[Lexicog] palm trees

[Wayne Leman]

Thanks, Greg. I understand what you are saying about using your three different kinds of semantic taxonomies for displaying lexical data and probably also as heuristics (discovery procedures). I may be missing something, but I still do not understand how we could call a display of the words of a language its lexicon if that display was not organized according to the semantic domains of that language and the cultural context and worldview of its speakers.

I think that Ron's DDP approach is one of the most helpful workshop and heuristic programs to come along. But it and no other semantic taxonomies developed by outside researchers can ever really account for the indigenous semantic categories. We have to discover those using methods which allow native speakers, unbiased by outside educational systems, to try to express how they divide up the lexical universe. Dick Watson's post is one good methodology for getting at those emic semantic taxonomies.

BTW, Ron recognizes, as he has stated in his most recent message and he and I have had email exchanges on this point in the past, that the DDP program is a good start. I'd stay it's far better than good. It represents a great deal of careful thinking by someone who has done a lot of lexical work with speakers in workshops in different parts of the world. It simply has the limitations that any "external" program will have for displaying semantic domains of any particular language.

Yes, there are semantic universals. I don't know how many universals there are re: semantic taxonomies. It may be that there are universals, but that we have to describe them using dependency relationships or something like that, such as is done by some people working with language typologies today (e.g. If a clause of a language has an Object, that Object will usually appear in such-and-such a position relative to the Verb).

Ultimately, we need to do a lot more work on ethnosemantics based on culturally-sensitive cognitive science. After all, lexical relationships presumably represent relationships among mental concepts of people who have various worldviews and artifacts within their worlds.

So, in summary, Greg, I understand what you are saying. I could even accept, hmm, perhaps (!), the validity of some lexical data of some language published for English speakers using semantic domains that English speakers use. But the publication should make it very, very clear that those semantic domains are only there as a helpful device for English speakers to access information about semantic domains they are curious about. They need to understand that if they consider a palm to be a tree and find a palm in the tree category (even if the language does not have a generic word for tree), that does not mean that the palm is a tree in the lexicon that they are viewing in publication. My own preference would be to limit the misunderstanding that can result from squeezing round and other shaped and colored objects into square holes. I've seen this done terribly with "dictionaries" published recently for a variety of language by a man (Philip M. Parker; googling on his name is an interesting exercise if one is interested in how not to do lexicography) who squeezed the words of every language (none of which he knew and so there were many errors) into an English thesaurus model. Several of us linguists have had to contact him and try to help him understand how distorted and inaccurate his books are. And they have even been demeaning to the native speakers of languages, as for instance, if he would force a vernacular word for "weed" into the thesaurus category for mind-altering substances. That very kind of thing happened for one Native American language and those people were highly offended by their language was misrepresented.

Wayne






  Hi Wayne,

  I am sorry if my reply seems inane, but one purpose of a semantic taxonomy is to produce a list of words grouped by semantic domain, to help find similar words. If the reader wants to explore the plant names of a vernacular, it is useful to have the plant names grouped in a list, and to have the list divided into various sub-groupings.

  Having read the LDL today, it seems there are at least three possible ways of ordering the semantic domain list. (1) There may be a universal order, which would reflect a kind of average of individual ethno-taxonomic systems. This has the advantage of being intuitive and easily used by everyone. (2) You could use an English ethno-taxonomy, which has the benefit of being intuitive and easily used by an English reader. (3) You could use the ethno-taxonomy of the vernacular language, which has the advantage of being a insightful window on the vernacular language and thought system, but the disadvantage of possibly being obscure to an outsider. I was wondering which of the three options the DDP taxonomy was aiming at, and whether the DDP taxonomy needs to be tweaked for each language, or deliberately kept unchanged.

  I have just learned that in the Austronesian language I work with, coconut palms, sago palms, pandanus trees and betelnut palms are all not considered 'trees'. There is no superordinate term to refer to them, as you rightly suggested might be the case.

  Regards, Greg


    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Wayne Leman 
    To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com 
    Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 2:09 AM
    Subject: [Lexicog] palm trees


    Greg, if you are attempting to reflect the lexicon of a language, what is
    the purpose of using a semantic taxonomy that does not reflect the lexical
    relationships of that language?

    It seems to me that using an "external" taxonomy to aid English readers
    creates a distorted view of the lexical relations within the language, which
    includes taxonomic relationships.

    By the way, it is not necessary to have superordinate category
    classification words in order for a people to have the concept of a semantic
    grouping, although it definitely helps. Not every concept that people have
    is lexicalized, including in English.

    Wayne
    -----
    Ninilchik Russian dictionary online:
    http://ninilchik.noadsfree.com

    --------

    Hi Ron,

    I was not thinking of using a vernacular classification because the
    vernacular I am studying actually seems to have few classification words of
    levels that I can find. Also, I want my semantic domain list to reflect a
    likely folk classification of English readers because it will mostly be
    English readers who access the (English) sematic domain list. I know you do
    not want an English folk classification. Sorry.

    <snip>

    Regards, Greg




  
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