Dictionaries and Society. Proceedings of the XX EURALEX International Congress, 12-16 July 2022, Mannheim, Germany
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In this paper, the author studies the role of the dictionary in the first language acquisition, highlighting its didactic value. Based on two Romanian lexicographical works of the 19th century, Lexiconul de la Buda (Buda, 1825) [the Lexicon of Buda] et Vocabularu romano-francesu (Bucarest, 1870) [the Romanian-French Vocabulary], the author analyses the normative information recorded in the articles in order to observe which level of language (i. e. phonetical, morphological, syntactical and lexical) is concerned. Such an approach allows to distinguish between the possible changings both at the level of the perception or at the grammatical, lexical and semantical description, i. e. the settlement of the word in the first language, and at a technical level, i. e. the making of article and of dictionary.
This paper presents the decisions behind the design of a maths dictionary for primary school children. We are aware that there has been a considerable problem regarding Mexican children’s performance in maths dragging on for a long time, and far from getting better, it is getting worse. One of the probable causes seems to be the lack of coordination between maths textbooks and teaching methods. Most maths textbooks used in primary schools include lots of activities and problem-solving techniques, but hardly any conceptual information in the form of definitions or explanations. Consequently, many children learn to do things, but have difficulty understanding mathematical concepts and applying them in different contexts. To help solve this problem, at least partially, the project of the dictionary was launched aiming at helping children to grasp and understand maths concepts learned during those first six years of their formal education. The dictionary is a corpus-based terminographical product whose macrostructure, microstructure, typography, and additional information were specifically designed to help children understand mathematical concepts.
This paper deals with the lexicographic treatment of the evidently plenty and pervasive scatological vocabulary, that is vocabulary concerning the process and products of bodily excretion (especially feces), in the synchronic Early New High German Dictionary (FWB = Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch) from a dictionary user’s view. Initially, different cultural concepts of scatology by Norbert Elias, Michail Bachtin and Mary Douglas among others and the term taboo are reflected. Subsequently, selected lexical items such as words with a primary scatological meaning (e. g. drek, kot, scheisse), concealing expressions (euphemisms, periphrases, metaphors, e. g. sitzen, seine notdurft tun, bauernveiel), and certain aspects within the polysemy of the verb scheissen are discussed, the latter on the one hand referring to a physical process with uncontrollable aspects and on the other hand denoting a deliberate action and functionalized as a fighting word during the reformation. Focussing on different positions of lexicographical information within the microstructure of the FWB, the surveillance shows that in a synchronic perspective Early New High German scatological vocabulary is a heterogeneous and complex phenomenon due to speaker, context and respectively semantic and pragmatic purposes
To effectively design online tools and develop sophisticated programs, for the teaching of Ancient Greek language, there is a clear need for lexical resources that provide semantic links with Modern Greek. This paper proposes a microstructure for an online Ancient Greek to Modern Greek thesaurus (AMGthes) that serves educational purposes. The terms of this bilingual thesaurus have been selected from reference Ancient Greek texts, taught and studied during lower and upper secondary education in Greece. The main objective here is to build a semantic map that helps students find relevant and semanti- cally related terms (synonyms and antonyms) in Ancient Greek, and then provide a rich set of suitable translations and definitions in Modern Greek. Designed to be an online resource, the thesaurus is being developed using web technologies, and thus will be available to every school and university student that pursues a degree in digital humanities.
The paper presents the results of empirical research conducted with students from the Faculty of Translation studies of Ventspils University of Applied Sciences (VUAS) in Latvia. The study investigates the habits and practices concerning the use of dictionaries on the part of translation students, as well as types of dictionaries used, frequency of use, etc. The study also presents an insight into the evaluation of the usefulness of dictionaries by Latvian students. The research describes the advantages and disadvantages of dictionaries used by the respondents, the importance of the preface and the explanation of the terms and abbreviations used in dictionaries. The research conducted, as well as the insights, results and recommendations presented, will be relevant for the lexicographic community, as it reflects the experience of one Latvian University to improve the teaching of dictionary use and lexicographic culture in this country and to complement dictionary use research with the Latvian experience.
Learning from students. On the design and usability of an e-dictionary of mathematical graph theory
(2022)
We created a prototype of an electronic dictionary for the mathematical domain of graph theory. We evaluate our prototype and compare its effectiveness in task-based tests with that of Wikipedia. Our dictionary is based on a corpus; the terms and their definitions were automatically extracted and annotated by experts (cf. Kruse/Heid 2020). The dictionary is bilingual, covering German and English; it gives equivalents, definitions and semantically related terms. For the implementation of the dictionary, we used LexO (Bellandi et al. 2017). The target group of the dictionary are students of mathematics who attend lectures in German and work with English resources. We carried out tests to understand which items the students search for when they work on graph-theoretical tasks. We ran the same test twice, with comparable student groups, either allowing Wikipedia as an information source or our dictionary. The dictionary seems to be especially helpful for students who already have a vague idea of a term because they can use the resource to check if their idea is right.
This paper describes the results of an empirical investigation carried out within the project Lessico Multilingue dei Beni Culturali (LBC), whose aim is to create a multilingual online dictionary of the lexicon of the Italian artistic heritage. The dictionary, whose lexicographic process has already started, is intended for linguists and specialist translators as well as for professionals in the tourism sector and students of Foreign Languages and Literatures. The investigation conducted through a questionnaire submitted to undergraduate students at the University of Milan and at the University of Florence has a double aim: to research the habits in the use of lexicographic tools by possible users of the dictionary (Italian Learners of German Language), and to identify preferences regarding macro-, medio- and microstructural features of the future LBC-dictionary to realize a user-friendly tool. After a brief introduction on the state of the art of the survey in the field of Dictionary Users Studies, the article describes the questionnaire and the results obtained from the pilot study. A summary and a discussion on the future developments of the project conclude the work.
