[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[phil cash cash]

Thanks Bill, i can appreciate the complexity of your (and others) task.
  i too would like to address this problem someday soon and model nez
perce verb morphology, but life is just too short and our languages are
disappearing faster than i can compute.  still, i have a difficult time
getting past the risk we take by substituting analysis and calculation
(assumption: computers are faster than human thinkers) for
understanding and meaning.  this is a programmers dilema being
unnecessarily transferred to the the language learner.  which is
probably why i don't think it is as transparent or as desirable for the
typical language learner (mostly second language learners).  compound
this with the fact that dictionaries by design have never been
transparent or desirable for indigenous speech communities to begin
with because they are almost always modeled from Indo-European sources.
  i tend to think that polysynthesis is still too radical for current
linguistic theory and even more so for dictionary makers.  but after
reading your reply i think electronic dict makers are definitely a step
ahead of most people and this is why it intrigues me so.

it looks like /ya/ is contrastive on a number of levels syntactic,
phonological, etc.  this contrast is to the language learners advantage
and should be built into the system of access strategies and not be
just another computational algorithm.  but i'm sure you must have
thought of this already.

living breathing polysynthesis,
phil cash cash (cayuse/nez perce)
UofA


On Jun 1, 2004, at 5:36 PM, 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
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>



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