) is a new historical dictionary of New High German, the most recent period of German reaching from approximately 1600 AD up to the present. By contrast to many historical dictionaries, Wortgeschichte digital has a narrated text – a “word history” – at the core of its entries. The motivation for choosing this format rather than traditional microstructures is
briefly outlined. Special emphasis it put on the way these word histories interact with other components of the dictionary, notably with the quotation section. As Wortgeschichte digital is an online only project, visualizations play an important role for the design of the dictionary. Two examples are presented: first, the “quotation navigator” which is relevant for the microstructure of the entries, and, second, a timeline (“Zeitstrahl”) which is part of the macrostructure as it gives access to the lemma inventory from a diachronic point of view.
Within a rapidly digitalising society, it is important to understand how the learning and teaching of digital skills play out in situ, particularly amongst older adults who acquire these skills later in life. This paper focuses on participants engaged in the process of learning digital skills in adult education courses. Using video recordings from adult education centres in Finland and Germany, we explore how students mobilise their teachers’ assistance when encountering problems with their smartphones, laptops or tablets. Prior research on social interaction has shown that assistance can be recruited through a variety of verbal and embodied formats. In this specific educational setting, participants can use complaints about their digital skills or mobile devices to obtain assistance. Utilising multimodal conversation analysis, we describe two basic sequence types involving students’ complaints, discuss their cross-linguistic characteristics, and reflect on their connection to this educational setting and digital devices.
The QUEST (QUality ESTablished) project aims at ensuring the reusability of audio-visual datasets (Wamprechtshammer et al., 2022) by devising quality criteria and curating processes. RefCo (Reference Corpora) is an initiative within QUEST in collaboration with DoReCo (Documentation Reference Corpus, Paschen et al. (2020)) focusing on language documentation projects. Previously, Aznar and Seifart (2020) introduced a set of quality criteria dedicated to documenting fieldwork corpora. Based on these criteria, we establish a semi-automatic review process for existing and work-in-progress corpora, in particular for language documentation. The goal is to improve the quality of a corpus by increasing its reusability. A central part of this process is a template for machine-readable corpus documentation and automatic data verification based on this documentation. In addition to the documentation and automatic verification, the process involves a human review and potentially results in a RefCo certification of the corpus. For each of these steps, we provide guidelines and manuals. We describe the evaluation process in detail, highlight the current limits for automatic evaluation and how the manual review is organized accordingly.
Metadata provides important information relevant both to finding and understanding corpus data. Meaningful linguistic data requires both reasonable annotations and documentation of these annotations. This documentation is part of the metadata of a dataset. While corpus documentation has often been provided in the form of accompanying publications, machinereadable metadata, both containing the bibliographic information and documenting the corpus data, has many advantages. Metadata standards allow for the development of common tools and interfaces. In this paper I want to add a new perspective from an archive’s point of view and look at the metadata provided for four learner corpora and discuss the suitability of established standards for machine-readable metadata. I am are aware that there is ongoing work towards metadata standards for learner corpora. However, I would like to keep the discussion going and add another point of view: increasing findability and reusability of learner corpora in an archiving context.
Sometimes in interaction, a speaker articulates an overt interpretation of prior talk. Such moments have been studied as involving the repair of a problem with the other’s talk or as formulating an understanding of the matter at hand. Stepping back from the established notions of formulations and repair, we examine the variety of actions speakers do with the practice of offering an interpretation, and the order within this domain. Results show half a dozen usage types of interpretations in mundane interaction. These form a largely continuous territory of action, with recognizably distinct usage types as well as cases falling between these (proto)typical uses. We locate order in the domain of interpretations using the method of semantic maps and show that, contrary to earlier assumptions in the literature, interpretations that formulate an understanding of the matter at hand are actually quite pervasive in ordinary talk. These findings contribute to research on action formation and advance our understanding of understanding in interaction. Data are video- and audio-recordings of mundane social interaction in the German language from a variety of settings.
In this paper, we deal with register-driven variation from a probabilistic perspective, as proposed in Schäfer, Bildhauer, Pankratz, Müller (2022). We compare two approaches to analyse this variation within HPSG. On the one hand, we consider a multiple-grammar approach and combine it with the architecture proposed in the CoreGram project Müller (2015) - discussing its advantages and disadvantages. On the other hand, we take into account a single-grammar approach and argue that it appears to be superior due to its computational efficiency and cognitive plausibility.
In this article we examine moments in which parents or other caregivers overtly invoke rules during episodes in which they take issue with, intervene against, and try to change a child’s ongoing behavior or action(s). Drawing on interactional data from four different languages (English, Finnish, German, Polish) and using Conversation Analytic methods, we first illustrate the variety of ways in which parents may use such overt rule invocations as part of their behavior modification attempts, showing them to be functionally versatile interactional objects. Their interactional flexibility notwithstanding, we find that parents typically invoke rules when, in the course of the intervention episode, they encounter trouble with achieving an acceptable compliant outcome. To get at the distinct import of rule formulations in this context, we then compare them to two sequential alternatives: parental expressions of an experienced negative affective state, and parental threats. While the former emphasize aspects of social solidarity, the latter seek to enforce compliance by foregrounding a power asymmetry between the parent and the child. Rule formulations, by contrast, are designedly impersonal and appear to be directed at what the parents construe as shortcomings in common-sense practical reasoning on the child’s part. Reflexively, the child is thereby cast as not having properly applied common-sense ‘practical reason’ when engaging in what is treated as the problematic behavior or action. Overt rule invocations can, therefore, be understood as indexical appeals to practical reason.
In the currently ongoing process of retro-digitization of Serbian dialectal dictionaries, the biggest obstacle is the lack of machine readable versions of paper editions. Therefore, one essential step is needed before venturing into the dictionary-making process in the digital environment – OCRing the pages with the highest possible accuracy. Successful retro-digitization of Serbian dialectal dictionaries, currently in progress, has shown a dire need for one basic yet necessary step, lacking until now – OCRing the pages with the highest possible accuracy. OCR processing is not a new technology, as many opensource and commercial software solutions can reliably convert scanned images of paper documents into digital documents. Available software solutions are usually efficient enough to process scanned contracts, invoices, financial statements, newspapers, and books. In cases where it is necessary to process documents that contain accented text and precisely extract each character with diacritics, such software solutions are not efficient enough. This paper presents the OCR software called “SCyDia”, developed to overcome this issue. We demonstrate the organizational structure of the OCR software “SCyDia” and the first results. The “SCyDia” is a web-based software solution that relies on the open-source software “Tesseract” in the background. “SCyDia” also contains a module for semi-automatic text correction. We have already processed over 15,000 pages, 13 dialectal dictionaries, and five dialectal monographs. At this point in our project, we have analyzed the accuracy of the “SCyDia” by processing 13 dialectal dictionaries. The results were analyzed manually by an expert who examined a number of randomly selected pages from each dictionary. The preliminary results show great promise, spanning from 97.19% to 99.87%.
This paper deals with different types of verbal complementation of the German verb verdienen. It focuses on constructions that have been undergoing a grammaticalization process and thus express deontic modality, as in Sie verdient geliebt zu werden (ʽShe deserves to be lovedʼ) and Sie verdient zu leben (ʽShe deserves to liveʼ) (Diewald, Dekalo & Czicza 2021). These constructions are connected to parallel complementation types with passive and active infinitives containing a correlate es, as in Sie verdient es, geliebt zu werden and Sie verdient es, zu leben, as well as finite clauses with the subordinator dass with and without correlative es, as in Sie verdient, dass sie geliebt wird and Sie verdient es, dass sie geliebt wird. This paper attempts to show a close comparative investigation of these six types of constructions based on their relevant semantic and syntactic properties in terms of clause linkage (Lehmann 1988). We analyze the relevant data retrieved from the DWDS corpus of the 20th century and present an expanded grammaticalization path for verdienen-constructions. The finite complementation with dass is regarded as an example of a separate structural option called “elaboration”. Concerning the use of correlative es, it is shown that it does not have any substantial effect on the grammaticalization of modal verdienen-constructions.