This paper gives an insight into a cross-media publishing process on different stages: from a printed bilingual syntagmatic dictionary for GFL to an online learner’s dictionary of German collocations to a German learner’s dictionary portal. On the basis of an sql database specially developed for a corpus-guided dictionary of German collocations, the bilingual syntagmatic learner’s dictionary KolleX was published in 2014. The first part of the article describes this lexicographic process, focusing the most relevant aspects of the dictionary concept, e. g. dictionary type, subject matter, corpus guided data selection and microstructure. The second part introduces the first online version of KolleX from 2016 and the profound changes in the editing system – from a desktop version (2005) to a web-based editing system (2016) –, which resulted successively in a prototype of a German learner’s dictionary portal, called E-KolleX DaF (2018–). Focusing on the aspects of dynamism and integration of different resources from a learner’s perspective the paper shows the innovative features of this new online reference work. The contribution presents the solutions for the integration of new datatypes in the database of KolleX and the linking to different data in German monolingual dictionary platforms. The paper outlines the web design, functioning and technical improvements of E-KolleX DaF. The conclusions provide an outlook to the forthcoming challenges.
There is a growing interest in pedagogical lexicography, and more specifically in the study of dictionary users’ abilities and strategies (Prichard 2008; Gavriilidou 2010, 2011; Gavriilidou/Mavrommatidou/Markos 2020; Gavriilidou/Konstantinidou 2021; Chatjipapa et al. 2020). Τhe purpose of this presentation is to investigate dictionary use strategy and the effect of an explicit and integrated dictionary awareness intervention program on upper elementary pupils’ dictionary use strategies according to gender and type of school. A total of 150 students from mainstream and intercultural schools, aged 10–12 years old, participated in the study. Data were collected before and after the intervention through the Strategy Inventory for Dictionary Use (SIDU) (Gavriilidou 2013). The results showed a significant effect of the intervention program on Dictionary Use Strategies employed by the experimental group and support the claim that increased dictionary use can be the outcome of explicit strategy instruction. In addition, the effective application of the program suggests that a direct and clear presentation of DUS is likely to be more successful than an implicit presentation. The present study contributes to the discussion concerning both the ‘teachability’ of dictionary use strategies and skills and the effective forms of intervention programs raising dictionary use awareness and culture.
In this paper, we propose a controlled language for authoring technical documents and report the status of its development, while maintaining a specific focus on the Japanese automotive domain. To reduce writing variations, our controlled language not only defines approved and unapproved lexical elements but also prescribes their preferred location in a sentence. It consists of components of a) case frames, b) case elements, c) adverbial modifiers, d) sentence-ending functions, and e) connectives, which have been developed based on the thorough analyses of a large-scale text corpus of automobile repair manuals. We also present our prototype of a writing assistant tool that implements word substitution and reordering functions, incorporating the constructed controlled language.
The focus of this paper will be on lexical information systems and the framework guidelines for the definition of the curricula within the educational system of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/ Bozen (Italy). In Italy, the competences to be achieved at different school levels are published in the form of general guidelines. On this basis each school has to specify the general competency goals and to spell them out in a concrete curriculum. In this paper I will examine to what extent lexical information systems are represented in the framework guidelines within the German and the Italian educational system of the Autonomous Province, these being separate systems. In a second step, I will check the representations of the resources against the “Villa Vigoni Theses on Lexicography“. Finally, I will discuss the results and give an outlook for further research.
Thesauri have long been recognized as valuable structured resources aiding Information Retrieval systems. A thesaurus provides a precise and controlled vocabulary which serves to coordinate data indexing and retrieval. The paper presents a bilingual Greek and English specialized thesaurus that is being developed as the backbone of a platform aimed at enhancing and enriching the cultural experiences of visitors in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, Greece. The cultural component of the intended platform comprises textual data, images of artifacts and living entities (animals and plants in the area), as well as audio and video. The thesaurus covers the domains of Archaeology, Literature, Mythology, and Travel; therefore, it can be viewed as a set of inter-linked thesauri. Where applicable, terms and names in the database are also geo-referenced.
Lexicographers working with minority languages face many challenges. When the language in question is also a sign language, circumstances specific to the visual-spatial modality have to be taken into consideration as well. In this paper, we aim to show and discuss which challenges we encounter while compiling the Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Gebärdensprache (DW-DGS), the first corpus-based dictionary of German Sign Language (DGS). Some parallel the challenges minority language lexicographers of spoken languages encounter, e. g. few resources, no written tradition, and having to create one dictionary for all potential user groups, while others are specific to sign languages, e. g. representation of visual-spatial language and creating access structures for the dictionary.
The EMLex Dictionary of Lexicography (= EMLexDictoL) is a plurilingual subject field dictionary (in German, English, Afrikaans, Galician, Italian, Polish and Spanish) that contains the basic subject field terminology of lexicography and dictionary research, in which the dictionary article texts are presented in a sophisticated but comprehensible form. The articles are supplemented by a complex crossreferencing system and the current subject field literature of the respective national languages. Following the lemma position, the dictionary articles contain items regarding morphology, synonymy, the position of the definiens, additional explanations, the cross-reference position, the position for literature, the equivalent terms in the other six languages of the dictionary as well as the names of the authors.
This paper focusss on the first Slavonic-Romanian lexicons, compiled in the second half of the 17th century and their use(rs), proposing a method of investigating the manner in which lexical information available in the above corpus relates, if at all, to the vocabulary of texts from the same period. We chose to investigate their relation to an anonymous Old Testament translation made from Church Slavonic, also from the second half of the 17th century, which was supposed to be produced in the same geographical area, in the same Church Slavonic school or even by the same author as the lexicons. After applying a lemmatizer on both the Biblical text (Books of Genesis and Daniel) and the Romanian material from the lexicons, we analyse the results and double the statistical analysis with a series of case studies, focusing on some common lexemes that might be an indicator of the relatedness of the texts. Even if the analysis points out that the lexicons might not have been compiled as a tool for the translation of religious texts, it proves to be a useful method that reveals interesting data and provides the basis for more extensive approaches.
Given the relevance of interoperability, born-digital lexicographic resources as well as legacy retro-digitised dictionaries have been using structured formats to encode their data, following guidelines such as the Text Encoding Initiative or the newest TEI Lex-0. While this new standard is being defined in a stricter approach than the original TEI dictionary schema, its reuse of element names for several types of annotation as well as the highly detailed structure makes it difficult for lexicographers to efficiently edit resources and focus on the real content. In this paper, we present the approach designed within LeXmart to facilitate the editing of TEI Lex-0 encoded resources, guaranteeing consistency through all editing processes.
