ABSTRACT:In this article we discuss the use of Swahili terminology in the field of linguistics. In particular, we are interested in finding out whether the rules laid out by scholars in the scientific literature for the creation of terminological neologisms in Swahili correspond with actual practice. In order to do this, three steps are taken. In Step 1 we undertake the semi-automatic extraction of linguistics terminology, by comparing occurrence frequencies in a special-purpose corpus consisting of ten recent Swahili language/linguistics textbooks, with their corresponding frequencies in a twenty-two-million-token general-language reference corpus of Swahili. In Step 2 we study the source languages and actual word formation processes of the terms and neologisms with the highest keyness values obtained during the previous step. This discussion is divided into several sections, one section per source language. In Step 3, the terms and neologisms that have been found are compared with their treatment (or absence thereof) in two existing reference works, a general dictionary and a linguistics terminology list. These three steps are preceded by brief introductions to (i) the Swahili language; (ii) its dictionaries and terminology lists; (iii) its metalexicographical, terminological and neologism studies; and (iv) our use of the term "neologism." The three steps are followed by a discussion of our findings and a conclusion.
{"title":"Linguistics Terminology and Neologisms in Swahili: Rules vs. Practice","authors":"Gilles-Maurice de Schryver","doi":"10.1353/dic.2020.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2020.0006","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In this article we discuss the use of Swahili terminology in the field of linguistics. In particular, we are interested in finding out whether the rules laid out by scholars in the scientific literature for the creation of terminological neologisms in Swahili correspond with actual practice. In order to do this, three steps are taken. In Step 1 we undertake the semi-automatic extraction of linguistics terminology, by comparing occurrence frequencies in a special-purpose corpus consisting of ten recent Swahili language/linguistics textbooks, with their corresponding frequencies in a twenty-two-million-token general-language reference corpus of Swahili. In Step 2 we study the source languages and actual word formation processes of the terms and neologisms with the highest keyness values obtained during the previous step. This discussion is divided into several sections, one section per source language. In Step 3, the terms and neologisms that have been found are compared with their treatment (or absence thereof) in two existing reference works, a general dictionary and a linguistics terminology list. These three steps are preceded by brief introductions to (i) the Swahili language; (ii) its dictionaries and terminology lists; (iii) its metalexicographical, terminological and neologism studies; and (iv) our use of the term \"neologism.\" The three steps are followed by a discussion of our findings and a conclusion.","PeriodicalId":35106,"journal":{"name":"Dictionaries","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dic.2020.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45750287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Usage guides invariably include prescriptive rules codifying meanings for words like aggravate and infer. The guides do not always pronounce proscribed forms as incorrect, but when they claim incorrect meanings, irrespective of actual usage, they suggest the existence of some principle of language that can serve as an authority in correctness judgments about word meanings akin to grammatical "rules" for correctness judgments about morphology and syntax. What those principles might be is the topic of this paper. The most basic assumed principle is that words have discrete meanings and that speakers and writers use words incorrectly if they use them for senses they do not have. But this assumption does little more than restate the proscription. For general principles that can be used as an authority for claims of correctness, the most frequent appeal in usage guides is to etymology in both its narrow sense of word origins and its wider sense of word histories. Appeals to the related notions of "confusion," "differentiation," and "slipshod extension" support and reveal the assumptions about etymology underlying correctness claims.
{"title":"Etymology and the Doctrine of Correctness: Word Meaning in Dictionaries of English Usage","authors":"Don Chapman","doi":"10.1353/dic.2019.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2019.0015","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Usage guides invariably include prescriptive rules codifying meanings for words like aggravate and infer. The guides do not always pronounce proscribed forms as incorrect, but when they claim incorrect meanings, irrespective of actual usage, they suggest the existence of some principle of language that can serve as an authority in correctness judgments about word meanings akin to grammatical \"rules\" for correctness judgments about morphology and syntax. What those principles might be is the topic of this paper. The most basic assumed principle is that words have discrete meanings and that speakers and writers use words incorrectly if they use them for senses they do not have. But this assumption does little more than restate the proscription. For general principles that can be used as an authority for claims of correctness, the most frequent appeal in usage guides is to etymology in both its narrow sense of word origins and its wider sense of word histories. Appeals to the related notions of \"confusion,\" \"differentiation,\" and \"slipshod extension\" support and reveal the assumptions about etymology underlying correctness claims.","PeriodicalId":35106,"journal":{"name":"Dictionaries","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dic.2019.0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45898424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:As far as Italy and Italian are concerned, the concept of language usage largely depends on the fact that, for centuries and well after the political unification of Italy in 1861, Italian existed only as a literary language, while people spoke the local dialect or the regional variety of the language. This paper provides a brief historical introduction to the problem of usage and its presentation in dictionaries before commenting on two fairly recent, and conceptually different, models of usage in Italian lexicography. Both the Dizionario italiano Sabatini-Coletti and the Nuovo dizionario De Mauro date from the late 1990s, but while the latter is corpus-based and relies on word-frequency lists, the former introduces the concept of word availability (as distinct from word frequency) and applies it in its entries. In a way, these different lexicographical approaches show that language usage is still an issue of concern in the Italian linguistic panorama of the twenty-first century.
