[Lexicog] bilingual dictionaries

[Lou Hohulin]

Hi Mery,

 "mmyit" <mmyit at yahoo.it> wrote:
>
> one year ago I started working for a French publishing house and now
> I would like to spread my lexicographic knowledge by writing what
> I've learned (and I'm still learning) on French-Italian dictionaries
> and their creation. My experience concerns mainly bilingual
> dictionaries of small size, but I'm interested in dictionaries of
> big size too.

My research and the dictionary I am compiling is very different from a bilingual dictionary such as the French-Italian one that you worked on. My research has been on an Austronesian, Philippine-type language (Tuwali Ifugao) that until recently has had little documentation. Glosses, definitions and translation of sentence illustrations, grammatical notes, etc. are in English. And of course, there is an English index.
So I am unsure whether any of my comments will be helpful for your thesis. But perhaps what I say might elicit more helpful comments or data from others on the list.

One of the issues that I'm going to develop in my
> thesis is how to treat polysemies. To distinguish the meanings of a
> word, collocators are much more useful than synonyms, but synonyms
> are still much more frequent than collocators in many bilingual
> dictionaries.

Elizabeth O'Dowd wrote a book on prepositions and particles in English; her claim is that there are semantic and discourse patterns of certain prepositions co-occurring with verbs, and that these patterns should be part of dictionary entries. She deals with such collocations as:
1) call in, call out, call off
2) turn in, turn off, turn about
3) hook up, end up, wake up, sign up, divide up, open up, break up, cover up, crack up, fix up, wise up, screw up, mess up, heat up

There are many more examples in her book. Native speakers of English understand all of these; they are very common in spoken English. However, to give glosses in another language would be time-consuming and far from easy.

Is this the sort of collocators that you are thinking of using as a technique for analyzing polysemy? Or are you thinking more of something like:
The dog barks at everyone who passes by. vs.
The boss was so upset, he barked at every employee that entered his office.

In Tuwali Ifugao, only a 'dog' can collocate with 'bark'; therefore, we would need a different gloss, probably a phrase to equate the use of 'bark' in the second sentence.

 I know that in dictionaries of small size it is not
> possible to insert all the collocators which allow the same
> translation for a word, but this is not the case of big bilingual
> dictionaries, where there's no need to use synonyms instead of
> collocators in order to save space. Don't you think that collocators
> would better help foreign users to understand the meaning(s) of a
> lexical item?

I think that it would be tremendously helpful to have something about collocators in bilingual dictionaries. I have not thought through how it might be done, perhaps others on the list have. Until now, I have put an explanatory equivalent in the definition if I thought it was critical information. I have also used an annotation field for some explanations of this type, particularly when collocations relate to great cultural differences.

Best,
Lou



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