[Lexicog] aiming at exhaustiveness in eliciting the lexicon of a language

[Sebastian Drude]

Dear lexicographers,


I would like to ask you for advice and/or bibliographic references, on 
techniques and methodology in field research that aims at obtaining as 
exhaustive a set of lexical data of a language as possible in a limited 
period of time.

Besides the obvious methods of (1) using stimuli word lists in other 
languages (portuguese) and (2) extracting words from texts, I am 
especially interested in (3) associative techniques that make use of the 
network of semantic and associative relations that hold among the 
lexical items of any language, or other techniques that help to discover 
even rarely used or quite abstract and relational words.

Are there any explicit field guides or other concrete instructions you 
know of?  I am aware of some works as, for example: (to 1) Studying and 
Describing Unwritten Languages (Bouquiaux and Thomas 1992, french 
original 1972) or the exhaustive comparative SAILDP questionnaire for 
Latin America elaborated by B. Berlin and T. Kaufmann.  Hints to other 
stimuli word lists are also welcome.

As to (3), what (known to me) comes closest to what I am seeking is:
BEEKMAN, John (1968), "Eliciting vocabulary, meaning, and collocations",
	in: Notes on Translation 29:111, reprinted in: Alan Healey (ed)
	(1975) Language Learner’s Field Guide, Ukarumpa (PNG): SIL
See also section 8 of
MOSEL, Ulrike (2004): "Dictionary making in endangered language
	communication", in: Peter K. Austin (ed) Language Documentation
	and Description vol. 2, London: SOAS


My background: for some 7 years now, I am conducting field research on 
Awetí, a tupian (but not tupi-guaranian) language in central Brazil.  In 
the last years, the focus of my work is on documenting the languages, 
that is, I am compiling a large corpus of data, mostly with audio and/or 
video media, with transcriptions and translations.  Even not the primary 
objective of my current work, morpho-syntactic analysis is obviously 
always going on, but the lexicon is the area I payed comparatively less 
attention to.

Now I am preparing for a research project that allows me to use the 
corpus as a basis for, among other things, a description of the 
language, including preparing for the compilation of a dictionary.

Up to now, I have shoebox databases that contain some 2400 entries as 
the result of eliciting basic word lists (usually for comparative aims) 
and thematic word lists (the latter mostly nouns, such as 150 prominent 
cultural items / artefacts, 130 kinship terms, and a total of about 350 
animal terms) as well as the results of glossing some of the texts.
I guess at least about the same amount can be extracted from the texts 
(probably more than 30 hours of transcribed texts, of which about 18 
hours are translated but most are not further unanalyzed).

Of course, this is only a first step to a more "complete" data set that 
could eventually be published as a dictionary of Awetí (of course, 
completeness is always a very relative notion and depends, among other 
things, on decisions like that up to which degree results of productive 
word formation processes such as derivation and composition are to be 
included).

So what is your advice how to proceed, besides exctracing lexical items 
from the texts (and possibly eliciting further stimuli word lists)?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Sebastian Drude
-- 
|   Sebastian   D R U D E         (Lingüista, Projeto Aweti / DOBES)
|   Setor de Lingüística   --  Coordenação de Ciências Humanas (CCH)
|   Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi,  Belém do Pará   --  CNPq  --  MCT
|   Cx.P. 399  --  CEP: 66 040 - 170  --  Tel. e FAX: (91) 274 40 04
|   Email:   sebadru at zedat.fu-berlin.de    +   drude at museu-goeldi.br
|   URL:   http://www.germanistik.fu-berlin.de/il/pers/drude-en.html



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