[Lexicog] citation forms and how to 'file'

[Piotr Bański]

Hello Paul,

Thanks for the interesting description of (a bit of) Lengo, I hope you
will update the list with news on how you proceed. When you're done,
I'll be happy to read more about the language facts and about how they
influenced your lexicographic decisions.

Let me offer some remarks that might perhaps be helpful (possibly
indirectly, if someone else decides to share their view on this). I'd
like to begin with a question though: what makes you 'gloss' the verbal
forms by full sentences? In other words, I assume the subject
('someone/something') is simply implicit, and the non-pronominal object
('a canoe') is there merely for illustration -- but what about the
inflections, are these really 3rd person present singular forms?

> /vo-vothe/ vt. 'someone paddles a canoe'
> /digi/ vi. 'something is closed'

would it be just as good to say:

/vo-vothe/ vt. paddle
/digi/ vi. (stative) be closed

?

Or are we looking at inflected forms here? (In other words, have you
already, perhaps subconsciously, made a partial decision concerning your
citation forms?)

> 1. should the nouns derived from verbs (and vice versa) be entered as
> main entries (and subentries of the included stem)? or senses of the
> included stem?

One question is: how regular is the reduplication? Is it perfect CV-? (I
understand that your /gh/ is an aspirated /g/). If it is regular, and if
you care about the volume of your dictionary (=if you feel some pressure
to pack things neatly), you can probably expect the user to be able to
recover the unreduplicated bases from reduplicated forms, and  thus you
can pack them together into a single entry -- this way you guarantee
that the relationship between these forms is made obvious to the user.
If you don't care so much about the volume, it is considered more
user-friendly to enter such forms separately, so that the reader can
find them immediately without having to wonder about their internal
make-up (and then, cross-entry references would be a nice addition).

You're asking about subentries vs. subsenses -- is it meant merely as a
question of presentation (senses get, say, a number, while subentries
begin with a headword) or is this a reference to some Fieldworks
technology? I guess using the sense approach may make some sense in
cases such as English zero-derivation pairs (hammer-hammer, love-love,
etc.), where sometimes the POS information at the beginning of a sense
division is enough for the user. But given that in your case, the actual
forms are different, I'd say subentries (if you end up lumping them
together).

Obviously, if the reduplication is regular, you might think of going for
senses and then, just like in the 'love-love' case, put the POS at the
beginning of a new sense and expect the reader to realise that they
should mentally reduplicate the initial CV -- but that would be a case
of extreme user-unfriendliness, understandable (hmm) only if you were
extremely limited volume-wise (which is hard to imagine).

In other words, if there are several competing ways to
macro/micro-structure your entries, think of the user -- which of them
will be most friendly to the people you are doing this for?

> 2. how best to file the transitive forms? and what do I use for a
> citation form? It seems I could get away without an object suffix for
> those verbs that take transitivising suffix -Ci, but it is difficult
> to distinguish transitive /gharasu/ from intransitive /gharasu/
> without an object suffix . . . And if I have to include an object
> suffix, do I just go with 3sg /-a/?

The -Ci- forms are irregular, and furthermore, the -Ci- is sometimes
omitted. But this is suffixation, which makes things easier if you
decide to keep them together with the intransitives -- the user will
probably be able to locate the transitive forms easily by looking for
the intransitive bases. Furthermore, this is merely a valence change,
with the core of the meaning staying the same (compare the difference
between 'be closed' vs. 'door'). The Ci-less forms could even be treated
as subsenses (_gharasu_ 1. vi. ..., 2. vt. ...).

Again, much depends on how friendly you want to be, and on how
(un)friendly you need to be. If your dictionary is going to be reused as
an electronic resource (and I hope it will be), you might want to make
sure that even if you enter subentries by suffixes (_bere_, vi. see;
~_ngi_/_ni_ vt. look at sth), the full forms will be easily recoverable
automatically. (Note: myself, I don't like the last example at all, but
see below for a reference and a link.)

I don't see enough data to speculate about the ngi/ni alternation --
maybe there is a regularity there, conditioned by e.g -V vs. -CV, or
morphologically?

Now let me point you to one paper that argues for keeping derivatives
together with their roots -- I'm not a fan of this approach, but I
appreciate the arguments, and they deal with changes in the meaning of
morphologically related forms:

"Reflections on the Huallaga Quechua dictionary: derived forms as
subentries", by David J. Weber:

http://emeld.org/workshop/2002/presentations/weber/emeld.pdf

(have a look here as well:

http://www.emeld.org/events/index.cfm )

And here's another nice paper, arguing roughly the opposite (on somewhat
different grounds though):

"Towards a Sound Lemmatisation Strategy for the Bantu Verb through the
Use of Frequency-based Tail Slots – with special reference to Cilubà,
Sepedi and Kiswahili", by G-M de Schryver & D.J. Prinsloo:

http://tshwanedje.com/publications/kiswahili2000fbts.pdf

I hope the above will be helpful as a starter.

Good luck with your dictionary,

  Piotr


lengosi writes:
> Since this is my first post, a bit of an introduction might be in
> order. I work with Lengo (lgr), a Southeast Solomonic language of NE
> Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands. I've written up a bit of a grammar and
> am now tackling the lexicon (in greater earnest). I have used
> FieldWorks to organise my data. But it's organising my data that
> brings me here . . . so on to my questions, with a bit of background
> to set things up.
> 
> Lengo is a derivation-rich language. Nouns can be derived from verbs
> and verbs from nouns by means of initial CV reduplication. For example:
> 
> /vothe/ n. 'a paddle'
> /vo-vothe/ vt. 'someone paddles a canoe' 
> /digi/ vi. 'something is closed'
> /di-digi/ n. 'a door'
> 
> This is quite productive in the language.
> 
> Further, transitive verbs can be derived from intransitive verbs by
> means of the addition of -Ci, where the consonant C seems quite
> unpredictable (and even changes for the same stem depending on the
> following object suffix). For example:
> 
> /bere/ vi. 'someone sees'
> /bere-ngi-a/ vt. 'someone sees / looks at something'
> /bere-ni-gho/ vt. 'someone sees / looks at you (sg)'
> 
> [/ng/ is, in Lengo, a single consonant ('eng')]
> 
> This is very productive in the language. But it is not the only way to
> make a transitive verb. There are some intransitive forms that merely
> take an object suffix; they do not go through the vi -> vt process of
> adding -Ci. For example:
> 
> /gharasu/ vi. 'someone moves'
> /gharasu-a/ vt. 'someone moves something'
> 
> So there's some background; now for the questions.
> 
> 1. should the nouns derived from verbs (and vice versa) be entered as
> main entries (and subentries of the included stem)? or senses of the
> included stem?
> 2. how best to file the transitive forms? and what do I use for a
> citation form? It seems I could get away without an object suffix for
> those verbs that take transitivising suffix -Ci, but it is difficult
> to distinguish transitive /gharasu/ from intransitive /gharasu/
> without an object suffix . . . And if I have to include an object
> suffix, do I just go with 3sg /-a/?
> 
> Well, I think that's enough for now. I'd appreciate any guidance I
> could get with this! Thanks,
> 
> Paul
> 
> 


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