[Lexicog] Criteria for example sentences

Fri Mar 12 11:36:08 UTC 2004

I agree entirely with Ron Moe’s comments. Even very simple words need
examples. I would only add this: everything depends on the aim of your
dictionary. I think it’s very different if you’re writing a dictionary for
‘decoding’ or for ‘encoding’. Computers now allow us to make this
distinction practically possible.

>From a decoding point of view, you hardly need an example since you
obviously took the word you don’t know from some kind of context which will
help you to choose among different translation alternatives, or different
definitions. ‘Lead’ has a number of different meanings, but the fact that
you’re reading a book on Writing techniques will induce you to understand
‘lead’ as ‘first part of an article’ or something of the kind and not ‘a
kind of metal.’ As Ron states, however, “I am sometimes unsure what sense a
definition is referring to until I read the example sentence.” So am I.

If, on the contrary, you aim primarily at helping your audience with
encoding, then the amount of examples you need goes from, say, 1 or 2 to any
amount. In my experience, as someone who has to write in a foreign language
almost every day, you need a lot of examples for every word, even for
monosemous words like, say, ‘atrioventricular block’ or ‘forceps’. You need
at least to know what are the verbs acceptable with these nouns, and
probably which nouns can be subject and object of these words. As Ron Moe
shows on the basis of our recent discussion, even words like ‘rock’ and
‘dog’ need examples. At least if you want to use them productively. To
merely understand them, even within an expression, is usually not too
difficult. As we know since “Metaphors we live by”, basic metaphors follow
the same lines in most languages.

But, coming back to Mike’s first question, as a general rule, and according
to my experience, you need examples most for verbs. I remember ‘indulge’
(which I cited in a previous e-mail) for which I needed probably 30 examples
before getting it right. And even then it wasn’t entirely ‘appropriate’.
Adverbs I would say are rather straightforward, and I don’t remember I ever
had any serious problems with them, certainly not when using a bilingual
dictionary. It is true though that monolingual dictionaries cannot help but
giving a disastrous treatment to adverbs, prepositions and the like. In a
bilingual dictionary a would simply say (Spanish) ‘por’ means ‘by’ except in
these cases (when they are accompanied by these words 
). 

Another parameter to take into consideration is the mother tongue of your
audience. For Japanese learners, ‘simple’ prepositions like ‘in’, ‘next to’
etc. are difficult because the way you use Japanese prepositions is totally
different. A Dutch speaker will need no examples at all, or very few (as Ron
Moe has put us on the alert). 

To speak about 30 examples for a verb would have seemed to be practically
absurd a few years ago. We know it isn’t anymore.

In the case of Learner’s dictionaries, I see a peripheral  problem when it
comes to choosing examples: the fact that  dictionaries are mostly made by
native speakers. Corpus analysis can only partly eliminate this problem
since there’s always someone who has to make the choice. Some might find
this a strange observation but I think it’s part of the reason why (at
least) learner’s dictionaries fail to deliver. Always in my opinion, of
course. Native speakers have a rather questionable idea of what the
difficulties of their own language are and, as part of that, of the
frequency of words. As I had the experience some time ago, for an
English-speaking person ‘confide’ is used just as frequently as ‘have
confidence’. My gut feeling tells me it’s not. This implies that you need
more examples to explain to your audience how to use ‘confide’ than how to
use ‘have confidence in’ since involuntary exposure to the former will be
much smaller than to the latter. 

Philippe Humblé

Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

humble at cce.ufsc.br

PS. Without wanting to be intrusive, I wrote a little book on this subject
(“Dictionaries and Language Learners”). Since my publisher wanted to charge
me a hefty fee (which I couldn’t pay) for even mentioning the existence of
the book on his website, I don’t see any problem in sending it in PDF to
anyone interested.

I would agree with all Mike's points except the last. The recent discussion
of even such obvious nouns as 'bull' or 'dog' show a range of applicability
which is far from predictable. The metaphorical use of animal terms
indicates that our conception of an animal is far from trivial and goes far
beyond the scientific name. A dog is more than a member of the species canis
familiaris. We say, "He's as faithful as a dog," and "He's nothing but a
dirty dog." Or, "He's as strong as an ox," and "He's as dumb as an ox." In
fact these uses may be more common than literal references to oxen.

Even 'rock' needs to be carefully defined and illustrated. 'Rock' and
'stone' are not exact synonyms and the difference needs to be made explicit.
"We built our house on a rock." *"We built our house on a stone." "I cut my
hand on a sharp rock." *"I cut my hand on a sharp stone."

English has lots of verbal nouns that are noun in part of speech but whose
semantics refer to events, processes, and states. Most of us would agree
that these need to be illustrated as much as a verb. But there are other
nouns that are on the borderline between semantic "verbs" and semantic
"nouns" (if you will). For instance 'growth' in one of its senses refers to
a part of your body which is not normal. "The doctor removed a growth on my
back that proved to be benign." It is as much a thing as your nose, but is
called a 'growth' because it grows abnormally. The example sentence
illustrates several features of the semantics and usage. 1) It is external
to the skin or an internal organ (on something). 2) It is abnormal. 3) It is
feared to be cancerous. 4) Doctors often deal with them. 5) The verb used to
indicate surgically cutting it off is 'remove'.

So I would prefer the general rule: "Give an illustrative sentence for every
word unless you cannot find one that is non-trivial and informative. Of
course we have to be concerned about size restrictions, but I would prefer a
short illustrative phrase to nothing at all. I appreciate a fine tuned
definition, but I love a good illustration. When reading entries with
multiple senses in a monolingual English dictionary, I am sometimes unsure
what sense a definition is referring to until I read the example sentence.

Ron Moe

SIL, Uganda

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Maxwell [mailto:maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu]
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2004 10:15 AM
To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Lexicog] Criteria for example sentences

What criteria do y'all suggest for determining whether an entry (or
sub-entry) should include example sentences?

I suspect the answer is the same for monolingual and bilingual dictionaries,
although I'm interested in the bilingual case.

When I've reviewed bilingual dictionaries for publication, I have claimed
that every 'adverb', verb and adposition needs (at least one) example
sentence.  I have not pushed so hard for example sentences for adjectives
and nouns.  My reasoning is as follows:

(1) Adverb is a catch-all category.  Even if it's broken down into verbal
adverbs vs. sentential adverbs, or locatives vs. temporals vs. manners...,
it's still going to be unclear to the user of the dictionary just what the
behavior of that word is (even if there is a good grammar of the language).
Same goes for minor POSs, like determiners, 'particles' etc., although most
of these should be reasonably well documented in the grammar.

(2) Verbs tend to have complex argument structures, which vary across
languages even for similar meanings. (Cf. 'talk', 'say', 'ask', 'wonder'...
with their counterparts in any other language you may know.)  So again,
without example sentences, the user won't know how to use them.  (And it may
be necessary to have at least one example for each subcategorization frame.)

(3) Adpositions usually have a more straightforward grammar, but their
meaning may be unclear (no matter how well you gloss them).  So they should
have several example sentences, to (partially) illustrate their range of
meaning.  (BTW, there's a fascinating article in the Sept. 2003 issue of
Language on the semantics of spatial adpositions across languages.  Should
be required reading for lexicographers.)

(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.)

This is an easy test to make in a computerized way, since it's easy to pull
out all the words of a given grammatical category which do not have at least
one example sentence (or one for every sense of those words).

Comments?

    Mike Maxwell
    Linguistic Data Consortium
     <mailto:maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu> maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu

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