Lexical data API
(2022)
This API provides data from various dictionary resources of K Dictionaries across 50 languages. It is used by language service providers, app developers, and researchers, and returns data as JSON documents. A basic search result consists of an object containing partial lexical information on entries that match the search criteria, but further in-depth information is also available. Basic search parameters include the source resource, source language, and text (lemma), and the entries are returned as objects within the results array. It is possible to look for words with specific syntactic criteria, specifying the part of speech, grammatical number, gender and subcategorization, monosemous or polysemous entries. When searching by parameters, each entry result contains a unique entry ID, and each sense has its own unique sense ID. Using these IDs, it is possible to obtain more data – such as syntactic and semantic information, multiword expressions, examples of usage, translations, etc. – of a single entry or sense. The software demonstration includes a brief overview of the API with practical examples of its operation.
In the present contribution, I investigate if and how the English and French editions of the Wiktionary collaborative dictionary can be used as a corpus for real time neology watch. This option is envisaged as a stopgap, when no satisfactory corpus is available. Wiktionary can also prove useful in addition to standard corpus analysis, to minimize the risk of overlooking new coinages and new senses. Since the collaborative dictionary’s quest for exhaustiveness makes the manual inspection of the new additions unreasonable (more than 31,000 English lemmas and 11,000 French lemmas entered the nomenclature in 2020), identifying the possibly relevant headwords is an issue. The solution proposed here is to use Wiktionary revision history to detect the (new or existing) entries that received the greatest number of modifications. The underlying hypothesis is that the most heavily edited pages can help identify the vocabulary related to “hot topics”, assuming that, in 2020, the pandemic-related vocabulary ranks high. I used two measures introduced by Lih (2004), whose aim was to estimate the quality of Wikipedia articles: the so-called rigour (number of edits per page) and diversity (number of unique contributors per page). In the present study, I propose to adapt the rigour and diversity metrics to Wiktionary in order to identify the pages that generated a particular stir, rather than to estimate the quality of the articles. I do not subscribe to the idea that – in Wiktionary – more revisions necessarily produce quality articles (more revisions often produce complete articles). I therefore adopt Lih’s notion of diversity to refer to the number of distinct contributors, but leave out the name rigour when it comes to the number of revisions. Wolfer and Müller-Spitzer (2016) used the two metrics to describe the dynamics of the German and English editions of Wiktionary. One of their findings was that the number of edits per page is correlated with corpus word frequencies. The variation in number of page edits should therefore reflect to some extent the variation of corpus word frequencies. Renouf (2013) established a relationship between the fluctuation of word frequencies in a diachronic corpus and various neological processes. In particular, she illustrated how specific events generate sudden frequency spikes for words previously unseen in the corpus. For instance, Eyjafjallajökull, the – existing – name of an Icelandic glacier, appeared in the corpus when the underlying volcano erupted in 2010 and disrupted air traffic in Europe. In order to check if the same phenomenon occurs when using Wiktionary edits instead of corpus frequencies, I manually annotated the most frequently revised entries (according to various ranking scores) with the binary tag: “related to Covid-19” (yes/no). The annotations were then used to test the ability of various configurations to detect relevant headwords from the English and French Wiktionary, namely Covid-19 neologisms and related existing words that deserve updates.
To leverage the Deaf community’s increasing online presence, the web-based platform NZSL Share was launched in March 2020 to crowdsource new and previously undocumented signs, and to encourage community validation of these signs. The platform allows users to upload sign videos, comment on videos and agree or disagree with (often new) signs being proposed. It is managed by the research team that maintains the ODNZSL, which includes the authors. NZSL Share is being used by individuals as well as Deaf community groups to record and share signs of a specialist nature (e.g., school curriculum signs). NZSL Share now has close to 50 actively contributing members. Its launch coincided with the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak in New Zealand and so some of the first signs contributed were COVID-19-related, which are the focus of this paper.
This paper arises within the current communication urgency experienced throughout the pandemic. From its onset, several new lexical units have permeated the overall media discourse, as well as social media and other channels. These units convey information to the public regarding the ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ namely COVID-19. In addition to its worldwide impact healthwise, the pandemic generates noteworthy influence in the linguistic landscape, and as a result, a significant number of neologisms have emerged. Within the scope of our ongoing research, we identify the neologisms in European Portuguese that are related to the term COVID-19 via form or meaning. However, not all the new lexical units identified in our corpus containing COVID-19 in its formation can unequivocally be regarded as neoterms (terminological neologisms). Accordingly, this article aims not only to reflect on the distinction between neologism and neoterm but also to explore the determinologisation process that several of these new lexical units experience.
This paper examines a certain subset of the vocabulary of Modern Icelandic, namely those words that are labelled as ‘ancient’ in the Dictionary of Contemporary Icelandic (DCI). The words were analysed and grouped into two main categories, 1) Words with only ‘ancient’ sense(s) and 2) words that have modern as well as an obsolete older sense. Several subgroups were identified as well as some lexical characteristics. The words in question were then analysed in two other sources, the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP) and the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus (IGC). The results show that the words belong to several semantic domains that reflect the types of texts that have survived until modern times. Most of the words are robustly attested in Old Norse sources, although there are a few exceptions. Large majority of the words can be found in Modern Icelandic texts, but to a varying degree. Limits of the corpus material makes it difficult to analyse some of the words. The result indicate that the words labelled ‘ancient’ can be divided into three main groups: a) words that are poorly attested and should perhaps not be included in the lexicographic description of Modern Icelandic; b) words that are likely to occur sometimes in Modern Icelandic; c) words that function as other inherited Old Norse words and perhaps do not require a special label or should have an additional sense in the DCI.
This paper presents a multilingual dictionary project of discourse markers. During its first stage, consisting of collecting the list of headwords, we used a parallel corpus to automatically extract units from texts written in Spanish, Catalan, English, French and German. We also applied a method to create a taxonomy structure for automatically organising the markers in clusters. As a result, we obtain an extensive, corpus-driven list of headwords. We present a prototype of the microstructure of the dictionary in the form of a standard XML database and describe the procedure to automatically fill in most of its fields (e.g., the type of DM, the equivalents in other languages, etc.), before human intervention.
This paper describes a method for extracting collocation data from text corpora based on a formal definition of syntactic structures, which takes into account not only the POS-tagging level of annotation but also syntactic parsing (syntactic treebank model) and introduces the possibility of controlling the canonical form of extracted collocations based on statistical data on forms with different properties in the corpus. Specifically, we describe the results of extraction from the syntactically tagged Gigafida 2.1 corpus. Using the new method, 4,002,918 collocation candidates in 81 syntactic structures were extracted. We evaluate the extracted data sample in more detail, mainly in relation to properties that affect the extraction of canonical forms: definiteness in adjectival collocations, grammatical number in noun collocations, comparison in adjectival and adverbial collocations, and letter case (uppercase and lowercase) in canonical forms. The conclusion highlights the potential of the methodology used for the grammatical description of collocation and phrasal syntax and the possibilities for improving the model in the process of compilation of a digital dictionary database for Slovene.
