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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Standards in CLARIN
(2022)
This chapter looks at a fragment of the ongoing work of the CLARIN Standards Committee (CSC) on producing a shared set of recommendations on standards, formats, and related best practices supported by the CLARIN infrastructure and its participating centres. What might at first glance seem to be a straightforward goal has over the years proven to be rather complex, reflecting the robustness and heterogeneity of the emerging distributed digital research infrastructure and the various disciplines and research traditions of the language-based humanities that it serves and represents, and therefore part of the chapter reviews the various initiatives and proposals that strove to produce helpful standards-related guidance. The focus turns next to a subtask initiated in late 2019, its scope narrowed to one of the core activities and responsibilities of CLARIN backbone centres, namely the provision of data deposition services. Centres are obligated to publish their recom-mendations concerning the repertoire of data formats that are best suited for their research profiles. We look at how this requirement has been met by the particular centres and suggest that having centres maintain their information in the Standards Information System (SIS) is the way to improve on the current state of affairs.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
Germany’s diverse history in the 20th century raises the question of how social upheavals were constituted in and through political discourse. By analysing basic concepts, the research network “The 20th century in basic concepts” (based at the Leibniz institutes IDS, ZfL, ZZF) aims to identify continuities and discontinuities in political and social discourse. In this way, historical sediments of the present are to be uncovered and those challenges identified that emerged in the course of the 20th century and continue to shape political discourse until the present.
Dieses Kapitel lotet Möglichkeiten und Methoden aus, digitale Diskursanalysen nationalsozialistischer Quellentexte durchzuführen. Digitale Technologie wird dabei als heuristisches Werkzeug betrachtet, mit dem der Sprachgebrauch während des Nationalsozialismus im Rahmen größerer Quellenkorpora untersucht werden kann. In einem theoretischen Abschnitt wird grundsätzlich dafür plädiert, während des Analyseprozesses hermeneutisches Sinnverstehen mit breitflächigen korpusbasierten Abfragen zu kombinieren. Verdeutlicht wird diese Herangehensweise an zwei empirischen Beispielen: Anhand eines Korpus von Hitler- und Goebbels-Reden wird dem Auftauchen und der diskursiven Ausgestaltung des nationalsozialistischen Konzepts „Lebensraum“ nachgespürt. Schritt für Schritt wird offengelegt, welche Analysewege durch das Abfragen von Schlüsseltexten, Keywords, Konkordanzen und Kollokationen verfolgt werden können. Das zweite Beispiel zeigt anhand von Eingaben, die aus der Bevölkerung an Staats- und Parteiinstanzen gerichtet wurden, wie solche Quellen mithilfe eines digitalen Tools manuell annotiert werden können, um sie danach auf Musterhaftigkeiten im Sprachgebrauch hin auswerten zu können.
CLARIN stands for “Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure”. In 2012 CLARIN ERIC was established as a legal entity with the mission to create and maintain a digital infrastructure to support the sharing, use, and sustainability of language data (in written, spoken, or multimodal form) available through repositories from all over Europe, in support of research in the humanities and social sciences and beyond. Since 2016 CLARIN has had the status of Landmark research infrastructure and currently it provides easy and sustainable access to digital language data and also offers advanced tools to discover, explore, exploit, annotate, analyse, or combine such datasets, wherever they are located. This is enabled through a networked federation of centres: language data repositories, service centres, and knowledge centres with single sign-on access for all members of the academic community in all participating countries. In addition, CLARIN offers open access facilities for other interested communities of use, both inside and outside of academia. Tools and data from different centres are interoperable, so that data collections can be combined and tools from different sources can be chained to perform operations at different levels of complexity. The strategic agenda adopted by CLARIN and the activities undertaken are rooted in a strong commitment to the Open Science paradigm and the FAIR data principles. This also enables CLARIN to express its added value for the European Research Area and to act as a key driver of innovation and contributor to the increasing number of industry programmes running on data-driven processes and the digitalization of society at large.
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 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.
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.
Action ascription can be understood from two broad perspectives. On one view, it refers to the ways in which actions constitute categories by which members make sense of their world, and forms a key foundation for holding others accountable for their conduct. On another view, it refers to the ways in which we accountably respond to the actions of others, thereby accomplishing sequential versions of meaningful social experience. In short, action ascription can be understood as matter of categorisation of prior actions or responding in ways that are sequentially fitted to prior actions, or both. In this chapter, we review different theoretical approaches to action ascription that have developed in the field, as well as the key constituents and resources of action ascription that have been identified in conversation analytic research, before going on to discuss how action ascription can itself be considered a form of social action.