An ongoing academic and research program, the “Vocabula Grammatica” lexicon, implemented by the Centre for the Greek Language (Thessaloniki, Greece), aims at lemmatizing all the philological, grammatical, rhetorical, and metrical terms in the written texts of scholars (philologists and scholiasts) who curated the ancient Greek literature from the beginning of the Hellenistic period (4th/3rd c. BC) until the end of the Byzantine era (15th c. AD). In particular, it aspires to fill serious gaps (a) in the study of ancient Greek scholarship and (b) in the lexicography of the ancient Greek language and literature. By providing specific examples, we will highlight the typical and methodological features of the forthcoming dictionary.
Basnage’s revision (1701) of Furetiere’s Dictionnaire universel is profoundly different from Furetiere’s work in several regards. One of the most noticeable features of the dictionary lies in his in- creased use of usage labels. Although Furetiere already made use of usage labels (see Rey 1990), Basnage gives them a prominent role. As he states in the preface to his edition, a dictionary that aspires to the title of “universal” should teach how to speak in a polite way (“poliment”), right (“juste”) and making use of specific terminology for each art. He specifies, lemma by lemma, the diaphasic dimension by indicating the word’s register and context of use, the diastratic one by noting the differences in the use of the language within the social strata, the diachronic evolution by indicating both archaisms and neologisms, the diame- sic aspect by highlighting the gaps between oral and written language, the diatopic one by specifying either foreign borrowings or regionalisms.
After extracting the entries containing formulas such as “ce mot est...”, “ce terme est...” and similar ones, we compare the number of entries and the type of information provided by the two lexicographers1. In this paper, we will focus on Basnage’s innovative contribution. Furthermore, we will try to identify the lexi- cographer’s sources, i. e. we will try to establish on which grammars, collections of linguistic remarks or contemporary dictionaries Basnage relies his judgements.
Wortgeschichte digital (‘digital word history’) is a new historical dictionary of New High German, the most recent period of German reaching from approximately 1600 AD up to the present. By contrast to many historical dictionaries, Wortgeschichte digital has a narrated text – a “word history” – at the core of its entries. The motivation for choosing this format rather than traditional microstructures is
briefly outlined. Special emphasis it put on the way these word histories interact with other components of the dictionary, notably with the quotation section. As Wortgeschichte digital is an online only project, visualizations play an important role for the design of the dictionary. Two examples are presented: first, the “quotation navigator” which is relevant for the microstructure of the entries, and, second, a timeline (“Zeitstrahl”) which is part of the macrostructure as it gives access to the lemma inventory from a diachronic point of view.
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%.
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.
Almanca tuhfe / Deutsches Geschenk (1916) oder: Wie schreibt man deutsch mit arabischen Buchstaben?
(2022)
Versified dictionaries are bilingual/multilingual glossaries written in verse form to teach essential words in any foreign language. In Islamic culture, versified dictionaries were produced to teach the Arabic language to the young generations of Muslim communities not native in Arabic. In the course of time, many bilingual/multilingual versified dictionaries were written in different languages throughout the Islamic world. The focus of this study is on the Turkish-German versified dictionary titled Almanca Tuhfe / Deutsches Geschenk [German Gift], published by Dr. Sherefeddin Pasha in Istanbul in 1916. This dictionary is the only dictionary in verse ever written combining these two languages. Moreover the dictionary is one of the few texts containing German words written in Arabic letters (applying Ottoman spelling conventions). The study concentrates on the way German words are spelled and tries to find out, whether Sherefeddin Pasha applied something like fixed rules to write the German lexemes.
This article aims to show the influence of doctrines in the medical lexicographers choices, with the Capuron-Nysten-Littré lineage as a case study. Indeed, the Dictionnaire de médecine has been crossed by several schools of thought such as spiritualism and positivism. While lexical continuity may seem self-evident due to the nature of the work, thus reducing the reprint to a simple lexical increase, this process introduces neologisms and deletions, all can be considered in their effects by using text statistics and factorial analysis.
This paper examines a certain subset of the vocabulary of Modern Icelandic, namely those words that are labelled as ‘ancient’ in the Dictionary of Contemporary Icelandic (DCI). The words were analysed and grouped into two main categories, 1) Words with only ‘ancient’ sense(s) and 2) words that have modern as well as an obsolete older sense. Several subgroups were identified as well as some lexical characteristics. The words in question were then analysed in two other sources, the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP) and the Icelandic Gigaword Corpus (IGC). The results show that the words belong to several semantic domains that reflect the types of texts that have survived until modern times. Most of the words are robustly attested in Old Norse sources, although there are a few exceptions. Large majority of the words can be found in Modern Icelandic texts, but to a varying degree. Limits of the corpus material makes it difficult to analyse some of the words. The result indicate that the words labelled ‘ancient’ can be divided into three main groups: a) words that are poorly attested and should perhaps not be included in the lexicographic description of Modern Icelandic; b) words that are likely to occur sometimes in Modern Icelandic; c) words that function as other inherited Old Norse words and perhaps do not require a special label or should have an additional sense in the DCI.
This paper presents a multilingual dictionary project of discourse markers. During its first stage, consisting of collecting the list of headwords, we used a parallel corpus to automatically extract units from texts written in Spanish, Catalan, English, French and German. We also applied a method to create a taxonomy structure for automatically organising the markers in clusters. As a result, we obtain an extensive, corpus-driven list of headwords. We present a prototype of the microstructure of the dictionary in the form of a standard XML database and describe the procedure to automatically fill in most of its fields (e.g., the type of DM, the equivalents in other languages, etc.), before human intervention.
This paper describes a method for extracting collocation data from text corpora based on a formal definition of syntactic structures, which takes into account not only the POS-tagging level of annotation but also syntactic parsing (syntactic treebank model) and introduces the possibility of controlling the canonical form of extracted collocations based on statistical data on forms with different properties in the corpus. Specifically, we describe the results of extraction from the syntactically tagged Gigafida 2.1 corpus. Using the new method, 4,002,918 collocation candidates in 81 syntactic structures were extracted. We evaluate the extracted data sample in more detail, mainly in relation to properties that affect the extraction of canonical forms: definiteness in adjectival collocations, grammatical number in noun collocations, comparison in adjectival and adverbial collocations, and letter case (uppercase and lowercase) in canonical forms. The conclusion highlights the potential of the methodology used for the grammatical description of collocation and phrasal syntax and the possibilities for improving the model in the process of compilation of a digital dictionary database for Slovene.
This paper looks at whether, after two decades of corpus building for the Bantu languages, the time is ripe to begin using monitor corpora. As a proof-of-concept, the usefulness of a Lusoga monitor corpus for lexicographic purposes, in casu for the detection of neologisms, both in terms of new words and new meanings, is investigated and found useful.