This paper looks at whether, after two decades of corpus building for the Bantu languages, the time is ripe to begin using monitor corpora. As a proof-of-concept, the usefulness of a Lusoga monitor corpus for lexicographic purposes, in casu for the detection of neologisms, both in terms of new words and new meanings, is investigated and found useful.
This paper presents the main issues connected with the creation of a trilingual Hungarian-Italian-English dictionary of the COVID-19 pandemic using Lexonomy. My aim is not only to create a coronacorpus (in Hungarian, I propose my own corona-neologism or ‘coroneologism’: koronakorpusz) and a dictionary of equivalents, but also to understand how the different waves and phases of the COVID-19 pandemic are changing the Hungarian language, detect the Corona-, COVID-, pandemic-, virus-, mask-, quarantine-, and vaccine-related neologisms, and offer an overview of the most frequent or linguistically interesting Hungarian neologisms and multiword units related to COVID-19.
This article has a double objective. First, it seeks to offer an initial approach, with critical notes, to the group of pandemic-related neologisms incorporated into the DLE in the year 2020. To that end, the trends in the academic dictionary’s incorporation of neologisms will be reviewed, focusing in particular on specialized language neologisms. Second, the article presents the design of a research study that allows for the examination of any new words beginning with CORONA- added to the DLE and the DHLE. An assessment will be made of the particularities of the DLE and the DHLE regarding the incorporation of the new words, as well as the degree of correspondence or complementarity between the two works in this sense. This will show the complementary roles that the DLE and the DHLE are currently acquiring. In this sense, the new additions open up a debate on the treatment of neologisms in academic lexicography, in a particularly unique scenario.
This paper focuses on standardological and lexicographical aspects of Coronavirus-related neologisms in Croatian. The presented results are based on corpus analysis. The initial corpus for this analysis consists of terms collected for the Glossary of Coronavirus. This corpus has been supplemented by terms we collected on the Internet and from the media. The General Croatian corpora: Croatian Web Corpus – hrWaC (cf. Ljubešić/Klubička 2016) and Croatian Language Repository (cf. Brozović Rončević/Ćavar 2008: 173–186) were also used, but since they do not include neologisms that entered the language after 2013, they could be used only to check terms in the language before that time. From October 2021, a specialized Corona corpus compiled by Štrkalj Despot and Ostroški Anić (2021) became publicly available on request. The data from these corpora are analyzed by Sketch Engine (cf. Kilgarriff et al. 2004: 105–116), a corpus query system loaded with the corpora, enabling the display of lexeme context through concordances and (differential) word sketches and the extraction of keywords (terms) and N-grams. The most common collocations are sorted into syntactic categories. For English equivalents, in addition to the sources found on the Internet, enTenTen2020 corpus was consulted. In the second part of the paper, we analyze and compare the presentation of Coronavirus terminology in the descriptive Glossary of Coronavirus and the normative Croatian Web Dictionary – Mrežnik.
Within the scope of the project "Study and dissemination of COVID-19 terminology", the study reported here aims to detect, analyse and discuss the characteristics of COVID-19 terminology, in particular the role of the adjective novo [new] in this terminology, the high recurrence of terms in the plural and the resemantization of some of the terminological units used. The present paper also discusses how these characteristics influenced the choices that have guided the creation of the proposed dictionary. This paper presents, therefore, the results of the analyses of these aspects, starting with a discussion of the relation between terminology and neology and arriving at the characteristic aspects of the macrostructural and microstructural choices about which some considerations were made.
While adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world started to talk about the “new normal” way of life, and they conveyed feelings and thoughts on the topic through social networks and traditional communication channels resorting to a set of specific linguistic strategies, such as metaphors and neologisms. The vocabulary in different domains and in everyday speech was expanded to accommodate a complex social, cultural, and professional phenomenon of changes. Therefore, this new life gave birth to a new language – the “coronaspeak”. According to Thorne (2020), the “coronaspeak” has three stages: first, it emerged in the way medical aspects were communicated in everyday language; secondly, it occurred when speakers verbalized the experiences they had undergone and “invented their own terms”; finally, this “new” way of speaking emerged in the government and authorities’ jargon, to ensure that the new rules and policies were understood, and that population adopted socially responsible behaviours.
In this paper, we will focus on the second stage, because we intend to take stock of how speakers communicate and verbalize this new way of living, particularly on social networks, for example. Alongside, we are interested in the context in which the neologism – be it a new word, a new meaning, or a new use – emerged, is used, and understood, through the observation of the occurrence of the new word(s) either on social networks or through dissemination texts (press) to confront it with the ones that Portuguese digital dictionaries have attested so far. Different criteria regarding the insertion of new units, the inclusion date, and the lexicographic description of the entries in the dictionaries will be debated.
Phonesthemes (Firth 1930) are sublexical constructions that have an effect on the lexico-grammatical continuum: they are recurring form-meaning associations that occur more often than by chance but not systematically (Abramova/Fernandez/Sangati 2013). Phonesthemes have been shown (Bergen 2004) to affect psycholinguistic language processing; they organise the mental lexicon. Phonesthemes appear over time to emerge as driven by language use as indexical rather than purely iconic constructions in the lexicon (Smith 2016; Bergen 2004; Flaksman 2020). Phonesthemes are acknowledged in construction morphology (Audring/Booij/Jackendoff 2017) as motivational schemas. Some phonesthemes also tend to have lexicographic acknowledgment, as shown by etymologist Liberman (2010), although this relevance and cohesion appears to be highly variable as we will show in this paper.
eThis paper first attempts a state-of-the art overview of what is known about women in the history of lexicography up to the early twentieth century. It then focusses more closely on the German and German-English lexicographical traditions to 1900, examining them from three different perspectives (following Russell’s 2018 study of women in English lexicography): women as users and dedicatees of dictionaries; women as contributors to and compilers of lexicographical works; and (in a very preliminary way) women and female sexuality as represented in German/English bilingual dictionaries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Russell (2018) was able to identify some 24 dictionaries invoking women as patrons, dedicatees or potential users before 1700, and some 150 works in English lexicography by women between 1500 and 1900, besides the contribution of hundreds of women as supporters and helpers, not least as unpaid readers and sub-editors for the Oxford English Dictionary. Equivalent research in other languages is lacking, but this paper presents some of the known examples of women as lexicographers. The evidence tends to support Russell’s finding for English, that women were more likely to find a place in lexicography outside the mainstream: sometimes in a more private sphere (like Hester Piozzi); often in bilingual lexicography (such as Margrethe Thiele, working on a Danish-French dictionary), including missionary and or colonizing activity (such as Cinie Louw in Africa, Daisy Bates in Australia); and in dialect description (Coronedi Berti in Italy, Luisa Lacal and María Moliner in Spain). Within the German-speaking context, women who participated in lexicographical work themselves are hard to identify before the late nineteenth century, though those few women who did have access to education were often engaged in language learning, including translation activity, and they were likely users of bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. Christian Ludwig’s (1706) English-German dictionary – the first of its kind – was dedicated to the Electoral Princess Sophia of Hanover. Elizabeth Weir may have been the first named female compiler of a German dictionary, with her bilingual New German Dictionary (1888). Rather better known are the cases of Agathe Lasch and Luise Pusch, who, as pioneering women in the field of German linguistics, ultimately led major lexicographical projects documenting German regional varieties in the first half of the twentieth century (Middle Low German and Hamburgish in the case of Lasch; the Hessisch Nassau dialect dictionary in the case of Berthold). In the light of existing research on gender and sexuality in the history of English lexicography (e. g. Iamartino 2010; Turton 2019), I conclude with a preliminary exploration how woman and sexuality have been represented in dictionaries of German and English, taking the words Hure and woman in bilingual German-English dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as my case studies.
