[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[William J Poser]

If you tell speakers to pull out the last syllable and look  under that,
you are, sort of, making a root-based dictionary. There are several
reasons that I think that an electronic dictionary with a full
parser is better:

(a) some users are going to have trouble even extracting the last
    syllable and looking under that. Admittedly, they are also likely
    to have trouble making use of the results, but having the software
    do this at least helps them along.

(b) there are interactions between prefixes and roots that complicate
    things so that it isn't quite as simple as "last syllable" = stem.
    Exactly how confusing these are varies from language to language.

(c) Many stems are ambiguous in the sense of being derivatives of
    more than one root. At the very least, the user has to keep track
    of this. It's easier for a computer to provide a list of possibilities.
    More importantly, often the ambiguity is resolved by the rest of
    the morphology of the verb. A computer program that does a full
    parse can use the information it gets from the prefixes
    to eliminate some roots. A printed root dictionary can't do this.

(d) There's the problem of what information to give the user and
    how he or she can make use of it. Suppose that someone with little
    analytic knowledge of the language is able to extract the stem,
    look it up, and make his or her way to the entry for the root.
    This should give him the meaning of the root. But what does the
    form actually mean? The root entry doesn't say. If its like
    the existing root-based dictionaries, it will provide information
    about the verb themes based on that root, but that information is
    rather abstract. It won't provide any information at all about
    the rest of the morphology. An electronic lexicon with a parser,
    however, will at least identify all of the other morphemes in the
    word, and if it is organized as I've suggested, as a sort of
    hypertext document linked both to a morpheme lexicon and a
    grammar, the user who doesn't understand what, say, the optative
    prefix is, can follow a link to an explanation of the uses of the
    optative.

This last point is, I hope, an answer to Phil's question. An electronic
dictionary can do the analysis that many dictionary users can't,
and can help them to learn what the components of words are and what
they mean.

Bill
--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu


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