{"title":"Usage in the Lexicography of Italian: Two Viewpoints and a Few Basic Reflections","authors":"G. Polimeni","doi":"10.1353/dic.2019.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2019.0016","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:As far as Italy and Italian are concerned, the concept of language usage largely depends on the fact that, for centuries and well after the political unification of Italy in 1861, Italian existed only as a literary language, while people spoke the local dialect or the regional variety of the language. This paper provides a brief historical introduction to the problem of usage and its presentation in dictionaries before commenting on two fairly recent, and conceptually different, models of usage in Italian lexicography. Both the Dizionario italiano Sabatini-Coletti and the Nuovo dizionario De Mauro date from the late 1990s, but while the latter is corpus-based and relies on word-frequency lists, the former introduces the concept of word availability (as distinct from word frequency) and applies it in its entries. In a way, these different lexicographical approaches show that language usage is still an issue of concern in the Italian linguistic panorama of the twenty-first century.","PeriodicalId":35106,"journal":{"name":"Dictionaries","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dic.2019.0016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47503195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Green's Dictionary of Slang Online by Jonathon Green (review)","authors":"Ammon Shea","doi":"10.1353/dic.2019.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2019.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35106,"journal":{"name":"Dictionaries","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dic.2019.0022","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46527131","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Etymological Collections of English Words and Provincial Expressions by White Kennett (review)","authors":"A. Liberman","doi":"10.1353/dic.2019.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2019.0024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35106,"journal":{"name":"Dictionaries","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dic.2019.0024","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48824431","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"John Algeo, A Life with Language: In Memoriam","authors":"W. Kretzschmar","doi":"10.1353/dic.2019.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2019.0021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35106,"journal":{"name":"Dictionaries","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dic.2019.0021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44617738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:The online Middle English Dictionary, after lying dormant for twenty years, during 2016–2019 staged a revival, receiving both new technical underpinnings (a new platform and interface) and considerable editorial revision, the latter drawing on decades of collected corrections as well as a fresh review of recent scholarship. The MED's unique organizational placement within the University of Michigan Library helped secure it the NEH funding necessary for the success of the immediate project, and it offers some hope for a future of ongoing revision and maintenance.
{"title":"The Middle English Dictionary Revenant","authors":"P. Schaffner","doi":"10.1353/dic.2019.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2019.0020","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The online Middle English Dictionary, after lying dormant for twenty years, during 2016–2019 staged a revival, receiving both new technical underpinnings (a new platform and interface) and considerable editorial revision, the latter drawing on decades of collected corrections as well as a fresh review of recent scholarship. The MED's unique organizational placement within the University of Michigan Library helped secure it the NEH funding necessary for the success of the immediate project, and it offers some hope for a future of ongoing revision and maintenance.","PeriodicalId":35106,"journal":{"name":"Dictionaries","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dic.2019.0020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47220268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This paper focuses on a set of 180 neologisms recorded in both Australian English (AusE) and New Zealand English (NZE) in order to examine their actual place and contexts of origin and to clarify the prevailing direction of transfer or "borrowing" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of these neologisms (90%) were recorded earlier in AusE, which provides a lexicographic answer to the linguistic question as to whether AusE could be regarded as a regional epicenter of linguistic influence within Australasia. The majority of the neologisms are informal words pertaining to social values shared by Australians and New Zealanders. They reflect their common pioneering history, socioeconomic development, and wartime experience, and they highlight the shared contexts that fostered the takeup of words coined in one country by the other. This prompts further questions on the usage of these neologisms in twenty-first century AusE and NZE and whether any asymmetries in their currency and productivity correlate with the source country. Data from the Australian and New Zealand segments of GloWbE (Global Corpus of Web-based English 2012) show that higher frequencies of usage and greater morphological productivity do tend to correlate with the country of origin. Evidently regional neologisms typically remain more vibrant in the discourse of the society and culture that first coined them.
