[Lexicog] polysynthetic languages and dictionaries

[William J Poser]

As far as I can see, there is really only one good solution
and that is to use an electronic dictionary to which the user
can give as input a fully inflected form. The dictionary software
will look this form up, either directly, by virtue of being able
to store a far larger number of forms than one could reasonably
print, or by parsing it. Any other approach requires the user to
have knowledge of the morphological structure of words that those
without interest and training in the linguistics of the language
cannot be expected to have.

That's not to say that such an electronic dictionary eliminates
the problem of need for grammatical knowledge. Suppose you
look up the Carrier word nodudelh in your electronic Stony Creek
dictionary and it response that this is the first person dual subject
form of the optative affirmative of the root "eat effectively uncountable
things individually" with the n-class classifier for the absolutive
argument. How much will you be enlightened? Will you realize
that this form probably means "let's me and you eat berries off the bush"?
The optative has a range of uses that are part of one's grammatical
knowledge. It is also part of one's grammatical knowledge that
the classificatory prefix I call "absolutive classifiers" agree with
the subject of intransitive verbs but the object of transitive verbs
such as this, and that the n-class is basically the class of round
things. And of course there is the problem that the definition of
many roots is rather abstract. Nor, even if you could list the
typical meaning of such forms, which in most cases won't be practical,
would it be sufficient to do so. This form, for instance, could refer
to eating something other than berries, and optatives have plenty
of uses other than the jussive. So a really comprehensive
dictionary of such a language can't avoid such grammatical knowledge
and abstraction. Therefore, my suggestion is that the dictionary
should provide links from the parsed word (or expression) to its
components, that is, to a morpheme lexicon and grammar.

I have a paper about this entitled "Making Athabaskan Dictionaries
Usable" which can be downloaded from my web page:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wjposer/papers.html.
Mike Maxwell also thoughts on this but is travelling and may
find it difficult to chime in.

Bill

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


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