While the role of intentions in the constitution of actions gives rise to complex and heavily controversial questions, it appears to be indisputable that action ascription in interaction mostly does without any overt ascription of intention. Yet, sometimes participants explicitly ascribe intentions to their interlocutors in order to make sense of their prior actions. The chapter examines intention ascriptions in response to a partner’s adjacent prior turn using the German modal verb construction willst du/wollen Sie (do you want). The analysis focuses on the aspect of the prior action the intention ascription addresses (action type, projected next action, motive etc.), the action the intention ascription performs itself, and the next action they make relevant from the prior speaker. It was found that intention ascriptions are used to clarify and intersubjectively ground the meaning of the prior turn, which seems otherwise underspecified, ambiguous or puzzling. Yet, they are also used to adumbrate criticism, e.g., that the prior turn projects a course of future actions which is considered to be inadequate, or to expose a concealed, problematic allegedly “real” meaning of the prior turn.
This paper presents an algorithm and an implementation for efficient tokenization of texts of space-delimited languages based on a deterministic finite state automaton. Two representations of the underlying data structure are presented and a model implementation for German is compared with state-of-the-art approaches. The presented solution is faster than other tools while maintaining comparable quality.
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.
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-ofthe-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.
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.
This chapter will present lessons learned from CLARIN-D, the German CLARIN national consortium. Members of the CLARIN-D communities and of the CLARIN-D consortium have been engaged in innovative, data-driven, and community-based research, using language resources and tools in the humanities and neigh-bouring disciplines. We will present different use cases and users’ stories that demonstrate the innovative research potential of large digital corpora and lexical resources for the study of language change and variation, for language documentation, for literary studies, and for the social sciences. We will emphasize the added value of making language resources and tools available in the CLARIN distributed research infrastructure and will discuss legal and ethical issues that need to be addressed in the use of such an infrastructure. Innovative technical solutions for accessing digital materials still under copyright and for data mining such materials will be presented. We will outline the need for close interaction with communities of interest in the areas of curriculum development, data management, and training the next generation of digital humanities scholars. The importance of community-supported standards for encoding language resources and the practice of community-based quality control for digital research data will be presented as a crucial step toward the provisioning of high quality research data. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of impor-tant directions for innovative research and for supporting infrastructure development over the next decade and beyond.
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.
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.
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.
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 strategies, 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.
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.
We present the use of count-based and predictive language models for exploring language use in the German Reference Corpus DeReKo. For collocation analysis along the syntagmatic axis we employ traditional association measures based on co-occurrence counts as well as predictive association measures derived from the output weights of skipgram word embeddings. For inspecting the semantic neighbourhood of words along the paradigmatic axis we visualize the high dimensional word embeddings in two dimensions using t-stochastic neighbourhood embeddings. Together, these visualizations provide a complementary, explorative approach to analysing very large corpora in addition to corpus querying. Moreover, we discuss count-based and predictive models w.r.t. scalability and maintainability in very large corpora.
Preface
(2022)
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.
In this paper, we address two problems in indexing and querying spoken language corpora with overlapping speaker contributions. First, we look into how token distance and token precedence can be measured when multiple primary data streams are available and when transcriptions happen to be tokenized, but are not synchronized with the sound at the level of individual tokens. We propose and experiment with a speaker based search mode that enables any speaker’s transcription tier to be the basic tokenization layer whereby the contributions of other speakers are mapped to this given tier. Secondly, we address two distinct methods of how speaker overlaps can be captured in the TEI based ISO Standard for Spoken Language Transcriptions (ISO 24624:2016) and how they can be queried by MTAS – an open source Lucene-based search engine for querying text with multilevel annotations. We illustrate the problems, introduce possible solutions and discuss their benefits and drawbacks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
This paper describes the TEI-based ISO standard 24624:2016 ‘Transcription of spoken language’ and other formats used within CLARIN for spoken language resources. It assesses the current state of support for the standard and the interoperability between these formats and with rele- vant tools and services. The main idea behind the paper is that a digital infrastructure providing language resources and services to researchers should also allow the combined use of resources and/or services from different contexts. This requires syntactic and semantic interoperability. We propose a solution based on the ISO/TEI format and describe the necessary steps for this format to work as an exchange format with basic semantic interoperability for spoken language resources across the CLARIN infrastructure and beyond.
