[Lexicog] increasing vocabulary entries

[Pamela Munro]

> The techniques Wayne mentioned for increasing vocabulary are certainly
> the classics. The semantic association technique can be especially good
> when working with a group (as Joe Grimes has observed) -- for example,
> whenever my Zapotec collaborator and I go to visit the cabildo (village
> council) in his town, we come prepared with a few interesting questions
> (e.g. "tell us about types of witches") to stimulate discussion among
> these old men.
>
> I can suggest three others that I have found helpful.
>
> -- Going through dictionaries or wordlists of related languages with
> speakers. This of course produces results that are of special value to
> comparativists, but it must be done with care, since words often mean
> different things in the language you are studying than they did in the
> stimulus language.
>
> -- Translation projects. Translating anything, particularly things that
> a community or the speaker will find interesting and useful (the United
> Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Bible stories,
> traditional stories previously recorded only in English, songs) often
> brings up new words and constructions that might not appear in
> volunteered texts.
>
> -- Excursions away from the usual workplace. This is especially useful
> for finding names for plants, though of course these are hard for most
> of us without training to identify accurately.
>
> Pam
>
> --
> ----
> Pamela Munro
> Professor, Department of Linguistics, UCLA
> UCLA Box 951543
> Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543 USA
> http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/munro/munro.htm
>
>
>
>
>
>
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