{"title":"Shared Lexical Innovations in Australian and New Zealand English","authors":"Pam Peters, Adam Smith, Tobias Bernaisch","doi":"10.1353/dic.2019.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2019.0011","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper focuses on a set of 180 neologisms recorded in both Australian English (AusE) and New Zealand English (NZE) in order to examine their actual place and contexts of origin and to clarify the prevailing direction of transfer or \"borrowing\" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of these neologisms (90%) were recorded earlier in AusE, which provides a lexicographic answer to the linguistic question as to whether AusE could be regarded as a regional epicenter of linguistic influence within Australasia. The majority of the neologisms are informal words pertaining to social values shared by Australians and New Zealanders. They reflect their common pioneering history, socioeconomic development, and wartime experience, and they highlight the shared contexts that fostered the takeup of words coined in one country by the other. This prompts further questions on the usage of these neologisms in twenty-first century AusE and NZE and whether any asymmetries in their currency and productivity correlate with the source country. Data from the Australian and New Zealand segments of GloWbE (Global Corpus of Web-based English 2012) show that higher frequencies of usage and greater morphological productivity do tend to correlate with the country of origin. Evidently regional neologisms typically remain more vibrant in the discourse of the society and culture that first coined them.","PeriodicalId":35106,"journal":{"name":"Dictionaries","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dic.2019.0011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45906867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Charles Sanders Peirce, the eminent American philosopher who is widely credited with many important contributions to modern thought, lived much of his adult life in dire poverty and was forced to take paid employment where he found it. Among his myriad writing gigs was a considerable stint in lexicography: he contributed about 6,000 definitions to The Century Dictionary and edited many more. I examine Peirce's definitions in the context of his other writing and intellectual pursuits. Using the API supplied by Wordnik and Sketch Engine software, I have also constructed two corpora from Century definitions, representing those written by Peirce and those written by others, in order to look at the statistical properties of his lexicographic output. Examination of the corpora at the macro level reveals no significant differences between the definitions written by Peirce and by others, but individual study of Peirce's definitions in this great American dictionary is a source of insight into his interests, preoccupations, and analytical approach that has so far scarcely been tapped.
{"title":"The Century Dictionary Definitions of Charles Sanders Peirce","authors":"Orin Hargraves","doi":"10.1353/dic.2019.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2019.0012","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Charles Sanders Peirce, the eminent American philosopher who is widely credited with many important contributions to modern thought, lived much of his adult life in dire poverty and was forced to take paid employment where he found it. Among his myriad writing gigs was a considerable stint in lexicography: he contributed about 6,000 definitions to The Century Dictionary and edited many more. I examine Peirce's definitions in the context of his other writing and intellectual pursuits. Using the API supplied by Wordnik and Sketch Engine software, I have also constructed two corpora from Century definitions, representing those written by Peirce and those written by others, in order to look at the statistical properties of his lexicographic output. Examination of the corpora at the macro level reveals no significant differences between the definitions written by Peirce and by others, but individual study of Peirce's definitions in this great American dictionary is a source of insight into his interests, preoccupations, and analytical approach that has so far scarcely been tapped.","PeriodicalId":35106,"journal":{"name":"Dictionaries","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dic.2019.0012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42408176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:The politeness markers please, thank you, and sorry provide a raft of problems for lexicographical treatment. Grammatically, they fall between categories. As pragmatic elements, they defy easy definition, and variations in their usage are subtle. Few words are prescribed so vigorously as politeness markers ("always say please and thank you"), yet they do not fit the stereotype of a prescription, in that there is no proscription. This study investigates how please, thank you, thanks, and sorry are treated in thirteen monolingual dictionaries of English, finding variation in (a) the extent to which their interactional functions are covered, (b) the types of information contained in definitions, and (c) the (sometimes very subtle) ways in which information about the potential (im)polite effects of these words is communicated. Learner dictionaries generally provide more explicit information about the polysemy of these expressions, while traditional American lexicography provides much less useful information, in part because of a tendency to define interactional word senses using similar formulae to those for denotational senses. The best definition practice emphasizes the actions the words perform and the contexts in which the actions take place.
{"title":"Defining your P's and Q's: Describing and Prescribing Politeness in Dictionaries","authors":"M. Murphy","doi":"10.1353/dic.2019.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dic.2019.0014","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The politeness markers please, thank you, and sorry provide a raft of problems for lexicographical treatment. Grammatically, they fall between categories. As pragmatic elements, they defy easy definition, and variations in their usage are subtle. Few words are prescribed so vigorously as politeness markers (\"always say please and thank you\"), yet they do not fit the stereotype of a prescription, in that there is no proscription. This study investigates how please, thank you, thanks, and sorry are treated in thirteen monolingual dictionaries of English, finding variation in (a) the extent to which their interactional functions are covered, (b) the types of information contained in definitions, and (c) the (sometimes very subtle) ways in which information about the potential (im)polite effects of these words is communicated. Learner dictionaries generally provide more explicit information about the polysemy of these expressions, while traditional American lexicography provides much less useful information, in part because of a tendency to define interactional word senses using similar formulae to those for denotational senses. The best definition practice emphasizes the actions the words perform and the contexts in which the actions take place.","PeriodicalId":35106,"journal":{"name":"Dictionaries","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/dic.2019.0014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44345448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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