[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[Melissa Axelrod]

But can't you tell Athabaskan dictionary users to
pull out the last syllable (unless it's one of a small
set of enclitics) and then look that up? You'd have
to have an entry for every stem - leading to the main
root entry - but that's still less than listing every inflected
form and easier for the user than having to know
everything about the morphology and morphophonemics
of the language. I think that's our plan for the Jicarilla
dictionary -  a main entry at the root, cross-references
for each stem, and an entry for the 3rd person imperfective
form of the primary theme, with a pointer to the main
root entry. Is there a user-friendlier system?
  Melissa

William J Poser wrote:

>The reason for having the dictionary emulate the rules of the
>grammar is precisely because they aren't transparent to the
>dictionary user. Suppose you're a second language learner
>who doesn't yet  have a good analytic knowledge of the language
>and you encounter a big hairy verb form. If the dictionary only
>lists infinitives or root or a selected citation form of some sort,
>you may be quite unable to figure out what to look that verb up
>under. Suppose, for instance, you encounter the Carrier form
>natisdalh, which means "I'm going to walk back', e.g. "I'm going to
>go home". A root dictionary would list this under ya "for one person
>to walk on a single pair of limbs", as in nusya "I am walking around".
>To be able to look at natisdalh and realize that you need to look it up
>under ya, you need to be able to pick it apart into na "back",
>t "inchoative", i "future", s "first person singular subject",
>d "valence prefix that usually accompanies 'back', among other morphemes",
>and know that certain /y/-initial stems delete the /y/ when preceded
>by the d "valance prefix". You also have to recognize the final /lh/
>as a future affirmative marker. So, if you know all this stuff
>you can figure out how to look up the root or other pieces of the
>verb and thus in principle can figure out what it means.
>
>If you have a computer program that "knows" this, you don't have to.
>You enter natisdalh and the computer figures out that it is a form
>of "walk" etc. If you don't know this and don't have such a computer
>program, you are stuck. How are you going to find the right
>information in the dictionary?
>
>I know of just two other approaches. One is to list every form in the
>dictionary. In that case, you just look up natisdalh and if you're
>lucky and that form is in the dictionary, you're fine. The problem
>is that at least in print you can't afford the space to include
>very form of every verb in languages with lots of forms, and even
>if you could, as you arguably can if the dictionary is electronic,
>entering all of them would be very tedious and error-prone.
>
>The other approach is to choose a particular fully inflected form
>as the citation form. This is the approach of the Young and Morgan
>Navajo dictionary. The problem with this is that you need a lot
>of knowledge about the morphology to get from the form you want
>to look up to the citation form. It has the virtue of being a little
>more concrete, which some users prefer, but it doesn't really
>solve the problem of requiring a lot of knowledge on the part of
>the user. Dine College has a semester long course for native speakers
>of Navajo that it is not too much of an exageration to describe
>as a course on how to look things up in Young and Morgan.
>
>I don't know much about Nez Perce, but if the complexity is more
>in "derivational" than "inflectional" morphology, that may or
>may not make a difference. If it isn't too complex, and if the
>inflectional stuff is separable from the derivational stuff,
>then you might be able to use derivational stems as headwords.
>Then people would just have to learn to strip off the inflectional
>stuff, and you could give the precise meaning of each derivational
>string. This is kind of like the situation in Turkish. Verbs
>can be quite long and complicated, but they are exclusively suffixing
>and quite regular, agglutinating rather than fusional, so it
>isn't too hard for people to learn to chop off the inflectional suffixes
>and look up the infinitive. The reason that dictionary lookup in
>Athabaskan languages like Carrier is such a problem is that the
>inflectional and derivational stuff are mixed up. Roughly speaking,
>you have a stem at the end, preceded by inflectional stuff like
>subject, tense, aspect, and object, which is then preceded by
>derivational stuff. Some prefixes that occur far to the left
>obligatorily co-occur with certain stems and have no meaning of
>their own. And some categories require prefixes in both regions.
>For example, in Stuart/Trembleur Lake Carrier, we have
>yalhtuzisduk for "I am not going to speak". The analysis is:
>
>	ya-lh-t-z-i-s-duk
>	YA-Neg-inchoative-Neg-Fut-1ssubj-speak
>
>There are TWO negative prefixes, and the prefix /ya/ at the
>beginning has no meaning of its own. "to speak" is a discontinuous
>morpheme consisting of the prefix /ya/ plus the stem /duk/.
>So it is hard to teach people to chop off certain pieces as you
>can in Turkish.
>
>Bill
>
>
>--
>Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
>http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu
>
>
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>
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
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