relative roots

[Monica Macaulay]

Posoh fellow dictionary makers...

We're currently going through the archaic English words that  
Bloomfield used in his Menominee lexicon and trying to come up with  
more colloquial defintions.  While thinking about 'thus' and what we  
could replace it with, I realized that there's an intersecting  
problem, which is due to the fact that all of the verbs that have  
'thus' in their definition - not surprisingly - have the relative  
root aeN- in them.  We were going to change 'thus' to 'in that  
manner' but it occurs to me that that might be interpreted as a  
complete definition.  So, take the verb that Bloomfield translates as  
'it glows thus' - we could change it to 'it glows in that manner' but  
a dictionary user might not realize that it's a verb that needs a  
manner adverb - and that using it without one would actually be  
ungrammatical to a native speaker.  Conversely they might not realize  
how to translate it in a sentence; i.e. if you used this verb with  
'brightly' the meaning would be 'it glows brightly' - NOT 'it glows  
brightly in that manner' or something like that.  Have any of you  
wrestled with this one and come up with a good solution?

A related issue of course is how much info one puts into a dictionary  
without crossing over the line into being a grammar.  I think we  
probably are all making somewhat different decisions about where to  
draw that line, and I haven't decided yet where it would be drawn in  
a case like this.

- Monica


Monica Macaulay
Department of Linguistics
University of Wisconsin
1168 Van Hise Hall; 1220 Linden Drive
Madison, WI  53706
phone (608) 262-2292; fax (608) 265-3193
http://ling.wisc.edu/~macaulay/monica.html