Phonesthemes (Firth 1930) are sublexical constructions that have an effect on the lexico-grammatical continuum: they are recurring form-meaning associations that occur more often than by chance but not systematically (Abramova/Fernandez/Sangati 2013). Phonesthemes have been shown (Bergen 2004) to affect psycholinguistic language processing; they organise the mental lexicon. Phonesthemes appear over time to emerge as driven by language use as indexical rather than purely iconic constructions in the lexicon (Smith 2016; Bergen 2004; Flaksman 2020). Phonesthemes are acknowledged in construction morphology (Audring/Booij/Jackendoff 2017) as motivational schemas. Some phonesthemes also tend to have lexicographic acknowledgment, as shown by etymologist Liberman (2010), although this relevance and cohesion appears to be highly variable as we will show in this paper.
eThis paper first attempts a state-of-the art overview of what is known about women in the history of lexicography up to the early twentieth century. It then focusses more closely on the German and German-English lexicographical traditions to 1900, examining them from three different perspectives (following Russell’s 2018 study of women in English lexicography): women as users and dedicatees of dictionaries; women as contributors to and compilers of lexicographical works; and (in a very preliminary way) women and female sexuality as represented in German/English bilingual dictionaries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Russell (2018) was able to identify some 24 dictionaries invoking women as patrons, dedicatees or potential users before 1700, and some 150 works in English lexicography by women between 1500 and 1900, besides the contribution of hundreds of women as supporters and helpers, not least as unpaid readers and sub-editors for the Oxford English Dictionary. Equivalent research in other languages is lacking, but this paper presents some of the known examples of women as lexicographers. The evidence tends to support Russell’s finding for English, that women were more likely to find a place in lexicography outside the mainstream: sometimes in a more private sphere (like Hester Piozzi); often in bilingual lexicography (such as Margrethe Thiele, working on a Danish-French dictionary), including missionary and or colonizing activity (such as Cinie Louw in Africa, Daisy Bates in Australia); and in dialect description (Coronedi Berti in Italy, Luisa Lacal and María Moliner in Spain). Within the German-speaking context, women who participated in lexicographical work themselves are hard to identify before the late nineteenth century, though those few women who did have access to education were often engaged in language learning, including translation activity, and they were likely users of bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. Christian Ludwig’s (1706) English-German dictionary – the first of its kind – was dedicated to the Electoral Princess Sophia of Hanover. Elizabeth Weir may have been the first named female compiler of a German dictionary, with her bilingual New German Dictionary (1888). Rather better known are the cases of Agathe Lasch and Luise Pusch, who, as pioneering women in the field of German linguistics, ultimately led major lexicographical projects documenting German regional varieties in the first half of the twentieth century (Middle Low German and Hamburgish in the case of Lasch; the Hessisch Nassau dialect dictionary in the case of Berthold). In the light of existing research on gender and sexuality in the history of English lexicography (e. g. Iamartino 2010; Turton 2019), I conclude with a preliminary exploration how woman and sexuality have been represented in dictionaries of German and English, taking the words Hure and woman in bilingual German-English dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as my case studies.
In a multilingual and multicultural society, dictionaries play an important role to enhance interlingual communication. A diversity of languages and different levels of dictionary culture demand innovative lexicographic approaches to establish a dictionary landscape that responds to the needs of the various speech communities. Focusing on the South African situation this paper discusses some aspects of a few dictionaries that contributed to an improvement of the local dictionary landscape. Using the metaphors of bridges, dykes and sluice gates it is shown how lexicographers need a balanced approach in their lemma selection and treatment. Whilst a too strong prescriptive approach can be to the detriment of the macrostructural selection, a lack of regulatory criteria could easily lead to a data overload. The lexicographer should strive to give a reflection of the actual language use and enable the users to retrieve the information that can satisfy their specific communication and cognitive needs. Such lexicographic products will enrich and improve the dictionary landscape.
This paper presents the Lehnwortportal Deutsch, a new, freely accessible publication platform for resources on German lexical borrowings in other languages, to be launched in the second half of 2022. The system will host digital-native sources as well as existing, digitized paper dictionaries on loanwords, initially for some 15 recipient languages. All resources remain accessible as individual standalone dictionaries; in addition, data on words (etyma, loanwords etc.) together with their senses and relations to each other is represented as a cross-resource network in a graph database, with careful distinction between information present in the original sources and the curated portal network data resulting from matching and merging information on, e. g., lexical units appearing in multiple dictionaries. Special tooling is available for manually creating graphs from dictionary entries during digitization and for editing and augmenting the graph database. The user interface allows users to browse individual dictionaries, navigate through the underlying graph and ‘click together’ complex queries on borrowing constellations in the graph in an intuitive way. The web application will be available as open source.
The public as linguistic authority: Why users turn to internet forums to differentiate between words
(2022)
This paper addresses the question of why we face unsatisfactory German dictionary entries when looking up and comparing two similar lexical terms that are loan words, new words, (near) synonyms, or confusables. It explains how users are aware of existing reference works but still search or post on language forums, often after consulting a dictionary and experiencing a range of dictionary based problems. Firstly, these dictionary based difficulties will be scrutinised in more detail with respect to content, function, presentation, and the language of definitions. Entries documenting loan words and commonly confused pairs from different lexical reference resources serve as examples to show the short comings. Secondly, I will explain why learning about your target group involves studying discussion forums. Forums are a valuable source for detailed user studies, enabling the examination of different communicative needs, concrete linguistic questions, speakers’ intuitions, and people’s reactions to posts and comments. Thirdly, with the help of two examples I will describe how the study of chats and forums had a major impact on the development of a recently compiled German dictionary of confusables. Finally, that same problem solving approach is applied to the idea of a future dictionary of neologisms and their synonyms.
Dictionaries are often a reflection of their time; their respective (socio-)historical context influences how the meaning of certain lexical units is described. This also applies to descriptions of personal terms such as man or woman. Lexicographers have a special responsibility to comprehensively investigate current language use before describing it in the dictionary. Accordingly, contemporary academic dictionaries are usually corpus-based. However, it is important to acknowledge that language is always embedded in cultural contexts. Our case study investigates differences in the linguistic contexts of the use of man and woman, drawing from a range of language collections (in our case fiction books, popular magazines and newspapers). We explain how potential differences in corpus construction would therefore influence the “reality” depicted in the dictionary. In doing so, we address the far-reaching consequences that the choice of corpus-linguistic basis for an empirical dictionary has on semantic descriptions in dictionary entries.Furthermore, we situate the case study within the context of gender-linguistic issues and discuss how lexicographic teams can engage with how dictionaries might perpetuate traditional role concepts when describing language use.
