How to make a dictionary

Introduction:

Our lecturer Mr. Gibbon was absent today so the lecture was held by Mr. Trippel. We discussed many technical terms in a dictionary e.g. lemma and lexeme.

Learner's Diary:

Revision:

Microstructure:

- number of lexicon articles/entries/records

- order of DatCats (Data categories)

Mesostructure:

 - interrelation of lexicon entries

- relation to external information

Macrostructure:

- order of lexicon entries

- selection of sort key

- sorting order not trivial!

Lexicon Microstructure: DatCats in Lexicons

• words
• grammatical information

 - part of speech (POS)

- inflectional class (inflectional term in morphology assigned to affixes which encode grammatical properties such as number, tense and do not change the part of speech of the stems to which they are attached)

Source: (http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt/MTbook/HTML/node98.html)

- valence (In linguistics, valency or valence refers to the capacity of a verb to take a specific number and type of arguments (noun phrase positions). A monovalent verb (for example, sleep) cannot take a direct object (*he sleeps it). A trivalent verb has three arguments (e. g., give has the giver, the recipient, and the thing given).

The linguistical meaning of valence is derived from the definition of valency in chemistry.

Valency is closely related, though not identical, to transitivity. Transitivity refers to the number of core arguments of the verb that are not optional (giving intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and ditransitive verbs).

For example:

(1) Newlyn lies. (valency of lie = 1, intransitive-a verb that has a subject but does not have an object)

(2) John kicks the ball. (valency of kick = 2, transitive-a verb that requires both a subject and one ore more objects)

(3) John gives Mary a flower. (valency of give = 3, ditransitive-a verb which takes a subject and two objects called direct and indirect object)

The concept of valency is however undermined by the fact that non-optional or core meanings are hard to pin down. For example:

(4) Ask, and God will give.

(5) John kicks Mary the ball.

(6) The horse kicks.

Source: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valency_(linguistics)

• representaion of meaning

- semantics

- definition

• corpus reference :=usasge examples

Lexeme/Lemma - Lexeme refers to the set of all the forms that have the same meaning, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme.

Source: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_%28linguistics%29)

Problematic issues in lexicography

• ambiguity

- synonyms : two word forms, same meaning

- polysemy: one word form, two (or more) sloghtly different meanings

homonyms: one word form, meaning completely different

• search word

- languauges with inflectional prefixes

-  orthographic ambiguity

- picture lexicons?

• language change

- "new" words,

- new meaning

Affixes: Prefixes and Suffixes

There are differnt kinds of affixes, depending on where they are attached to a base.

 Prefixes are affixes that are attached to the beginning of a base, such as anti- in the noun antihero (anti-hero), dis- in the verb disarm (dis-arm), or un- in the adjective unfair (un-fair).

Suffixes are attached to the end of a base, such as -ness in sadness (sad-ness), -ing in weeping (weep-ing), or -est in deepest (deep-est).

Most affixes of English are prefixes and suffixes.

Source: Introduction to English Linguistics, UTB basics, A.Francke Verlag

Glossary:

All the words already defined above

Affixes (Prefixes, Suffixes)

Ambiguity

Concordance (in First order lexicon - corpus lexicon)

a concordance is a special kind of dictionary:

- each word in a text corpus is linked with its contexts of occurance in this corpus

- (Google is a special form of concordance)

Source: (http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/lili/personen/vraithel/teaching/ial/lexicography-intro-02.pdf)

Lemma

Lexeme

Valence, Valency

Verbs (intransitive, transitive, ditransitive)

Evaluation:

There are lots of definitions which have to learn by hard but I'm glad that at least I found good definitions for all of them.