In a multilingual and multicultural society, dictionaries play an important role to enhance interlingual communication. A diversity of languages and different levels of dictionary culture demand innovative lexicographic approaches to establish a dictionary landscape that responds to the needs of the various speech communities. Focusing on the South African situation this paper discusses some aspects of a few dictionaries that contributed to an improvement of the local dictionary landscape. Using the metaphors of bridges, dykes and sluice gates it is shown how lexicographers need a balanced approach in their lemma selection and treatment. Whilst a too strong prescriptive approach can be to the detriment of the macrostructural selection, a lack of regulatory criteria could easily lead to a data overload. The lexicographer should strive to give a reflection of the actual language use and enable the users to retrieve the information that can satisfy their specific communication and cognitive needs. Such lexicographic products will enrich and improve the dictionary landscape.
This paper presents the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, a new, freely accessible publication platform for resources on German lexical borrowings in other languages, to be launched in the second half of 2022. The system will host digital-native sources as well as existing, digitized paper dictionaries on loanwords, initially for some 15 recipient languages. All resources remain accessible as individual standalone dictionaries; in addition, data on words (etyma, loanwords etc.) together with their senses and relations to each other is represented as a cross-resource network in a graph database, with careful distinction between information present in the original sources and the curated portal network data resulting from matching and merging information on, e. g., lexical units appearing in multiple dictionaries. Special tooling is available for manually creating graphs from dictionary entries during digitization and for editing and augmenting the graph database. The user interface allows users to browse individual dictionaries, navigate through the underlying graph and ‘click together’ complex queries on borrowing constellations in the graph in an intuitive way. The web application will be available as open source.
The public as linguistic authority: Why users turn to internet forums to differentiate between words
(2022)
This paper addresses the question of why we face unsatisfactory German dictionary entries when looking up and comparing two similar lexical terms that are loan words, new words, (near) synonyms, or confusables. It explains how users are aware of existing reference works but still search or post on language forums, often after consulting a dictionary and experiencing a range of dictionary based problems. Firstly, these dictionary based difficulties will be scrutinised in more detail with respect to content, function, presentation, and the language of definitions. Entries documenting loan words and commonly confused pairs from different lexical reference resources serve as examples to show the short comings. Secondly, I will explain why learning about your target group involves studying discussion forums. Forums are a valuable source for detailed user studies, enabling the examination of different communicative needs, concrete linguistic questions, speakers’ intuitions, and people’s reactions to posts and comments. Thirdly, with the help of two examples I will describe how the study of chats and forums had a major impact on the development of a recently compiled German dictionary of confusables. Finally, that same problem solving approach is applied to the idea of a future dictionary of neologisms and their synonyms.
Dictionaries are often a reflection of their time; their respective (socio-)historical context influences how the meaning of certain lexical units is described. This also applies to descriptions of personal terms such as man or woman. Lexicographers have a special responsibility to comprehensively investigate current language use before describing it in the dictionary. Accordingly, contemporary academic dictionaries are usually corpus-based. However, it is important to acknowledge that language is always embedded in cultural contexts. Our case study investigates differences in the linguistic contexts of the use of man and woman, drawing from a range of language collections (in our case fiction books, popular magazines and newspapers). We explain how potential differences in corpus construction would therefore influence the “reality” depicted in the dictionary. In doing so, we address the far-reaching consequences that the choice of corpus-linguistic basis for an empirical dictionary has on semantic descriptions in dictionary entries.Furthermore, we situate the case study within the context of gender-linguistic issues and discuss how lexicographic teams can engage with how dictionaries might perpetuate traditional role concepts when describing language use.
Words and their usages are in many cases closely related to or embedded in social, cultural, technical and ideological contexts. This does not only apply to individual words and specific senses, but to many vocabulary zones as well. Moreover, the development of words is often related to aspects of socio-cultural evolution in a broad sense. In this paper I will have a look at traditional dictionaries and digital lexical systems focussing on the question how they deal with socio-cultural and discourse-related aspects of word usage. I will also propose a number of suggestions how future digital lexical systems might be enriched in this respect.
Tok Pisin is a pidgin/creole language spoken since the late 19th century in most of the area that nowadays constitutes Papua New Guinea where it emerged under German colonial rule. Unusual for a pidgin/creole, Tok Pisin is characterized by a extensive lexicographic history. The Tok Pisin Dictionary Collection at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, described in this article, includes about fifty dictionaries. The collection forms the basis for the sketch of the history of Tok Pisin lexicography as part of colonial history presented here. The basic thesis is that in the history of Tok Pisin, lexicographic strat egies, dictionary structures, and publication patterns reflect the interest (and disinterest) of various groups of colonial actors. Among these colonial actors, European scientists, Catholic missionaries, and the Australian and US militaries played important roles.
The aim of this paper is to show how lexicographical choices reflect ideological thinking, singled out by Eagleton (2007) into the strategies of rationalizing, legitimating, action orienting, unifying, naturalizing and universalizing. It will be carried out by examining two twenty first century editions of each of the five English monolingual learner’s dictionaries published by Cambridge, Collins, Longman, Macmillan, and Oxford. The synchronic and diachronic analyses of the dictionaries and their different editions at the macro structural level (the wordlists) and at the micro structural level (the definitional styles) will show how the reduction and change of data, derived from heterogeneous social and cultural contexts of language use, to abstract essential forms, involves decisions about the central and peripheral aspects of the lexicon and the meaning of words.
Applying terminological methods to lexicography helps lexicographers deal with the terms occurring in general language dictionaries, especially when it comes to writing the definitions of concepts belonging to special fields. In the context of the lexicographic work of the Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, an updated digital version of the last Academia das Ciências de Lisboa’ dictionary published in 2001, we have assumed that terminology – in its dual dimension, both linguistic and conceptual – and lexicography are complementary in their methodological approaches. Both disciplines deal with lexical items, which can be lexical units or terms. In this paper, we apply terminological methods to improve the treatment of terms in general language dictionaries and to write definitions as a form of achieving more precision and accuracy, and also to specify the domains to which they belong. Additionally, we highlight the consistent modelling of lexicographic components, namely the hierarchy of domain labels, as they are term identification markers instead of a flat list of domains. The need to create and make available structured, organised and interoperable lexicographic resources has led us to follow a path in which the application of standards and best practices of treating and representing specialised lexicographic content are fundamental requirements.
While there was arguably a need for multi authored, multi volume, metalexicographic handbooks three decades ago – when the field of metalexicography was still ‘young’ – it is a bit puzzling to make sense of the current output flurry in this field. Is it simply a matter of ‘every publisher trying to fill its shelves’? or is there really a need in the scientific community for more and (continuously) updated reference works? And once available, are such works also consulted? Which parts? By whom? How often? For what purposes? In this paper we look at an ongoing, real world metalexicographic handbook project to answer these questions.
This paper focuses on the treatment of culture bound lexical items in a novel type of online learner’s dictionary model, the Phrase Based Active Dictionary (PAD). A PAD has a strong phraseological orientation: each meaning of a word is exclusively defined in a typical phraseological context. After introducing the relevant theory of realia in translation studies, we develop a broader notion of culture specific lexical items which is more apt to serve the purposes of learner’s lexicography and thus to satisfy the needs of a larger and often undefined target group. We discuss the treatment of such words and expressions in common English learner’s dictionaries and then present various excerpts from PAD entries in English, German, and Italian which display different strategies for coping with cultural contents in the lexicon. Our aim is to demonstrate that the phraseological approach at the core of the PAD model turns out to be extremely important to convey cultural knowledge in a suitable way for users to fully grasp cultural implications in language.
