[Lexicog] Discovering the lexicon via semantic domains

[Chaz and Helga Mortensen]

> From Chaz Mortensen:
>
> See my comments below (CM:)
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Wayne Leman" <wayne_leman at sil.org>
>
> > Lexicographers have used a variety of techniques to discover the
> > words of the lexicon of a language, e.g.
> >
> > 1. combing through vernacular texts (I have heard of one linguist
> > making a dictionary who would not enter a form in the lexicon until
> > it was found in a text)
> CM: This is the best way, in my opinion and in my experience. Shoebox was
a
> wonderful tool for this because it would stop at any unidentified morpheme
> or combination of morphemes and prompt one to parse words and identify
> morphemes correctly. It took a while to get it set up but it was worth it.
> If you just comb through a text manually it is easy to miss more common
> words. I found that we were missing "eat", "make", "go", "come" and other
> simple words.
>
> > 2. trying to match entries in a national language dictionary
> CM: I hadn't thought of this. It sounds simple and effective but at least
> it's tedious.
>
> > 3. semantic association through work with semantic domains of the
> > language
> CM: I have tried this in the past. It is effective if, among the linguist
> and the language associate(s), there is at least one person with a really
> good imagination. It takes creative planning just like a language learning
> session does. But if your lang. assoc. is good you can ask: "Do you fish a
> lot?" >>Yes<<. "What kind of fish do you catch/eat?" And off he goes
naming
> every kind he knows.
>
> > What are some techniques that you have found helpful to discover
> > lexical entries for a language?
> CM: Be willing to buy high quality field guides on birds, mammals, fish,
> reptiles, trees, flowers, insects, etc. You will be amazed at how many
> dictionary entries you end up with. Buy books that focus on the region in
> which you work. (Buying a general North American bird book will not be
> helpful if you are working in South American jungles.)
> A small picture in a book may be misleading, though. Read the descriptions
> of the animals/plants in the books and check whether your lang. assoc.
> confirms them or not. If they don't match, check for a similar species.
>
> > Although dictionaries for many previously unstudied languages
> > typically contain 5,000 or so entries, we all know, I think, that the
> > lexicons of these languages actually contain many more thousands of
> > entries which are not found in such "basic" dictionaries. Have you
> > found techniques to successfully get the number of valid lexical
> > entries up to the neighborhood of 15,000-25,000, esp. within a
> > relatively short period of research time?
> CM: Gee, I thought 3,189 was a good amount! I suppose if we added all the
> possible derivational affixes on all verbs we could up it some...if we
> included all forms of the irregular verbs...if we included all possible
> combinations of other verbal suffixes and postpositions... if we included
> the postpositions and other suffixes in the first place... if I could ever
> get a good tree book...
>
> CM: On a negative note, it is necessary to eliminate duplicate entries
that
> are spelled similarly. You'll always get these of you work with more than
> one lang. assoc. Sometimes the only way to catch these is by printing out
a
> page and looking at it.
>
> -Chaz
>
>
>
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