Words and their usages are in many cases closely related to or embedded in social, cultural, technical and ideological contexts. This does not only apply to individual words and specific senses, but to many vocabulary zones as well. Moreover, the development of words is often related to aspects of socio-cultural evolution in a broad sense. In this paper I will have a look at traditional dictionaries and digital lexical systems focussing on the question how they deal with socio-cultural and discourse-related aspects of word usage. I will also propose a number of suggestions how future digital lexical systems might be enriched in this respect.
Tok Pisin is a pidgin/creole language spoken since the late 19th century in most of the area that nowadays constitutes Papua New Guinea where it emerged under German colonial rule. Unusual for a pidgin/creole, Tok Pisin is characterized by a extensive lexicographic history. The Tok Pisin Dictionary Collection at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, described in this article, includes about fifty dictionaries. The collection forms the basis for the sketch of the history of Tok Pisin lexicography as part of colonial history presented here. The basic thesis is that in the history of Tok Pisin, lexicographic strat egies, dictionary structures, and publication patterns reflect the interest (and disinterest) of various groups of colonial actors. Among these colonial actors, European scientists, Catholic missionaries, and the Australian and US militaries played important roles.
The aim of this paper is to show how lexicographical choices reflect ideological thinking, singled out by Eagleton (2007) into the strategies of rationalizing, legitimating, action orienting, unifying, naturalizing and universalizing. It will be carried out by examining two twenty first century editions of each of the five English monolingual learner’s dictionaries published by Cambridge, Collins, Longman, Macmillan, and Oxford. The synchronic and diachronic analyses of the dictionaries and their different editions at the macro structural level (the wordlists) and at the micro structural level (the definitional styles) will show how the reduction and change of data, derived from heterogeneous social and cultural contexts of language use, to abstract essential forms, involves decisions about the central and peripheral aspects of the lexicon and the meaning of words.
Applying terminological methods to lexicography helps lexicographers deal with the terms occurring in general language dictionaries, especially when it comes to writing the definitions of concepts belonging to special fields. In the context of the lexicographic work of the Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, an updated digital version of the last Academia das Ciências de Lisboa’ dictionary published in 2001, we have assumed that terminology – in its dual dimension, both linguistic and conceptual – and lexicography are complementary in their methodological approaches. Both disciplines deal with lexical items, which can be lexical units or terms. In this paper, we apply terminological methods to improve the treatment of terms in general language dictionaries and to write definitions as a form of achieving more precision and accuracy, and also to specify the domains to which they belong. Additionally, we highlight the consistent modelling of lexicographic components, namely the hierarchy of domain labels, as they are term identification markers instead of a flat list of domains. The need to create and make available structured, organised and interoperable lexicographic resources has led us to follow a path in which the application of standards and best practices of treating and representing specialised lexicographic content are fundamental requirements.
Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion im lexikographischen Prozess zu lexikalischen Informationssystemen
(2022)
Dictionaries of today and tomorrow are rather digital products than print dictionaries. From the user’s perspective, electronic dictionary applications and in particular „lexical information systems“, also referred to as „digital word information systems“ are coming to the fore alongside Google searches. Given the rapid developments in the area of the automated provision of lexicographic information, more precisely the automatic creation of online dictionaries, the new role of the lexicographer in the modern lexicographic process is questionable. This article addresses this issue.
While there was arguably a need for multi authored, multi volume, metalexicographic handbooks three decades ago – when the field of metalexicography was still ‘young’ – it is a bit puzzling to make sense of the current output flurry in this field. Is it simply a matter of ‘every publisher trying to fill its shelves’? or is there really a need in the scientific community for more and (continuously) updated reference works? And once available, are such works also consulted? Which parts? By whom? How often? For what purposes? In this paper we look at an ongoing, real world metalexicographic handbook project to answer these questions.
This paper focuses on the treatment of culture bound lexical items in a novel type of online learner’s dictionary model, the Phrase Based Active Dictionary (PAD). A PAD has a strong phraseological orientation: each meaning of a word is exclusively defined in a typical phraseological context. After introducing the relevant theory of realia in translation studies, we develop a broader notion of culture specific lexical items which is more apt to serve the purposes of learner’s lexicography and thus to satisfy the needs of a larger and often undefined target group. We discuss the treatment of such words and expressions in common English learner’s dictionaries and then present various excerpts from PAD entries in English, German, and Italian which display different strategies for coping with cultural contents in the lexicon. Our aim is to demonstrate that the phraseological approach at the core of the PAD model turns out to be extremely important to convey cultural knowledge in a suitable way for users to fully grasp cultural implications in language.
In foreign language teaching the use of dictionaries, especially bilingual, has always been related to the hypotheses concerning the relationship between the native language (L1) and second language acquisition method. If the bilingual dictionary was an obvious tool in the grammar-translation method, it was banned from the classroom in the direct, audiolingual and audiovisual methods. Also in the communicative method, foreign language learners are discouraged from using a dictionary. Its use should not obstruct the goals of communicatively oriented foreign language learning – a view still held by many foreign language teachers. Nevertheless, the reality has been different: Foreign language learners have always used dictionaries, even if they no longer possess a print dictionary and mainly use online resources and applications. Dictionaries and online resources will continue to play an important role in the future. In the Council of Europe’s language policy, with its emphasis on multilingualism and lifelong learning, the adequate use of reference tools as a strategic skill is highlighted. In several European countries, educational guidelines refer to the use of dictionaries in the context of media literacy, both in mother tongue and foreign language teaching. Not only is their adequate use important, but so too is the comparison, assessment and evaluation of the information presented, in order to develop Language Awareness and Language Learning Awareness. This is good news. However, does this mean that dictionaries are actually used in class? What role do dictionaries play in foreign language teaching in schools and universities? Are foreign language learners in the digital era really competent users? And how competent are their teachers? Are they familiar with the current (online) dictionary landscape? Can they support their students? After a more in-depth study of the status quo of dictionary use by foreign language learners and teachers and the gap between their needs and the reality, this contribution discusses the challenges facing lexicographers and meta-lexicographers and what educational policy measures are necessary to make their efforts worthwhile in turning foreign language learners – and their teachers – into competent users in a multilingual and digital world.