In foreign language teaching the use of dictionaries, especially bilingual, has always been related to the hypotheses concerning the relationship between the native language (L1) and second language acquisition method. If the bilingual dictionary was an obvious tool in the grammar-translation method, it was banned from the classroom in the direct, audiolingual and audiovisual methods. Also in the communicative method, foreign language learners are discouraged from using a dictionary. Its use should not obstruct the goals of communicatively oriented foreign language learning – a view still held by many foreign language teachers. Nevertheless, the reality has been different: Foreign language learners have always used dictionaries, even if they no longer possess a print dictionary and mainly use online resources and applications. Dictionaries and online resources will continue to play an important role in the future. In the Council of Europe’s language policy, with its emphasis on multilingualism and lifelong learning, the adequate use of reference tools as a strategic skill is highlighted. In several European countries, educational guidelines refer to the use of dictionaries in the context of media literacy, both in mother tongue and foreign language teaching. Not only is their adequate use important, but so too is the comparison, assessment and evaluation of the information presented, in order to develop Language Awareness and Language Learning Awareness. This is good news. However, does this mean that dictionaries are actually used in class? What role do dictionaries play in foreign language teaching in schools and universities? Are foreign language learners in the digital era really competent users? And how competent are their teachers? Are they familiar with the current (online) dictionary landscape? Can they support their students? After a more in-depth study of the status quo of dictionary use by foreign language learners and teachers and the gap between their needs and the reality, this contribution discusses the challenges facing lexicographers and meta-lexicographers and what educational policy measures are necessary to make their efforts worthwhile in turning foreign language learners – and their teachers – into competent users in a multilingual and digital world.
Wortgeschichte digital (Digital Word History) is an emerging historical dictionary of the German language that focuses on describing semantic shifts from about 1600 through today. This article provides deeper insight into the dictionary’s “cross-reference clusters,” one of its software tools that performs visualization of its reference network. Hence, the clusters are a part of the project’s macrostructure. They serve as both a means for users to find entries of interest and a tool to elucidate relations among dictionary entries. Rather than delve into technical aspects, this article focuses on the applied logics of the software and discusses the approach in light of the dictionary’s microstructure. The article concludes with some considerations about the clusters’ advantages and limitations.
Looking up for an unknown word is the most frequent use of a dictionary. For languages both agglutinative and inflectional, such as Georgian, this can be quite challenging because an inflected form can be very far from the lemmas used by the target dictionary. In addition, there is no consensus among Georgian lexicographers on which lemmas represent a verb in dictionaries. It further complicates dictionaries access. Kartu-Verbs is a base of inflected forms of Georgian verbs accessible by a logical information system. It currently contains more than 5 million inflected forms related to more than 16,000 verbs for 11 tenses; each form can have 11 properties; there are more than 80 million links in the base. This demonstration shows how, from any inflected form, we can find the relevant lemma to access any dictionary. Kartu-Verbs can thus be used as a front-end to any Georgian dictionary.
This paper reports on the restructuring of a bilingual (Greek Sign Language, GSL – Modern Greek) lexicographic database with the use of the WordNet semantic and lexical database. The relevant research was carried out by the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) / Athena R.C. team within the framework of the European project Easier. The project will produce a framework for intelligent machine translation to bring down language barriers among several spoken/written and sign languages. This paper describes the experience of the ILSP team to contribute to a multilingual repository of signs and their corresponding translations and to organize and enhance a bilingual dictionary (GSL – Modern Greek) as a result of this mapping; this will be the main focus of this paper. The methodology followed relies on the use of WordNet and, more specifically, the Open Multilingual WordNet (OMW) tool to map content in GSL to WordNet synsets.
The paper presents the process of developing the AirFrame database, a specialized lexical resource in which aviation terminology is defined in the form of semantic frames, following the methodology of the Berkeley FrameNet (FN). First, the structure of the database is presented, and then the methodology applied in developing and populating the database is described. The link between specialized aviation frames and general language semantic frames, of which frames defining entities, processes, attributes and events are particularly relevant, is discussed on the example of the semantic frame of Flight and its related frames. The paper ends with discussing possibilities of using AirFrame as a model for further developing resources in which general and specialized knowledge are linked.
Many European languages have undergone considerable changes in orthography over the last 150 years. This hampers the application of modern computer-based analysers to older text, and hence computer-based annotation and studies of text collections spanning a long period. As a step towards a functional analyser for Norwegian texts (Nynorsk standard) from the 19th century, funding was granted in 2020 for creating a full form generator for all inflected forms of headwords found in Ivar Aasen’s dictionary published in 1873 (Aasen 1873) and his grammar from 1864 (Aasen 1864). Creating this word bank led to new insight in Aasen (1873), its structure, internal organisation, and ambition level as well as its link to Aasen (1864). As a test, the full form list generated from this new word bank was used to analyse the word inventory of texts by Aa. O. Vinje, written in the period 1850–1870. The Vinje texts were also analysed using a full form list of modern standard Norwegian, to study the differences in applicability and see how Vinje’s language relates to the written standard of modern Norwegian.
In this paper, we present LexMeta, a metadata model for the description of human-readable and computational lexical resources in catalogues. Our initial motivation is the extension of the LexBib knowledge graph with the addition of metadata for dictionaries, making it a catalogue of and about lexicographical works. The scope of the proposed model, however, is broader, aiming at the exchange of metadata with catalogues of Language Resources and Technologies and addressing a wider community of researchers besides lexicographers. For the definition of the LexMeta core classes and properties, we deploy widely used RDF vocabularies, mainly Meta-Share, a metadata model for Language Resources and Technologies, and FRBR, a model for bibliographic records.
We describe the status of work intending at including sign language lexical data within the OntoLex-Lemon framework. Our general goal is to provide for a multimodal extension to this framework, which was originally conceived for covering only the written and phonetic representation of lexical data. Our aim is to achieve in the longer term the same type of semantic interoperability between sign language lexical data as this is achieved for their spoken or written counterparts. We want also to achieve this goal across modalities: between sign language lexical data and spoken/written lexical data.
The long road to a historical dictionary of Lower Sorbian. Towards a lexical information system
(2022)
The Sorbian Institute has been taking preparatory steps for a historical-documentary vocabulary information system for Lower Sorbian for about 10 years. To this end, the entire extant written material (16th–21st centuries) of this strongly endangered European minority language is to be systematically evaluated. An attempt made a few years ago to organise and finance the project as a long-term scientific project was not successful in the end. Therefore, it can only be advanced step by step and via some detours. The article informs about the interim status of the project, especially with respect to the creation of a reliable database.
The paper presents the results of a survey on lexicographic practices and lexicographers’ needs across Europe that was conducted in the context of the Horizon 2020 project European Lexicographic Infrastructure (ELEXIS) among the observer institutions of the project. The survey is a revised and upgraded version of the survey which was originally conducted among ELEXIS lexicographic partner institutions in 2018 (Kallas et al. 2019a). The main goal of this new survey was to complement the data from the ELEXIS lexicographic partner institutions in order to get a more complete picture of lexicographic practices both for born-digital and retro-digitised resources in Europe. The results offer a detailed insight into many aspects of the lexicographic process at European institutions, such as funding, training, staff, lexicographic expertise, software and tools. In addition, the survey reflects on current trends in lexicography and reveals what institutions see as the most important emerging trends that will affect lexicography in the short-term and long-term future. Overall, the results provide valuable input informing the development of tools, resources, guidelines and training materials within ELEXIS.
