Questions tagged [lexicography]
Production of dictionaries and analysis of the relationships between the words of a language.
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How should/do dictionaries display and relate orthographic and pronunciation variants of an underlying concept?
In English we have "color" and "colour", which is the same underlying concept, but just different spellings. So it would be wrong (IMO) for a database-driven electronic dictionary ...
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Dependency grammar based dictionary
A presupposition of constructing the dependency semantic structure of a sentence is the knowledge of semantic features of all sentence's semantemes (actants, semantemes' nature as predicate or name ...
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Under which entry should example phrases be included in a bilingual dictionary?
I am currently working on a thematic bilingual dictionary and I'm having trouble deciding under which entry the sample phrases I find in my corpus should be listed.
For instance, should translations ...
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How are explanatory thesauruses made?
Technically, creating an explanatory thesaurus should require a full-blown research (either a corpus study or a research conducted on native speakers) for every synonym group to pinpoint the exact ...
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When designing a dictionary for multiple languages, what should be a single "entry" (focusing on languages like English)?
I am looking at this dictionary guide and just looked up homophones to see how you might handle unrelated words with same spelling and pronunciation and part of speech. Google has basically separate ...
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Are there any thesauruses or publications that deal with the differentiation of near-synonyms in native/aboriginal/endangered languages?
I'm looking for any publications or thesauruses that deal with the differentiation of near-synonyms in any of the endangered/native languages (especially something that deals with a large chunk of the ...
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Is there a term for words differing in stress (only)?
That is words that is pronunced equally except the stress pattern differs. For example "digest /daɪˈdʒɛst/" (verb) and "digest /ˈdaɪdʒɛst/" (noun). Or even the case where the ...
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What do you call a transliteration that has gone native?
I'm looking for a word for transliterations that have gone on to become native words apart from their origins. For example, zombie, sarong, besuboru, Kalikimaka. The meanings may differ from the ...
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What do α, β, γ mean in a dictionary entry?
For example, the OED has the following for the word "ask"
Forms:
α. Old English ascian ...
β. Old English achsian ...
γ. Middle English aische ...
Do (α, β, γ) mean anything special, or ...
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Bilingual corpora work from the late 1980s
Does anyone know if the paper by Warwick and Russell (often cited as below) exists? I have looked on the EURALEX website and the authors are not listed as speakers in the 4th Conference. Maybe the ...
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How is the "basic form/citation form" defined in highly inflected languages besides IE languages?
A "basic form" may seldom appear in a highly inflected languages, and languages in the world are different from each other, by which we cannot simply apply the convention of IE languages on ...
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Noun phrases in dictionaries
Today's Oxford English Dictionary word-of-the-day ("ice master") reminded me of a question that's been on my mind for some time:
What criteria do dictionary-makers use to decide whether a ...
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how does one properly escape the context of a definition when writing one
When a lexicographer is forming a definition how do they make sure they are not overly influenced by the examples they refer to when forming their definitions.
how do they properly escape the ...
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What's the term for finding an attestation of a word that predates the earliest known one?
Certain dictionaries make a point of citing the earliest known written usage of a particular word. Sometimes, after the dictionary is published, someone tracks down an even earlier attestation of the ...
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Is it possible to infer the meaning of a word of a language based on corpus analysis, without prior knowledge of the language?
If I am totally foreign to a language, are there corpus analysis methodologies and theories that I can employ to figure out the meaning of a word in a corpus based on that language?
If yes, do point ...
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Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online database (by Brill, Leiden University)
The Indo-European Etymological Dictionaries Online database (by Brill) already includes eleven dictionaries https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/6356/22504
I've read about this "database" before. ...
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What was the diffusion and the use of dictionaries in ancient times? Every civilization with a dictionary?
Did they have dictionaries in the ancient times?
I mean who used the dictionaries? Did authors use them to know how to write?
I don't think it worked this way. But when in the history dictionaries ...
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How to make a dictionary with and without technology (comparison)
I'd like to know the difference between the way lexicographists wrote dictionaries in the past, and the way they could procede now, in our modern times.
Note: To compare, I'm talking about ...
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Is there a dictionary of word commonalities across languages?
The most common combination of letters that is used for a word... What is that called? And is there a dictionary of that?
An example is... Pineapple... If you look at the word pineapple in all the ...