Wortgeschichte digital (Digital Word History) is an emerging historical dictionary of the German language that focuses on describing semantic shifts from about 1600 through today. This article provides deeper insight into the dictionary’s “cross-reference clusters,” one of its software tools that performs visualization of its reference network. Hence, the clusters are a part of the project’s macrostructure. They serve as both a means for users to find entries of interest and a tool to elucidate relations among dictionary entries. Rather than delve into technical aspects, this article focuses on the applied logics of the software and discusses the approach in light of the dictionary’s microstructure. The article concludes with some considerations about the clusters’ advantages and limitations.
Looking up for an unknown word is the most frequent use of a dictionary. For languages both agglutinative and inflectional, such as Georgian, this can be quite challenging because an inflected form can be very far from the lemmas used by the target dictionary. In addition, there is no consensus among Georgian lexicographers on which lemmas represent a verb in dictionaries. It further complicates dictionaries access. Kartu-Verbs is a base of inflected forms of Georgian verbs accessible by a logical information system. It currently contains more than 5 million inflected forms related to more than 16,000 verbs for 11 tenses; each form can have 11 properties; there are more than 80 million links in the base. This demonstration shows how, from any inflected form, we can find the relevant lemma to access any dictionary. Kartu-Verbs can thus be used as a front-end to any Georgian dictionary.
This paper reports on the restructuring of a bilingual (Greek Sign Language, GSL – Modern Greek) lexicographic database with the use of the WordNet semantic and lexical database. The relevant research was carried out by the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP) / Athena R.C. team within the framework of the European project Easier. The project will produce a framework for intelligent machine translation to bring down language barriers among several spoken/written and sign languages. This paper describes the experience of the ILSP team to contribute to a multilingual repository of signs and their corresponding translations and to organize and enhance a bilingual dictionary (GSL – Modern Greek) as a result of this mapping; this will be the main focus of this paper. The methodology followed relies on the use of WordNet and, more specifically, the Open Multilingual WordNet (OMW) tool to map content in GSL to WordNet synsets.
The paper presents the process of developing the AirFrame database, a specialized lexical resource in which aviation terminology is defined in the form of semantic frames, following the methodology of the Berkeley FrameNet (FN). First, the structure of the database is presented, and then the methodology applied in developing and populating the database is described. The link between specialized aviation frames and general language semantic frames, of which frames defining entities, processes, attributes and events are particularly relevant, is discussed on the example of the semantic frame of Flight and its related frames. The paper ends with discussing possibilities of using AirFrame as a model for further developing resources in which general and specialized knowledge are linked.
Many European languages have undergone considerable changes in orthography over the last 150 years. This hampers the application of modern computer-based analysers to older text, and hence computer-based annotation and studies of text collections spanning a long period. As a step towards a functional analyser for Norwegian texts (Nynorsk standard) from the 19th century, funding was granted in 2020 for creating a full form generator for all inflected forms of headwords found in Ivar Aasen’s dictionary published in 1873 (Aasen 1873) and his grammar from 1864 (Aasen 1864). Creating this word bank led to new insight in Aasen (1873), its structure, internal organisation, and ambition level as well as its link to Aasen (1864). As a test, the full form list generated from this new word bank was used to analyse the word inventory of texts by Aa. O. Vinje, written in the period 1850–1870. The Vinje texts were also analysed using a full form list of modern standard Norwegian, to study the differences in applicability and see how Vinje’s language relates to the written standard of modern Norwegian.
In this paper, we present LexMeta, a metadata model for the description of human-readable and computational lexical resources in catalogues. Our initial motivation is the extension of the LexBib knowledge graph with the addition of metadata for dictionaries, making it a catalogue of and about lexicographical works. The scope of the proposed model, however, is broader, aiming at the exchange of metadata with catalogues of Language Resources and Technologies and addressing a wider community of researchers besides lexicographers. For the definition of the LexMeta core classes and properties, we deploy widely used RDF vocabularies, mainly Meta-Share, a metadata model for Language Resources and Technologies, and FRBR, a model for bibliographic records.
In the course of the last years, digital lexicography has opened up a variety of avenues fostering the conceptualisation, application and use of constructicons, a type of lexicographical reference work which has revealed itself highly promising in terms of connectivity and flexibility, at the same time, however, also challenging as to its technical implementation. The present paper takes up the ambitious aim to propose some reflections as well as a first draft for a possible model of a multilingual ‘periphrasticon’ as a subtype of a bigger constructicon focusing on a specific typology-related structural feature, i. e. periphrasticity. Taking periphrastic verbal constructions in French, Italian and Spanish as a starting point, it tries to sketch out a unified constructional network including not only equivalent (or corresponding) constructions within Romance, but also establishing (formal and functional) cross-linguistic connections to German and English. Comprising the major languages available to most language learners in (at least) German-speaking environments, the model is also supposed to pave the way for multilingual constructicography which, on the one hand, is able to account for intra- and cross-linguistic relations and, on the other hand, can also prove a valuable tool for language learning and use.
We describe the status of work intending at including sign language lexical data within the OntoLex-Lemon framework. Our general goal is to provide for a multimodal extension to this framework, which was originally conceived for covering only the written and phonetic representation of lexical data. Our aim is to achieve in the longer term the same type of semantic interoperability between sign language lexical data as this is achieved for their spoken or written counterparts. We want also to achieve this goal across modalities: between sign language lexical data and spoken/written lexical data.
The long road to a historical dictionary of Lower Sorbian. Towards a lexical information system
(2022)
The Sorbian Institute has been taking preparatory steps for a historical-documentary vocabulary information system for Lower Sorbian for about 10 years. To this end, the entire extant written material (16th–21st centuries) of this strongly endangered European minority language is to be systematically evaluated. An attempt made a few years ago to organise and finance the project as a long-term scientific project was not successful in the end. Therefore, it can only be advanced step by step and via some detours. The article informs about the interim status of the project, especially with respect to the creation of a reliable database.
