[Lexicog] marking semantic domain subcategories

[Mike Maxwell]

Wayne Leman wrote:
> ...Superordinate categories and subordinate categories, for instance.
> I am only aware of a single \sd (semantic domain) field for Shoebox
> and Toolbox.

I'm confused--this is the second msg I saw today that talks about fixed
record structure in Sh/Toolbox (the other one was Jan Ullrich's msg
about field order).  AFAIK, you can use any kind of fields you want with
these tools, and in any order.  You might have to edit the database
template and/or properties, but this can be done.  And you need to be
consistent (or better, run the Sh/Toolbox consistency checks--maybe this
was Jan's problem).  And user-defined fields might not work with Lexique
or MDF, but that's an issue with the latter tools, not with Sh/Toolbox.

That is both the strength of Sh/Toolbox (anyone can make any kind of
flat database they want) and their weakness (anyone can make mistakes
with their record structure--and I've never seen a Sh/Toolbox database
that didn't have such mistakes).

That is also not to say that some of these kinds of things aren't
clumsy; you may have to invent field names to deal with multiple
languages, for example

   \lx  <headword>
     \pos-eng <POS, English>
     \pos-fr  <POS, French>
     \gl-eng  <gloss, English>
     \gl-fr   <gloss, French>
     \ex  <example sentence>
        \ft-eng  <free translation, English>
        \ft-fr   <free translation, French>

--whereas in LinguaLinks (or the forthcoming Fieldworks lexical db), you
would just use multi-lingual strings to keep track of which language you
were using in a given field.

And of course hierarchy is more or less implicit in Sh/Toolbox.  I've
indicated the hierarchy by indentation in the above example, but of
course there is no indentation in the Sh/Toolbox views.  (There is in
the XML export, though, since XML can have both open and close tags,
whereas SFMs have only open tags.  The XML hierarchy is generated based
on the hierarchy you define in the database properties.)

> ...There may be some way to indicate semantic domain hierarchy that I
> don't know about. We should, for instance, not only be able within
> Lexique Pro to pull up all horses from our \sd horse fields, but also
> when we do so, we should be able to tell from the Lexique Pro
> display of the database markers that the horse semantic domain is a
> subcategory of the animals domain. Currently, I can mark more than
> one semantic domain for a lexical entry, but I have no way of showing
> any semantic relationship or hierarchy between multiple semantic
> domains for a record.

Again, I'm not understanding this.  In general, it doesn't seem to me
that you would want to encode the semantic domain hierarchy _in the
database markers_ (where I understand "database marker" to refer to the
Standard Format Markers = SFMs).  Because if you tried to invent a
different SFM for each level of the hierarchy, you might be endlessly
splitting.  In this particular domain, you might settle on \kingdom
\phylum \class \order \family \genus \species, but of course that's
limited to biology, and probably wouldn't fit a folk taxonomy.

Rather, it seems to me that a hierarchy should be defined over the
individual terms (horse, animal...), a definition that would live
outside the database (or perhaps in a separate Sh/Toolbox db).

Alternatively, you could do s.t. like

   \sd horse
      \sd-level species

where you indicate in the Sh/Toolbox database properties that the SFM
'sd-level' is "under" the SFM 'sd'.  (I think Bill Poser's suggestion is
along these lines, if I understand correctly.) Of course then you would
have potential errors of the sort where you forget whether 'horse' is at
the level of genus or species, and therefore assign the sd-level
inconsistently in different lex entries (or forget to assign it for some
lex entries).

But maybe I misunderstand what you want to do, Wayne.
--
	Mike Maxwell
	Linguistic Data Consortium
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


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