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

Fri Oct 7 19:06:23 UTC 2005

Hi Sebastian,

I'm on this discussion list and am available to answer any questions you might have about DDP. I designed it to specifically meet the need you describe.

Ron Moe
  -----Original Message-----
  From: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com [mailto:lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com]On Behalf Of Neal_Brinneman at sil.org
  Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 5:10 AM
  To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
  Subject: Re: [Lexicog] aiming at exhaustiveness in eliciting the lexicon of a language

  Dear Sebastian, 
  Go to http://www.sil.org/computing/ddp/index.htm for Ron Moe's Dictionary Development Program and you should find all you need 
  Neal 

        Sebastian Drude <sebadru at zedat.fu-berlin.de> 
        Sent by: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com 
        10/07/2005 12:51 AM Please respond to
              lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com 

       To lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com  
              cc  
              Subject [Lexicog]  aiming at exhaustiveness in eliciting the lexicon of a language 

  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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