[Lexicog] Criteria for example sentences

[Benjamin Barrett]

How about sentences with languages having declining nouns/adjectives? I'm
thinking in particular of Korean hiut and piup adjectives, which can be
difficult to conjugate (decline?) for the non-Korean speaker, though this
would apply to Latin, Japanese and perhaps many other languages as well.
 
Given that Korean adjectives are used in one basic form when acting as
predicates and another basic form when modifying, I was thinking that I
should come up with at least a sample phrase, though not necessarily a
sample sentence for each. In Japanese, I think the sample phrase route might
be best for -na adjectives (keiyou doushi).
 
I like the suggestion of using a sample sentence such as "the dog barks at
X", "the telephone rang/I answered the telephone" to inform the user of
commonly used verbs, though the danger of falling into cliches seems real.
 
Another major concern I have is which social register to use in example
sentences. In Japanese, I can see providing all sentences in plain form with
the formal (desu-masu-cho) form immediately following in parentheses, but
Korean has six registers. My inclination is to provide only the plain form
(handa) with the formal (yo) form, but perhaps sentences with honorifics or
child-directed registers should be added for headwords that are often used
in such contexts...Recommendations, anybody?
 
Benjamin Barrett

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Maxwell [mailto:maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu] 

(4) Nouns, and to a lesser extent adjectives, tend to have straightforward
grammars and meanings.  You don't need an example sentence to know how to
use 'dog' or 'rock'.  (Abstract nouns like the infamous 'destruction' are of
course exceptions to this.)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lexicography/attachments/20040311/07e765a8/attachment.htm>