Action ascription is an emergent process of mutual displays of understanding. Usually, the kind of action that is ascribed to a prior turn by a next action remains implicit. Sometimes, however, actions are overtly ascribed, for example, when speakers expose the use of strategies. This happens particularly in conflictual interaction, such as public debates or mediation talks. In these interactional settings, one of the speakers’ goals is to discredit their opponents in front of other participants or an overhearing audience. This chapter investigates different types of overt strategy ascriptions in a public mediation: exposing the opponent’s use of rhetorical devices, exposing the opponent’s use of false premises, and exposing that an opponent is telling only a half-truth. This chapter shows how speakers use ascriptions of acting strategically as accusations to disclose their opponents’ intentions and ‘truths’ that the opponents allegedly conceal and that are detrimental to their position.
This think-aloud study charts the use of online resources by five final-year MA students in Nordic and Literacy Studies based on the analysis of screen and audio recordings of an error-correction task. The article briefly presents some linguistic features of Norwegian Nynorsk that are not common in the context of other European languages, that is, norm optionality with regards to inflection and spelling. While performing the task, the participants were allowed to use all digital aids. This article examines their resource consultation behavior, and it makes use of Laporte/Gilquin’s (2018) annotation protocol. The following research questions are posed: What online resources are used by the students? What characterizes the use? Are online resources helpful? This study provides new insights into an as yet little explored topic within the Norwegian context. The findings demonstrate that the participants relied heavily on the official monolingual dictionary Nynorskordboka. Indeed, the dictionary was helpful in the vast majority of the searches, either resulting in error improvement or the validation of a word; that is, many of the searches considered correct words. The findings suggest severe norm insecurity and emphasize the need to improve norm knowledge and metalinguistic knowledge as prerequisites for better utilization of aids. It is also suggested to include necessary information on norm optionality and other commonly queried issues in the dictionary architecture.
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 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.
The article addresses Solution-Oriented Questions (SOQs) as an interactional practice for relationship management in psychodiagnostic interviews. Therapeutic alliance results from the concordance of alignment, as willingness to cooperate regarding common goals, and of affiliation, as relationship based upon trust. SOQs particularly allow for both: They are situated at the end of a troublesome topic area, which is linked to low agency on the patient’s side, and they reveal understanding of and interest in the patient. Following the paradigm of Conversation Analysis and German Gesprächsanalyse this paper analyzes the design and functions of SOQs as a means for securing and enhancing the relationship in the process of therapy. Our data comprise 15 videotaped first interviews following the manual of the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics. The analyses refer to all SOQs found but will be illustrated by means of a single conversation.
The normative layer of CLARIN is, alongside the organizational and technical layers, an essential part of the infrastructure. It consists of the regulatory framework (statutory law, case law, authoritative guidelines, etc.), the contractual framework (licenses, terms of service, etc.), and ethical norms. Navigating the normative layer requires expertise, experience, and qualified effort. In order to advise the Board of Directors, a standing committee dedicated to legal and ethical issues, the CLIC, was created. Since its establishment in 2012, the CLIC has made considerable efforts to provide not only the BoD but also the general public with information and guidance. It has published many articles (both in proceedings of CLARIN conferences and in its own White Paper Series) and developed several LegalTech tools. It also runs a Legal Information Platform, where accessible information on various issues affecting language resources can be found.
The debate on the use of personal data in language resources usually focuses — and rightfully so — on anonymisation. However, this very same debate usually ends quickly with the conclusion that proper anonymisation would necessarily cause loss of linguistically valuable information. This paper discusses an alternative approach — pseudonymisation. While pseudonymisation does not solve all the problems (inasmuch as pseudonymised data are still to be regarded as personal data and therefore their processing should still comply with the GDPR principles), it does provide a significant relief, especially — but not only — for those who process personal data for research purposes. This paper describes pseudonymisation as a measure to safeguard rights and interests of data subjects under the GDPR (with a special focus on the right to be informed). It also provides a concrete example of pseudonymisation carried out within a research project at the Institute of Information Technology and Communications of the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg.