The paper presents the results of a survey on lexicographic practices and lexicographers’ needs across Europe that was conducted in the context of the Horizon 2020 project European Lexicographic Infrastructure (ELEXIS) among the observer institutions of the project. The survey is a revised and upgraded version of the survey which was originally conducted among ELEXIS lexicographic partner institutions in 2018 (Kallas et al. 2019a). The main goal of this new survey was to complement the data from the ELEXIS lexicographic partner institutions in order to get a more complete picture of lexicographic practices both for born-digital and retro-digitised resources in Europe. The results offer a detailed insight into many aspects of the lexicographic process at European institutions, such as funding, training, staff, lexicographic expertise, software and tools. In addition, the survey reflects on current trends in lexicography and reveals what institutions see as the most important emerging trends that will affect lexicography in the short-term and long-term future. Overall, the results provide valuable input informing the development of tools, resources, guidelines and training materials within ELEXIS.
This paper aims at verifying if the most important online Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries include some of the neologisms identified in texts published in the 1990s to 2000s, formed with the elements ciber-, e-, bio-, eco- and narco, which we refer to as fractomorphemes / fracto-morphèmes. Three online dictionaries were analyzed (Aulete, Houaiss and Michaelis), as well as Vocabulário Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa (VOLP). We were able to conclude that all three dictionaries and VOLP include neologisms with these elements; Michaelis and VOLP do not include separate entries for bound morphemes, whereas Houaiss includes entries for all of them and Aulete includes entries for bio-, eco- and narco-. Aulete also describes the neological meaning of eco- and narco-, whereas Houaiss does not.
Word Families in Diachrony. An epoch-spanning structure for the word families of older German
(2022)
The ‘Word Families in Diachrony’ project (WoDia), for which a funding application to the DFG is in preparation, aims to provide a database driven online research environment that will enable processes of change in the entire historical vocabulary of German to be investigated by focusing on the changes in word families and the individual means of word formation. WoDia will embed the vocabularies of Old High German (OHG), Middle High German (MHG), Old Saxon (OS), and Middle Low German (MLG) in a database, resulting in a word-family structure for High and Low German from the beginnings up to the 15th century (for High German) and up to the 17th century (for Low German). The basis of the vocabulary is provided by reference dictionaries of the four historical varieties, whereas the word families’ historical structure is based on the word-family dictionary of OHG by Jochen Splett (1992). Each lemma in the database will be assigned, where appropriate, to a word family. The individual word-formation elements and the word-formation hierarchy will be mapped in a structural formula. The etymologically corresponding lemmas and word families of the different periods/varieties of older German will be linked so that an analysis across the varieties will also be possible. The annotations of word families in the database (e. g., relating to word structure) will be supplemented by linking their lemmas to the online dictionaries and to the reference corpora of Old German (OS and OHG), MHG, and MLG.
The digital environment represents a qualitatively new level of service for research work with linguistic information presented in dictionary form. And first of all, this applies to index systems. By dictionary indexing we mean a set of formalized rules and procedures, on the basis of which it is possible to obtain information about certain linguistic facts recorded in the dictionary. These rules are implemented in the form of user interfaces. However, one should take into account the fact that the effectiveness of automatic construction of index schemes for a digital dictionary is possible only in a sufficiently formalized environment. This article describes the method and technology of indexing the Etymological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language (EDUL). For the language indexing of the dictionary, a special computer instrumental system (VLL – virtual lexicographic laboratory) was developed, and adapted to the structure of the EDUL and focused on the creation of indexes in automatic mode. The digital implementation of the EDUL made it possible to access the entire corpus of the dictionary text regardless of the time of publication of the corresponding volume and opened up opportunities for various digital interpretations of etymological information.
The paper describes an online German-Russian database for phraseological constructions (PhC), or syntactic idioms. It is a linguistic phenomenon representing a stable multi-word form that usually contains some auxiliary words (“anchors”) and partially opens up empty spaces (“slots”) which are filled directly in spoken language by various lexemes or combinations of lexemes (“fillers”, or “slot fillers”). Linguists from several German institutions are currently working on the database. The PhCs selected for the database have to meet special criteria. The database is a manual that combines scientific descriptions, a thesaurus and a bilingual dictionary. The database is designed as an active aid for text production in the respective foreign language; it is also a manual for language researchers and for translators. Apart from that, it can serve as a basis for extensions for other language pairs. The aim of the project is to record and to describe 300 PhC before the database is published. Our objective is to enable foreign language learners to use the syntactic idioms correctly in the texts they produce rather than create a big-sized database. The paper describes some issues related to the creation of the database, namely objectives and target groups, material and methods, microstructure of the database article and some others.
This paper presents the methodology of a research project on the use of specialised German dictionaries. A mixed-methods research approach will help to answer the following main questions, concerning the lexicographic presentation of the data on the one hand and the data collection on the other hand: How do different systems of data organization and presentation affect the likelihood that users will correctly find and select the data they look up? And does the probability of success increase if users are familiar with the system? Which advantages and disadvantages do lexicographers and specialised languages experts see in using quantitative methods to extract terms? And are these methods accepted and considered reliable by the user community?
The purpose of this paper is to present the lexicographic protocol and to report on the progress of compilation of Mikaela_Lex, which is a Greek, free online monolingual school dictionary for upper elementary students with visual impairments including 4,000 lemmata. The dictionary is equipped with new digital tools, such as the “Braille-system keyboard, a “speech-to-text” tool, a “text-to-speech” tool and also a qwerty accessibility for visually non-impaired students.
This paper describes a method for automatic identification of sentences in the Gigafida corpus containing multi-word expressions (MWEs) from the list of 5,242 phraseological units, which was developed on the basis of several existing open-access lexical resources for Slovene. The method is based on a definition of MWEs, which includes information on two levels of corpus annotation: syntax (dependency parsing) and morphology (POS tagging), together with some additional statistical parameters. The resulting lexicon contains 12,358 sentences containing MWEs extracted from the corpus. The extracted sentences were analysed from the lexicographic point of view with the aim of establishing canonical forms of MWEs and semantic relations between them in terms of variation, synonymy, and antonymy.
This paper consists of a short analysis of the sources and the treatment of the legal lexicon in the first dictionary published by the Spanish Royal Academy (1726–1739), followed by a longer commentary on the representation and the treatment of the concept of judge, in which the reflection of the extralinguistic factors in the definitions stands in focus. The results highlight the relevance of the legal context of that era for the treatment of the lexicon related to the legal domain, but they also demonstrate the pattern in which the lexicographic data displays peculiarities of legal matters.
