Dictionary POS

[Jonathan Lighter]

I *don't* think it's a bad idea. In fact, it's a great idea. But the average user - make that *buyer* - of a general-purpose dictionary wants nouns and verbs. That's what they learned in school.and are still learning in school. And our great dictionary publishers are interested in the bottom line every bit as much as our great slasher-thriller publishers (they are often the same). I speak from experience.

  JL



LanDi Liu <strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: LanDi Liu
Subject: Re: Dictionary POS
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That's awfully traditionalist of you. And I have 150 students (between the
ages of 7 and 15) who would disagree with you. When a student looks up a
word like "some" in a dictionary, and it says it's an adjective, then
they're not likely by any stretch of the imagination to understand how to
use the word. And calling it an adjective implies that you can say things
like "I have this some book," and "This apple is very some."

The newer labels enable people to understand how to use the words. The
present labeling prevents that understanding.

Given all of the fervor that lexicologists put into detecting new words and
senses, it's amazingly ironic that they don't put ten times that fervor into
categorizing those words in an intelligible way. What are dictionaries for,
anyway?

Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 15:37:04 -0800, Jonathan Lighter
wrote:

>FWIW, no standard dictionary I know of uses the more precise terminology.
Why not? Because nobody except us would buy one, that's why not. Too hard
to figure out the labels.
>
> JL
>
>Mark Mandel wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Mark Mandel
>Subject: Re: Dictionary POS
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>I don't know how useful this would be to you, but look at the *COMLEX
>English Syntax Lexicon*.
>
>-- Mark A. Mandel
>Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania
>
>
>On Jan 9, 2008 12:36 PM, LanDi Liu wrote:
>
>> Are there published English dictionaries with modern part of speech
>> labels,
>> like determinative, subordinator, etc.?
>>
>> If not, are there any in the works?
>>
>> Randy Alexander
>> Jilin City, China
>>
>
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