[Lexicog] Criteria for example sentences

[HAI XU]

Dear Philippe:

I am very interested in your book Dictionaries and
Language Learners. Could you please send me a copy?
Many thanks.

Xu Hai
English Department,
Queen's University, Canada

--- cce <humble at cce.ufsc.br> µÄÕýÎÄ£º> 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 Humbl
>
> 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.
>
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> 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."
>
>
>
=== message truncated ===

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