In the etymological information for a word in a dictionary, the first question to be answered is whether the word is a borrowing or the result of word formation. Here, we consider this question for internationalisms ending in -ation in German and in -ácia in Slovak. In German, -ation is a suffix that attaches to verbs in -ieren. For these verbs, it is in competition with -ung. In Slovak, -ácia is a suffix that attaches to bases of Latin or Greek origin. The corresponding verbs are often backformations. Most Slovak verbs also have a nominalization in -nie. In order to investigate to what extent the nouns in -ation or -ácia are borrowings or derived from the corresponding verbs in German and Slovak, we took a random sample of English nouns in -ation for which OED gives a corresponding verb. For this sample, we checked whether the cognate noun in -ation or -ácia is attested in standard dictionaries and in corpora. Then we did the same for the corresponding verbs and the nouns in -ung or -nie. Finally, we checked the frequency of these words in DeReKo for German and SNK for Slovak. On this basis, we found evidence that -ation in German has a slightly different status to -ácia in Slovak. This status affects the relationship to the corresponding verbs and to the nouns in -ung or -nie. Such generalizations are important as background information for specifying etymological information in dictionaries, especially for languages where first attestations dates are not readily available.
Inspired by GWLN 3, we take a look at the new words, meanings, and expressions that have been created during or promoted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic provides a rare opportunity to follow the rise, spread, and integration of words and expressions in a language that may serve as an illustration of how linguistic innovation in general works. Relevant words were selected from various lists, notably monthly and annual lists of prominent words attested in the corpus of The Danish Dictionary. Analysis of these lists gives an insight into the number of words that stand out month by month and what kinds of words are involved, both in terms of morphological type and of semantic category, with special attention given to neologisms. Finally, we discuss the criteria for selecting which words to include in the dictionary. With this study, Danish is added to the list of languages covered in the GWLN series on
COVID-19 neologisms.
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.
One central goal of the project ‘Zentrum für digitale Lexikographie der deutschen Sprache’ (Center for digital lexicography for the German Language, www.zdl.org) is to provide a corpus-based lexicographic component of common German multi-word expressions (MWE), including idioms, for DWDS (www.dwds.de), a general language dictionary of contemporary German. As a central challenge of this task, we have identified an adequate lexicographic representation of such common properties of MWE as variation and modification. To document the variation, we have developed a special entry-clustering model, which we call hub-node entry. This model comprises a core hub entry headed by a short nuclear form of the MWE and several node entries, which represent the most common variants in their full lexical forms.
This paper discusses an investigation of how senses are ordered across eight dictionaries. A dataset of 75 words was used for this purpose, and two senses were examined for each word. The words are divided into three groups of 25 words each according to the relationship between the senses: Homonymy, Metaphor, and Systematic Polysemy. The primary finding is that WordNet differs from the other dictionaries in terms of Metaphor. The order of the senses was more often figurative/literal, and it had the highest percentage of figurative senses that were not found. We discuss leveraging another dictionary, COBUILD, to re-order the senses according to frequency.
When comparing different tools in the field of natural language processing (NLP), the quality of their results usually has first priority. This is also true for tokenization. In the context of large and diverse corpora for linguistic research purposes, however, other criteria also play a role – not least sufficient speed to process the data in an acceptable amount of time. In this paper we evaluate several state of the art tokenization tools for German – including our own – with regard to theses criteria. We conclude that while not all tools are applicable in this setting, no compromises regarding quality need to be made.
This paper presents the project “The first Romanian bilingual dictionaries (17th century). Digitally annotated and aligned corpus” (eRomLex) which deals with the editing of the first bilingual Romanian dictionaries. The aim of the project is to compile an electronic corpus comprising six Slavonic-Romanian lexicons dating from the 17th century, based on their relatedness and the fact that they follow a common model in order to highlight the characteristics of this lexicographical network (the affiliations between the lexicons, the way they relate to the source, the innovations towards it, their potential uses) and to facilitate the access to their content. A digital edition allows exhaustive data extraction and comparison and link with other digitized resources for old Romanian or Church Slavonic, including dictionaries. After presenting the corpus, we point to the necessary stages in achieving this project, the techniques used to access the material and the challenges and obstacles we encountered along the way. We describe how the corpus was created, stored, indexed and can be searched over; we will also present and discuss some statistical analyses highlighting relations between the Romanian lexicons and their Slavonic-Ruthenian source.
In this paper we present Trendi, a monitor corpus of written Slovene, which has been compiled recently as part of the SLED (Monitor corpus and related resources) project. The methodology and the contents of the corpus are presented, as well as the findings of the survey that aimed to identify the needs of potential users related to topical language use. The Trendi corpus currently contains news articles and other web content from 110 different sources, with the texts being collected and linguistically annotated on a daily basis. The corpus complements Gigafida 2.0, a 1.13-billion-word reference corpus of standard written Slovene. Also discussed are the ways in which the corpus will be integrated into various lexicographic projects, helping not only in the identification of neologisms but also in monitoring changes in already identified language phenomena.
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.
Vergleichbare Korpora für multilinguale kontrastive Studien. Herausforderungen und Desiderata
(2022)
This contribution aims to show the necessity of working in the development of multilingual corpora and appropriate tools for multilingual contrastive studies. We take the corpus of the lexicographical project COMBIDIGILEX as example to show, how difficultit is to build a suitable data basis to study and compare linguistic phenomena in German, Spanish and Portuguese. Despite the availability of big reference corpora for the three languages (at least for written language), it is not able to obtain a comparable data basis from, because the mentioned corpora are created according to different requirements and they are also powered by disparate information systems and analyse tools. To break the status quo, we plead for increasing research infrastructures by means of compatible language technology and sharing data.
Recent years have seen a growing interest in linguistic phenomena that challenge the received division of labour between lexicon and grammar, and hence often fall through the cracks of traditional dictionaries and grammars. Such phenomena call for novel, pattern based types of linguistic reference works (see various papers in Herbst 2019). The present paper introduces one such resource: MAP (“Musterbank argumentmarkierender Präpositionen”), a web based corpus linguistic patternbank of prepositional argument structure constructions in German. The paper gives an overview of the design and functionality of the MAP prototype currently developed at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim. We give a brief account of the data and our analytic workflow, illustrate the descriptions that make up the resource and sketch available options for querying it for specific lexical, semantic and structural properties of the data.
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.