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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.
This paper focuses on easily confused items (so-called paronyms) in German in terms of their general, technical or academic contextual uses. It outlines the semantic discrepancies between contextual usages of pairs such as Methode/Methodologie/Methodik and unehelich/nichtehelich/außerehelich depending on their linguistic registers and varieties. While previous studies lack empirical evidence and primarily operate with morphological criteria (cf. Lăzărescu 1999) the descriptions here derive from corpus-based examinations of general written and of technical discourse. It is shown that causes of lexical confusion arise from formal, phonetic resemblances or semantic similarities, regular co-occurrence, incorrect morphological analogies and political governance of language. Context, knowledge, associations and experience determine the choice of lexical terms. Speakers need to apply linguistic and extra-linguistic principles in order to create adequate contexts. With the help of paronym examples and corpus data, these will be elucidated in more detail.
Consistency of reference structures is an important issue in lexicography and dictionary research, especially with respect to information on sense-related items. In this paper, the systematic challenges of this area (e.g. ‘non-reversed reference’, bidirectional linking being realised as unidirectional structures) will be outlined, and the problems which can be caused by these challenges for both lexicographers and dictionary users will be discussed. The paper also discusses how text-technological Solutions may help to provide Support for the consistency of sense-related pairings during the process of compiling a dictionary.