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<DIV><SPAN class=049060221-18032004><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2>I'm a
big fan of the corpus method, not because I use it (other than to study Koine
Greek), but because I see so many valuable benefits from using it. The DDP
resulted from my efforts to develop materials to facilitate the production of
dictionaries for minority languages. When I first started working with a speaker
of Lugungu to develop materials in Lugungu, I asked him to collect everything
written in the language. He replied, "There is nothing written in Lugungu." You
can't use the corpus method without a corpus. So one of the first things we did
was to hold a story writing contest. We collected hundreds of pages of text, but
the difficulties of standardizing the orthography, typing and editing, and
developing a parser, made the process of forming a text corpus very time
consuming. We can collect more words (in their citation form) in less time using
DDP, than we could have by developing a sufficiently large text corpus. That is
not to say that we should not develop a text corpus. I am frequently surprised
by the definitions in English corpus based dictionaries because they do not
agree with my native speaker intuition. But upon reflection and looking at their
example sentences, I invariably realize they are right. So I would recommend
developing a text corpus for every language that doesn't have one. Unfortunately
with the extremely limited resources available to most minority languages, it
will take a long time to develop a large enough corpus to supply enough examples
to reveal patterns of usage for all but the most common words. In the meantime
I'm trying to think how we can produce a reasonably large and well developed
dictionary without a corpus. I'm especially interested in ways to help speakers
of a language to do most of the work with minimal training. I believe the only
way is to develop an easy to use, step by step procedure with all the materials,
explanations, and tools necessary to do each step.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=049060221-18032004><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=049060221-18032004><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2>You
ask how we could discover dog metaphors. The method would involve thinking about
each aspect of a dog's anatomy and behavior, and then thinking about the words
and phrases we use to talk about them. Then think about metaphorical extensions
to human behavior (and possibly other areas of life). The mind forms links
between words and phrases. DDP utilizes these links to jump from word to word
within a domain. Let your mind roam. You will be amazed at how fast it can come
up with all sorts of words and phrases that we use to talk about a topic. The
mind will sometimes jump from one word to another in a paradigmatic relationship
(bark, woof, ruff, howl, yowl, yip, yap). Then it will start on syntagmatic
relationships (dogs have fleas, dogs and cats). Then the mind will
start rearranging or expanding words into phrases (dogs have fleas >
flea bitten, dogs and cats > raining cats and dogs). Sometimes the mind
strays into another domain. When I was thinking of dog metaphors, my mind went
from 'claw' to 'claw your way to the top', which is actually a cat metaphor. The
mind is amazing. It takes a little training and practice to get your mind to do
a lot of free association and creative word generation. Not everyone is as good
at it as other people. I'm actually not as good as some other people in spite of
all my practice.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=049060221-18032004><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=049060221-18032004><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2>Every
domain is unique. It takes some work for me to fill out a domain and
subcategorize all the words in it. Then I have to analyze the semantics. I look
through the literature for help. Lakoff describes the metaphor 'anger is heat
and pressure'. That helped me identify some of the expressions we use in English
to talk about anger. The notion of extended metaphors that apply to a domain has
been very helpful. So has the literature on lexical relations. Fillmore's work
on case relations has influenced me for a long time, which is why I drooled over
the FrameNet web site (sorry about the dog metaphor). All these insights help me
to more rapidly think of words and understand what they mean. One reason why I
spend as much time on this discussion list as I do is because I'm learning so
much from all of you. Thanks.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=049060221-18032004><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=049060221-18032004><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2>Ron
Moe</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=049060221-18032004><FONT face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2>SIL,
Uganda</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV class=OutlookMessageHeader dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Tahoma
size=2>-----Original Message-----<BR><B>From:</B> John Roberts
[mailto:dr_john_roberts@sil.org]<BR><B>Sent:</B> Thursday, March 18, 2004 1:01
PM<BR><B>To:</B> lexicographylist@yahoogroups.com<BR><B>Subject:</B> [Lexicog]
The DDP and corpora<BR><BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Ron,<BR><BR>Your DDP seems to be excellent for
"discovering" a large proportion of the vocabulary of a language in a short
period of time. It is also excellent in that it involves native speakers
directly in the discovery process. Your W&D article says, "It would take a
text corpus of a million of words to equal the results in terms of numbers,
and many words are so rare they may not show up in a text corpus." So, you can
produce a large amount of vocabulary items without a corpus. B</FONT><FONT
face=Arial size=2>ut don't you still need a large corpus to generate
collocational and combinatory fields and discover all the senses and uses of
words, for example? Even a dictionary like the Longman Language
Activator, which is organised around semantic domains, is corpus-based - and
they indicate that sometimes the meaning of a word from an analysis of the
corpus is different to what native speakers commonly assume a word means.
Other corpus based dictionaries, such as NODE, also give some examples of
this. I am also not clear how you would discover all the 'dog' metaphors in
English you mentioned which do not include 'dog' in the expression. For
example, an expression like "Go at it tooth and nail." doesn't immediately
spring to my mind as a dog metaphor. What methodology do you use to work this
out?</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>John Roberts</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV><BR>
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