This paper aims at verifying if the most important online Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries include some of the neologisms identified in texts published in the 1990s to 2000s, formed with the elements ciber-, e-, bio-, eco- and narco, which we refer to as fractomorphemes / fracto-morphèmes. Three online dictionaries were analyzed (Aulete, Houaiss and Michaelis), as well as Vocabulário Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa (VOLP). We were able to conclude that all three dictionaries and VOLP include neologisms with these elements; Michaelis and VOLP do not include separate entries for bound morphemes, whereas Houaiss includes entries for all of them and Aulete includes entries for bio-, eco- and narco-. Aulete also describes the neological meaning of eco- and narco-, whereas Houaiss does not.
Word Families in Diachrony. An epoch-spanning structure for the word families of older German
(2022)
The ‘Word Families in Diachrony’ project (WoDia), for which a funding application to the DFG is in preparation, aims to provide a database driven online research environment that will enable processes of change in the entire historical vocabulary of German to be investigated by focusing on the changes in word families and the individual means of word formation. WoDia will embed the vocabularies of Old High German (OHG), Middle High German (MHG), Old Saxon (OS), and Middle Low German (MLG) in a database, resulting in a word-family structure for High and Low German from the beginnings up to the 15th century (for High German) and up to the 17th century (for Low German). The basis of the vocabulary is provided by reference dictionaries of the four historical varieties, whereas the word families’ historical structure is based on the word-family dictionary of OHG by Jochen Splett (1992). Each lemma in the database will be assigned, where appropriate, to a word family. The individual word-formation elements and the word-formation hierarchy will be mapped in a structural formula. The etymologically corresponding lemmas and word families of the different periods/varieties of older German will be linked so that an analysis across the varieties will also be possible. The annotations of word families in the database (e. g., relating to word structure) will be supplemented by linking their lemmas to the online dictionaries and to the reference corpora of Old German (OS and OHG), MHG, and MLG.
The digital environment represents a qualitatively new level of service for research work with linguistic information presented in dictionary form. And first of all, this applies to index systems. By dictionary indexing we mean a set of formalized rules and procedures, on the basis of which it is possible to obtain information about certain linguistic facts recorded in the dictionary. These rules are implemented in the form of user interfaces. However, one should take into account the fact that the effectiveness of automatic construction of index schemes for a digital dictionary is possible only in a sufficiently formalized environment. This article describes the method and technology of indexing the Etymological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language (EDUL). For the language indexing of the dictionary, a special computer instrumental system (VLL – virtual lexicographic laboratory) was developed, and adapted to the structure of the EDUL and focused on the creation of indexes in automatic mode. The digital implementation of the EDUL made it possible to access the entire corpus of the dictionary text regardless of the time of publication of the corresponding volume and opened up opportunities for various digital interpretations of etymological information.
The purpose of this paper is to present the lexicographic protocol and to report on the progress of compilation of Mikaela_Lex, which is a Greek, free online monolingual school dictionary for upper elementary students with visual impairments including 4,000 lemmata. The dictionary is equipped with new digital tools, such as the “Braille-system keyboard, a “speech-to-text” tool, a “text-to-speech” tool and also a qwerty accessibility for visually non-impaired students.
This paper describes a method for automatic identification of sentences in the Gigafida corpus containing multi-word expressions (MWEs) from the list of 5,242 phraseological units, which was developed on the basis of several existing open-access lexical resources for Slovene. The method is based on a definition of MWEs, which includes information on two levels of corpus annotation: syntax (dependency parsing) and morphology (POS tagging), together with some additional statistical parameters. The resulting lexicon contains 12,358 sentences containing MWEs extracted from the corpus. The extracted sentences were analysed from the lexicographic point of view with the aim of establishing canonical forms of MWEs and semantic relations between them in terms of variation, synonymy, and antonymy.
This paper consists of a short analysis of the sources and the treatment of the legal lexicon in the first dictionary published by the Spanish Royal Academy (1726–1739), followed by a longer commentary on the representation and the treatment of the concept of judge, in which the reflection of the extralinguistic factors in the definitions stands in focus. The results highlight the relevance of the legal context of that era for the treatment of the lexicon related to the legal domain, but they also demonstrate the pattern in which the lexicographic data displays peculiarities of legal matters.
In the etymological information for a word in a dictionary, the first question to be answered is whether the word is a borrowing or the result of word formation. Here, we consider this question for internationalisms ending in -ation in German and in -ácia in Slovak. In German, -ation is a suffix that attaches to verbs in -ieren. For these verbs, it is in competition with -ung. In Slovak, -ácia is a suffix that attaches to bases of Latin or Greek origin. The corresponding verbs are often backformations. Most Slovak verbs also have a nominalization in -nie. In order to investigate to what extent the nouns in -ation or -ácia are borrowings or derived from the corresponding verbs in German and Slovak, we took a random sample of English nouns in -ation for which OED gives a corresponding verb. For this sample, we checked whether the cognate noun in -ation or -ácia is attested in standard dictionaries and in corpora. Then we did the same for the corresponding verbs and the nouns in -ung or -nie. Finally, we checked the frequency of these words in DeReKo for German and SNK for Slovak. On this basis, we found evidence that -ation in German has a slightly different status to -ácia in Slovak. This status affects the relationship to the corresponding verbs and to the nouns in -ung or -nie. Such generalizations are important as background information for specifying etymological information in dictionaries, especially for languages where first attestations dates are not readily available.
In semantic fieldwork, it is common to use a language other than the language under investigation for presenting linguistic materials to the language consultants, e.g. discourse contexts in acceptability judgment tasks. Previous works commenting on the use of a ‘meta-language’ or ‘language of wider communication’ in this sense (AnderBois and Henderson 2015; Matthewson 2004) have argued that this practice is not methodologically inferior to the exclusive use of the object language for elicitation, but that the fieldworker needs to be alert to potential influences of the meta-language or, indeed, the object language, on the elicited judgments. Thus, the choice of a language for presenting discourse contexts is an integral component of fieldwork methodology. This paper provides a research report with a focus on this component. It describes a multilingual fieldwork setting offering several potential meta-languages, which the fieldworker and the consultants master to varying degrees. The choice of the languages in this setting is discussed with regard to methodological, social and practical considerations and related to selected, more general methodological questions regarding semantic fieldwork practice.
This contribution investigates the use of the Czech particle jako (“like”/“as”) in naturally occurring conversations. Inspired by interactional research on unfinished or suspended utterances and on turn-final conjunctions and particles, the analysis aims to trace the possible development of jako from conjunction to a tag-like particle that can be exploited for mobilizing affiliative responses. Traditionally, jako has been described as conjunction used for comparing two elements or for providing a specification of a first element [“X (is) like Y”]. In spoken Czech, however, jako can be flexibly positioned within a speaking turn and does not seem to operate as a coordinating or hypotactic conjunction. As a result, prior studies have described jako as a polyfunctional particle. This article will try to shed light on the meaning of jako in spoken discourse by focusing on its apparent fuzzy or “filler” uses, i.e., when it is found in a mid-turn position in multi-unit turns and in the immediate vicinity of hesitations, pauses, and turn suspensions. Based on examples from mundane, video-recorded conversations and on a sequential and multimodal approach to social interaction, the analyses will first show that jako frequently frames discursive objects that co-participants should respond to. By using jako before a pause and concurrently adopting specific embodied displays, participants can more explicitly seek to mobilize responsive action. Moreover, as jako tends to cluster in multi-unit turns involving the formulation of subjective experience or stance, it can be shown to be specifically designed for mobilizing affiliative responses. Finally, it will be argued that the potential of jako to open up interactive turn spaces can be linked to the fundamental comparative semantics of the original conjunction.