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How do dictionaries source attestation?
Some dictionaries source attestation and try to go for the earliest quotes they can find. How do they find them? Without electronic indexing this must have been impossibly difficult.
The reason I'm ...
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Minimal English: Lack Of Clarity And Redundancy
In terms of semantic useful words, Minimal English lists:
Foods:
corn (yams, etc.)
flour
meat
rice
salt
sugar
sweet
wheat
Technology And Transport:
bicycle
boat
car
engine
phone
pipe
plane
radio
...
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Greek: differences between words marked as αρχαιοπρεπής, λόγιος or παλαιότερα
In my dictionary some words are marked with αρχαιοπρεπής (dated, archaic), λόγιος (learned form) and παλαιότερα (more ancient use). What are the differences, if any, between these terms, and what is ...
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Programming tools for exploring semantic relationships between words
By relationships I mean things like "hypernym", "hyponym", "synonym", "antonym".
I'm not quite sure what type of tool I'm after; I just want to "easily explore".
I discovered WordNet and the wn ...
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Dictionary building / corpus exploring software
What software do lexicographers use these days to manage and search corpora? Is there a standard solution used by most people, or does every dictionary commission their own software to suit their own ...
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an open source lexicographical framework
I am looking for a lightweight open source framework for lexicographical experiments: building vocabularies, converting from one type to another, merging, dealing with multilingual issues, ...
google ...
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How do native speakers determine a word's literal/basic meaning?
For example, to me, the verb "to turn" has a literal meaning along the lines of "to change physical orientation along some particular axis". You can also say "X turned [adj.]", "X turned up (as in to ...
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Is there any OED-as-directed-graph research?
Say, I want to know what a "dog" is, so I read the definition for dog in the OED. But, of course, it contains a list of words too so I set out to read the definitions for those as well. This forms a ...
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Center of a set of words
Is there any available algorithm that can take a set of words and attempt to find a word that best represents the "center of mass" of all those words?
This would be easy if we can define a distance ...
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Is there an open source English dictionary that isn't too fine-grained in defining a word?
I'm creating a multilingual online dictionary and I need an open source English dictionary to work off of.
Wordnet is the obvious choice, as it's extremely complete and its license is permissive of ...
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Dictionary with real IPA and English sandhi rules?
I don't like English dictionaries that use pseudo-IPA to indicate pronunciation. I've seen none indicating that most plosives should be aspirated, but when they're in "sp", "st" and other combinations ...
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How can a multi-language dictionary be made? [closed]
Let's pretend we are producing four-language cross-dictionary. To be more difficult, let it be a Russian-English-Japanese-Sanskrit dictionary.
By "cross-dictionary" I mean that the person using it ...
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How are dictionaries produced
What are the steps invoked in producing a dictionary?
I am primarily interested in understanding the role software plays in the production process.
Obviously a corpus for the language is first ...
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Dictionary of Georgian language with lexical stress?
I search for dictionary of Georgian with lexical stress, but i can't find online of offline. Perhaps Georgian have any explicit rules for lexical stress which i don't know?
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What is the notion of lemma?
Psycholinguistically, a lemma is an abstract conceptual form of a word. However from a lexicographic perspective, the lemma is merely the aorist or canonical form of a word.
In English, the lemma of ...
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Etymology and Morphology
In lexicography is the following claim correct?
To describe the origin of a word in a dictionary only you need either describe its 'etymology' (if that word has a single morpheme) or 'morphology' (if ...
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Important english word which doesn't exist in another language
I'm looking for an important English word which doesn't have a corresponding word in another language. I would be happy even it's a language spoken only by a small population.
Preferably, the word is ...
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How are meanings of a word ordered in a dictionary?
What base does vocabulary.com use for its hierarchy of meanings of a word? For example see http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/sound. Are top levels (numbered list) all homonyms?
What structure do ...
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Is our mental lexicon structured like a tag-cloud system or hierarchical?
Thinking about this discussion on meta i was reasoning about simple self-experiments you can do in psycholinguistics, where you don't need great background knowledge in Cognitive Psychology or ...
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Are there dictionaries like Collins COBUILD for other languages than English? [closed]
Let me explain what I'm after:
monolingual
all examples are taken from a large corpus of contemporary text (the COBUILD series is now using Bank of English)
the senses for each entry are sorted by ...