Ethical issues in Language Resources and Language Technology are often invoked, but rarely discussed. This is at least partly because little work has been done to systematize ethical issues and principles applicable in the fields of Language Resources and Language Technology. This paper provides an overview of ethical issues that arise at different stages of Language Resources and Language Technology development, from the conception phase through the construction phase to the use phase. Based on this overview, the authors propose a tentative taxonomy of ethical issues in Language Resources and Language Technology, built around five principles: Privacy, Property, Equality, Transparency and Freedom. The authors hope that this tentative taxonomy will facilitate ethical assessment of projects in the field of Language Resources and Language Technology, and structure the discussion on ethical issues in this domain, which may eventually lead to the adoption of a universally accepted Code of Ethics of the Language Resources and Language Technology community.
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.
Not only professional lexicographers, but also people without a professional background in lexicography, have reacted to the increased need for information on new words or medical and epidemiological terms being used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, corona-related glossaries published on German news websites are presented, as well as different kinds of responses from professional lexicography. They are compared in terms of the amount of encyclopaedic information given and the methods of definition used. In this context, answers to corona-related words from a German questionanswer platform are also presented and analyzed. Overall, these different reactions to a unique challenge shed light on the importance of lexicography for society and vice versa.
Not only professional lexicographers, but also people without a professional background in lexicography, have reacted to the increased need for information on new words or medical and epidemiological terms being used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, corona-related glossaries published on German news websites are presented, as well as different kinds of responses from professional lexicography. They are compared in terms of the amount of encyclopaedic information given and the methods of definition used. In this context, answers to corona-related words from a German questionanswer platform are also presented and analyzed. Overall, these different reactions to a unique challenge shed light on the importance of lexicography for society and vice versa.
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.
In a recent article, Meylan and Griffiths (Meylan & Griffiths, 2021, henceforth, M&G) focus their attention on the significant methodological challenges that can arise when using large-scale linguistic corpora. To this end, M&G revisit a well-known result of Piantadosi, Tily, and Gibson (2011, henceforth, PT&G) who argue that average information content is a better predictor of word length than word frequency. We applaud M&G who conducted a very important study that should be read by any researcher interested in working with large-scale corpora. The fact that M&G mostly failed to find clear evidence in favor of PT&G's main finding motivated us to test PT&G's idea on a subset of the largest archive of German language texts designed for linguistic research, the German Reference Corpus consisting of ∼43 billion words. We only find very little support for the primary data point reported by PT&G.
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.
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 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.
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.
The present paper reports two acceptability-rating experiments and a supporting corpus study for Polish that tested the acceptability and frequency of five verb classes (WATCH, SEE, HATE, KNOW, EXHIBIT), entailing different sets of agentivity features, in different syntactic constructions: a) the personal passive (e.g. zachód słońca był oglądany ‘the sunset was watched’), b) the impersonal -no/-to construction (e.g. oglądano zachód słońca ‘people/they/one watched the sunset’), and c) the personal active construction (e.g. niektórzy oglądali zachód słońca ‘some (people) watched the sunset’). We asked whether acceptability ratings would show identical acceptability clines across constructions affected by agentivity, as predicted from Dowty’s (1991) prototype account of semantic roles with feature accumulation as its central mechanism, or whether clines would vary depending on syntactic construction, as predicted from Himmelmann & Primus’ (2015) prominence account that uses feature weighting to describe role-related effects. In contrasting the applicability of these two accounts, we also investigated whether previous research findings from German replicate in Polish, thereby revealing cross-linguistic stability or variation. Our results show that the five verb classes yield different acceptability clines in all three Polish constructions and that the clines for Polish and German passives show cross-linguistic variation. This pattern cannot be explained by role prototypicality, so that the experiments provide further evidence for the prominence account of role-related effects in sentence interpretation. Moreover, our data suggest that experiencer verbs interact differently with the animacy of the subject referent, yielding different results for perception verbs (SEE), emotion verbs (HATE), and cognition verbs (KNOW).
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.
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.
Enabling appropriate access to linguistic research data, both for many researchers and for innovative research applications, is a challenging task. In this chapter, we describe how we address this challenge in the context of the German Reference Corpus DeReKo and the corpus analysis platform KorAP. The core of our approach, which is based on and tightly integrated into the CLARIN infrastructure, is to offer access at different levels. The graduated access levels make it possible to find a low-loss compromise between the possibilities opened up and the costs incurred by users and providers for each individual use case, so that, viewed over many applications, the ratio between effort and results achieved can be effectively optimized. We also report on experiences with the current state of this approach.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”1 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.