This study examines a list of 3,413 neologisms containing one or more borrowed item, which was compiled using the databases built by the Korean Neologism Investigation Project. Etymological aspects and morphological aspects are taken into consideration to show that, besides the overwhelming prevalence of English-based neologisms, particular loans from particular languages play a significant role in the prolific formation of Korean neologisms. Aspects of the lexicographic inclusion of loan-based neologisms demonstrate the need for Korean neologism and lexicography research to broaden its scopes in terms of methodology and attitudes, while also providing a glimpse of changes.
This paper discusses an investigation of how senses are ordered across eight dictionaries. A dataset of 75 words was used for this purpose, and two senses were examined for each word. The words are divided into three groups of 25 words each according to the relationship between the senses: Homonymy, Metaphor, and Systematic Polysemy. The primary finding is that WordNet differs from the other dictionaries in terms of Metaphor. The order of the senses was more often figurative/literal, and it had the highest percentage of figurative senses that were not found. We discuss leveraging another dictionary, COBUILD, to re-order the senses according to frequency.
When comparing different tools in the field of natural language processing (NLP), the quality of their results usually has first priority. This is also true for tokenization. In the context of large and diverse corpora for linguistic research purposes, however, other criteria also play a role – not least sufficient speed to process the data in an acceptable amount of time. In this paper we evaluate several state of the art tokenization tools for German – including our own – with regard to theses criteria. We conclude that while not all tools are applicable in this setting, no compromises regarding quality need to be made.
The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the ‘Question Under Discussion’ framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).
This thesis is a corpus linguistic investigation of the language used by young German speakers online, examining lexical, morphological, orthographic, and syntactic features and changes in language use over time. The study analyses the language in the Nottinghamer Korpus deutscher YouTube‐Sprache ("Nottingham corpus of German YouTube language", or NottDeuYTSch corpus), one of the first large corpora of German‐language comments taken from the videosharing website YouTube, and built specifically for this project. The metadatarich corpus comprises c.33 million tokens from more than 3 million comments posted underneath videos uploaded by mainstream German‐language youthorientated YouTube channels from 2008‐2018.
The NottDeuYTSch corpus was created to enable corpus linguistic approaches to studying digital German youth language (Jugendsprache), having identified the need for more specialised web corpora (see Barbaresi 2019). The methodology for compiling the corpus is described in detail in the thesis to facilitate future construction of web corpora. The thesis is situated at the intersection of Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC) and youth language, which have been important areas of sociolinguistic scholarship since the 1980s, and explores what we can learn from a corpus‐driven, longitudinal approach to (online) youth language. To do so, the thesis uses corpus linguistic methods to analyse three main areas:
1. Lexical trends and the morphology of polysemous lexical items. For this purpose, the analysis focuses on geil, one of the most iconic and productive words in youth language, and presents a longitudinal analysis, demonstrating that usage of geil has decreased, and identifies lexical items that have emerged as potential replacements. Additionally, geil is used to analyse innovative morphological productiveness, demonstrating how different senses of geil are used as a base lexeme or affixoid in compounding and derivation.
2. Syntactic developments. The novel grammaticalization of several subordinating conjunctions into both coordinating conjunctions and discourse markers is examined. The investigation is supported by statistical analyses that demonstrate an increase in the use of non‐standard syntax over the timeframe of the corpus and compares the results with other corpora of written language.
3. Orthography and the metacommunicative features of digital writing. This analysis identifies orthographic features and strategies in the corpus, e.g. the repetition of certain emoji, and develops a holistic framework to study metacommunicative functions, such as the communication of illocutionary force, information structure, or the expression of identities. The framework unifies previous research that had focused on individual features, integrating a wide range of metacommunicative strategies within a single, robust system of analysis.
By using qualitative and computational analytical frameworks within corpus linguistic methods, the thesis identifies emergent linguistic features in digital youth language in German and sheds further light on lexical and morphosyntactic changes and trends in the language of young people over the period 2008‐2018. The study has also further developed and augmented existing analytical frameworks to widen the scope of their application to orthographic features associated with digital writing.
The present paper examines the usage of 341 COVID-19 neologisms which appeared in South Korea over a span of eighteen months (from December 2019 to May 2021) and were extracted from a corpus composed of COVID-19-related news articles and comments, the COVID-19 Corpus, in order to address the following research questions: 1) How do the 341 COVID-19 neologisms extracted rank in news articles and comments respectively?, 2) What usage trends do neologisms designating the disease and other high-frequency neologisms show in news articles and comments respectively?, 3) What characteristic differences do comments as a non-expert and subjective language resource and news articles as an expert and objective language resource show and what value may each genre add to the lexicographic description of neologisms?
Since the beginning of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has dominated public discourse and introduced a wealth of words and expressions to the general vocabulary of English and other world languages. The lexical adaptation necessitated by this global health crisis has been unprecedented in speed and scope, and in response, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has continually revised its coverage, publishing special updates of Covid-19-related words in 2020 outside of its usual quarterly publication cycle. This article describes how OED lexicographers have analysed language corpora and other text databases to monitor the development of pandemic-related words and provide a linguistic and historical context to their usage.
Between January 2020 and July 2021, many new words and phrases contributed to the expansion of the German vocabulary to enable communication under the new conditions that evolved during the Covid-19 pandemic. Medical and epidemiological vocabulary was integrated into the general language to a large extent. Suddenly, some lexemes from general language were used with very high frequency, while other words were used less often than before. These processes of language change can be studied in various ways, for example, in corpus linguistics with respect to the frequency or emergence of certain words in certain types of texts (e.g. press releases vs. posts in social media), in critical discourse analysis with respect to certain participants of the discourse (e.g. vocabulary of Covid-19 pandemic deniers), or in conversation analysis (e.g. with respect to new verbal interactions in greetings and farewells). The rapid expansion of vocabulary has notably affected also lexicography as a discipline of applied linguistics.
This article will focus on the ways in which a German neologism dictionary project has chosen to capture and document lexicographic information in a timely manner. Both challenges and advantages arise from lexicographic practice “at the pulse of time”. The Neologismenwörterbuch is presented as an example that lends itself well to such a discussion because its subject (neologisms) is characterized as new, innovative, and constantly changing.
This volume of Lexicographica : Series Maior focuses on lexicographic neology and neological lexicography concerning COVID-19 neologisms, featuring papers originally presented at the third Globalex Workshop on Lexicography and Neology (GWLN 2021).
The thirteen papers in this volume focus on ten languages: one Altaic (Korean), one Finno-Ugric (Hungarian), two Germanic (English and German), four Romance (French, Italian, [Brazilian and European] Portuguese and [Pan-American and European] Spanish), and one Slavic (Croatian), as well as the Sign Language of New Zealand. Specialized dictionaries of neologisms are discussed as well as general language ones, monolingual, bilingual and multilingual lexical resources, print and electronic dictionaries. Questions regarding terminology as well as general language and standard and norm regarding COVID-19 neologisms are raised and different methods of detecting candidates in media corpora, as well as by user contributions, are discussed.
This volume brings together contributions by international experts reflecting on Covid19-related neologisms and their lexicographic processing and representation. The papers analyze new words, new meanings of existing words, and new multiword units, where they come from, how they are transmitted (or differ) across languages, and how their use and meaning are reflected in dictionaries of all sorts. Recent trends in as many as ten languages are considered, including general and specialized language, monolingual as well as bilingual and printed as well as online dictionaries.
