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Dear Ron,<br>
<br>
Very interesting observations! I hadn’t looked at it that way yet. You
probably already know, but in case you don't, John Sinclair has very
interesting considerations on collocations, multi-word items and the like
in his ‘Corpus, Concordance, Collocation’. Not a very recent publication,
but still very inspiring. I don't have the book here, but I think it's
Chapter 8. In the dictionary I have been working on intermittently for
the last 14 years (Portuguese-Spanish; one way; only translated examples)
I reached the same conclusion to the point that headwords were actually
reduced to the number of 5000. The fact that it’s also an electronic
dictionary allows me not to be obliged to think about how I would go
about if I had to classify the multi-word items in a paper dictionary.
(Here also Sinclair’s brief remarks are seminal.) The
never-sufficiently-praised (as Don Quixote would say) Oxford
English-Spanish Dictionary was a milestone in that respect. (There could
be an earlier one…) But in this dictionary many of the words in one
language are simply not translated but ‘used’ in a multi-word item. Which
is then translated. (heedless: heedless OF sth: heedless of the danger,
the regiment … haciendo caso omiso del peligro, el regimiento …). Maybe
multi-word items are predominant because that’s where common words
acquire their meaning.<br><br>
As for Patrick Hanks’ remarks on corpus, I totally agree, but I have a
few observations. Everything depends on what you aim at with the examples
of your dictionary (since this is what the corpus is used for). I was a
critical observer at Cobuild 2 for a year. I started accepting what they
called their ‘orthodoxy’, of accepting all corpus material as evidence. I
ended up being convinced that producing evidence on language is one
thing, and writing a dictionary a different one. It’s difficult to make a
good product if you’re at the same time trying to make theoretical point.
<br>
I do think that, even allowing for some bias due to the almost
exclusively written input of most corpora, that corpora reflect the real
usage of words, on the condition that you know how to evaluate the data,
i.e., introspectively. A great number of assertions, which I thought were
beyond attack, crumbled when I started revising my own Portuguese-Spanish
dictionary, and when I started learning Japanese a few years ago. In
other words, when I started to confront my theoretical convictions with
my practice as a language teacher and learner. If you want to teach a
learner a word using not-meddled-with corpus examples, you need a lot of
them. Say, twenty, depending on the case. And when you deal with a
language pair of very different families -- Indo-european/Japanese – you
must forget about using ‘natural (corpus) examples’ and resort to
‘grammatical examples’ excluding exactly multi-word items.<br>
The main question is ‘what do I want my dictionary to help with?’ If the
answer is ‘describe the language’, it seems beyond any doubt that corpora
can help, or even ‘are’ the dictionary. If the answer is ‘teach a
language’, which is what learner’s dictionaries presumably aim at, then
the answer is not so clear. Monolingual dictionaries were invented,
<i>très tardivement</i>, with a mixture of political and scientific
intentions. They are the treasure room of knowledge on language. The aims
of dictionaries with a concrete aim, foreign language dictionaries, are
wholly different and have to take into account the wishes of the
audience, also the unconscious ones. A vast topic.<br><br>
<br>
Philippe Humblé <br>
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brasil)<br><br>
<br>
At 21:18 3/02/2004, you wrote:<br><br>
<tt>One discovery (that has implications for us) was when I was trying to
think<br>
of English example words for each domain in my list of semantic domains.
I<br>
found that a high percentage were multi-word lexical items. In some
domains<br>
I quickly ran out of single word entries, but could think of lots
of<br>
phrases. This phenomenon was repeated in a couple of workshops for
Bantu<br>
languages. The speakers were generating about 25% phrases.<br><br>
I presume (without a lot of data to back me up) that our dictionaries
should<br>
have a goodly percentage of multi-word entries. A quick scan of
Longman's<br>
Language Activator shows about 50% multi-word entries. Can anyone
give<br>
figures for their dictionaries? Has anyone worked at
identifying/generating<br>
multi-word lexical items in such a way that they can estimate the
percentage<br>
of idioms vs single words in a language? I realize that there is a
gradation<br>
from collocation to idiom, so that it may be difficult to draw a
line.<br><br>
Ron Moe<br>
SIL, Uganda<br><br>
-----Original Message-----<br>
From: List Facilitator
[<a href="mailto:lexicography2004@yahoo.com">mailto:lexicography2004@yahoo.com</a>]<br>
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 10:11 PM<br>
To: lexicographylist@yahoogroups.com<br>
Subject: [Lexicog] Interesting lexical discoveries<br><br>
<br>
What are one or two of the most interesting discoveries that stand out
for<br>
you (plural) in any of the lexical research that you have done?<br><br>
<br><br>
Wayne Leman<br>
Cheyenne dictionary project<br><br>
<br>
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