The syntagma gel hidroalcohólico ‘hydroalcoholic gel’ or the noun hidroalcohol ‘hydroalcohol’ cannot be found in Diccionario de la lengua española (DLE) of the Real Academia Española (‘Royal Spanish Academy’) or other general reference dictionaries of the Spanish language. This is so despite the fact that, for well over a year and to this very day, we have not been able to do anything without first sanitising our hands with this product. It is one of the many neologisms that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought us, and these have become commonly used words that dictionaries should consider as candidates for future updates.
By looking at the dictionarisability of these neologisms, in this work we try to set their boundaries on the continuum along which they fall. “Dictionarisability” means, in our context, the greater or lesser interest of these unities regarding the updating of general language dictionaries. At both ends of this continuum, there are surprising nonce words, as well as neologisms that have recently lost their status as such because they have now been incorporated into the dictionary. To identify different groups on the continuum of pandemic neologisms, we take into account the criteria proposed in the current literature and, by so doing, we are able to assess the extent to which they are discriminatory. This will allow us to address the neological process and to reflect on the various stages of it, from the time a neologism is born until the moment it ceases to be one because it has been dictionarised. Before that, however, we present the framework of our study and refer to the mechanisms available for detecting neologisms in general and pandemic neologisms in particular.
The aim of this work is to describe criteria used in the process of inclusion and treatment of neologisms in dictionaries of Spanish within the framework of pandemic instability. Our starting point will be data obtained by the Antenas Neológicas Network (https://www.upf.edu/web/antenas), whose representation in three different lexicographic tools will be analyzed with the purpose of identifying problems in the methodology used to dictionarize – that is, how and what words were selected to be included in dictionaries and how they were represented in their entries – neologisms during the COVID-19 pandemic (sources and corpora of analysis, selection criteria, types of definition, among other aspects). Two of them are monolingual and COVID-19 lexical units were included as part of their updates: the Antenario, a dictionary of neologisms of Spanish varieties, and the Diccionario de la Lengua Española [DLE], a dictionary of general Spanish, published by the Real Academia Española [RAE], Spanish Royal Academy). The other is a bilingual unidirectional English-Spanish dictionary first published as a glossary, Diccionario de COVID-19 EN-ES [TREMEDICA], entirely made up of neological and non-neological lexical units related to the virus and the pandemic. Thus, the target lexis was either included in existing works or makes up the whole of a new tool located in a portal together with other lexicographic tools. Unlike other collections of COVID-19 vocabulary that kept cropping up as the pandemic unfolded, all three have been designed and written according to well-established lexicographic practices.
Our working hypothesis is that the need to record and define words which were recently created impacts the criteria for inclusion and treatment of neologisms in dictionaries about Spanish, including a certain degree of overlap of some features which are traditionally thought to be specific to each type of dictionary.
This paper presents the project “The first Romanian bilingual dictionaries (17th century). Digitally annotated and aligned corpus” (eRomLex) which deals with the editing of the first bilingual Romanian dictionaries. The aim of the project is to compile an electronic corpus comprising six Slavonic-Romanian lexicons dating from the 17th century, based on their relatedness and the fact that they follow a common model in order to highlight the characteristics of this lexicographical network (the affiliations between the lexicons, the way they relate to the source, the innovations towards it, their potential uses) and to facilitate the access to their content. A digital edition allows exhaustive data extraction and comparison and link with other digitized resources for old Romanian or Church Slavonic, including dictionaries. After presenting the corpus, we point to the necessary stages in achieving this project, the techniques used to access the material and the challenges and obstacles we encountered along the way. We describe how the corpus was created, stored, indexed and can be searched over; we will also present and discuss some statistical analyses highlighting relations between the Romanian lexicons and their Slavonic-Ruthenian source.
In this paper we present Trendi, a monitor corpus of written Slovene, which has been compiled recently as part of the SLED (Monitor corpus and related resources) project. The methodology and the contents of the corpus are presented, as well as the findings of the survey that aimed to identify the needs of potential users related to topical language use. The Trendi corpus currently contains news articles and other web content from 110 different sources, with the texts being collected and linguistically annotated on a daily basis. The corpus complements Gigafida 2.0, a 1.13-billion-word reference corpus of standard written Slovene. Also discussed are the ways in which the corpus will be integrated into various lexicographic projects, helping not only in the identification of neologisms but also in monitoring changes in already identified language phenomena.
The Leibniz-Institute for the German Language (IDS) was established in Mannheim in 1964. Since then, it has been at the forefront of innovation in German linguistics as a hub for digital language data. This chapter presents various lessons learnt from over five decades of work by the IDS, ranging from the importance of sustainability, through its strong technical base and FAIR principles, to the IDS’ role in national and international cooperation projects and its expertise on legal and ethical issues related to language resources and language technology.
Head alignment in German compounds: Implications for prosodic constituency and morphological parsing
(2022)
The notion of head alignment was introduced to account for the observation that in a word with multiple feet, one is more prominent than the others. In particular, this notion is meant to capture the characteristic edge-orientation of main stress by requiring the (left or right) word boundary and the respective (left or right) boundary of the head foot to coincide (McCarthy & Prince 1993). In the present paper the notion of head alignment will be applied to compounds, which are also characterized by the property that one of their members, located in a margin position, is most prominent.
The adequacy of an analysis in terms of head alignment hinges on the question of whether observable prominence peaks associate with the boundaries of independently motivated constituents. It will be argued that such links exist for German compounds, indicating reference to at least three distinct compound categories established on morphological grounds: copulative, phrasal, and a default class of “regular” compounds. The evidence for the relevant distinctions sheds light on morphological parsing, indicating that compound categories can be – and often are – determined by properties pertaining to their complete form, rather than by conditions affecting their (original) construction.
The shortening of linguistic expressions naturally involves some sort of correspondence between short forms and (some portion of) the respective full forms. Based mostly on data from English and Hebrew this article explores the hypothesis that such correspondence concerns necessary sameness of symbolic form, referring either to graphemic or to a specific level of phonological representation. That level indicates a degree of abstractness defined by language-specific contrastiveness (i.e. “phonemic”). Reference to written form can be shown to be highly systematic in certain contexts, including cases where full forms consist of multiple stems. Specific asymmetries pertaining to the targeting of material by correspondence (e.g. initial vs. non-initial position) appear to be alike for both types of representation, a claim supported by a study based on a nomenclature strictly confined to writing (chemical element symbols).
Meta-communicative practices are generally reflexive in a fairly obvious sense: Inasmuch as speakers use them to talk about or comment on earlier/subsequent talk, they use language self-reflexively. In this paper, we explore a practice that is reflexive not only in this meta-communicative sense but also in a sequential-interactional one: Prefacing a conversational turn with I was gonna say. We show that the I was gonna say-preface furnishes the following general semantic-pragmatic affordances: (1) It retroactively relates the speaker’s subsequent talk to preceding talk from a co-participant, (2) it embodies a claim to prior, now-preempted, communicative intent with regard to what their co-participant has (just) said/done, (3) it therefore displays its speaker’s orientation to the relevance or the appropriate placement of the action(s) done in their own subsequent talk at an earlier moment in the interaction, and (4) it reflexively re-invokes, or retrieves, this earlier moment as the relevant sequential context for their action(s). We then go on to illustrate how speakers draw on these sequentially reflexive affordances for managing recurrent interactional contingencies in specific sequential environments. The paper ends with a discussion of the role that reflexivity plays in and for the deployment of this practice.