EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR LEXICOGRAPHY
EURALEX NEWSLETTER
Editors: Carla Marello and Rosamund Moon. Address for correspondence and contributions:
Carla Marello
Corso Unione Sovietica 115
I-10134 Torino
Italy
This quarterly Newsletter is intended to include not only official announcements but also news about EURALEX members, their publications, projects, and (it is hoped) their opinions, and news about other lexicographical organizations. Please try to support this by sending newsletter contributions to Carla Marello at the above address, or emailing the editors.
| winter (December) | 15 September |
|---|---|
| spring (March) | 15 December |
| summer (June) | 15 March |
| autumn (September) | 15 June |
The URL of the EURALEX web site is http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/euralex.
The Board is very happy to announce that the tenth EURALEX Congress will be held in 2002 in Copenhagen, hosted by the Center for Sprogteknologi (CST). We are very grateful to the organizers at CST, and in particular Bente Maegaard and Anna Braasch. The first circular will appear in 2001, and details will be posted on the EURALEX web site.
Marie-Hélène Corréard
EURALEX Secretary
5 place Hubert Dubedout
38000 Grenoble
France
Email: correard@worldnet.fr
Paula Thomson
EURALEX Society Liaison
Journals, Oxford University Press
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, GB
Email: thomsonp@oup.co.uk
Avec la disparition au mois d'août dernier de Danielle Corbin, c'est toute la lexicologie française dans ce qu'elle a de plus précis, profond et novateur qui est en deuil. Danielle Corbin nous a laissé en effet une oeuvre considérable qui a définitivement marqué et notre terminologie et notre manière d'appréhender la morphologie des mots. Ainsi, sans toujours le savoir, nous sommes tous empreints de ce qu'elle nous a apporté de manière décisive dans l'approche de la morphologie lexicale: rappelons par exemple que tous les étudiants français emploient aujourd'hui le terme `mot construit' et qu'il s'agit d'un terme que tous les linguistes ont emprunté à la terminologie de Danielle Corbin, qui avait choisi de désigner ainsi les mots composés et les mots dérivés. Et c'est bien en effet dans l'interprétation des mécanismes de la construction des mots qu'elle a introduit une véritable révolution.
En 1987 étaient publiés dans ce cadre, chez Max Niemeyer Verlag, deux volumes fondateurs intitulés La Morphologie dérivationnelle et structuration du lexique, qui renouvelaient en profondeur la problématique et la terminologie des analyses faites dans ce domaine. Une deuxième édition en était publiée en 1991 aux Presses Universitaires de Lille, en même temps que paraissait, coordonné et présenté par Danielle Corbin, également aux Presses Universitaires de Lille, le numéro 10 de la revue Lexique consacré à La formation des mots: structures et interprétations. Rappelons au passage que c'est à Danielle et Pierre Corbin que l'on doit la création de la revue Lexique, dont le premier numéro date de 1982 et qui a fortement contribué au rayonnement de notre discipline.
Les bases théoriques du très grand nombre de travaux que conduira ensuite Danielle Corbin sont ici posées. Il s'agit pour en résumer très brièvement les fondements de rappeler que pour cette grande lexicologue de formation structuraliste, il y a élaboration simultanée de la structure et du sens pour tous les mots construits, et que cette construction se doit d'être clairement reflétée par la représentation grammaticale qui en est faite. Danielle Corbin propose en somme un modèle associatif en opposition au modèle dissociatif dominant en grammaire générative qui donne, à tort à ses yeux, la première place à la structure en ne faisant intervenir qu'en second le sens à partir de règles interprétatives. Choisir l'associativité comme mode de représentation des relations entre forme et sens dans les mots construits a bien entendu un prix à payer: il faut savoir réduire les distorsions observables entre forme et sens en procédant tantôt à une analyse précise et hiérarchisée du sens tantôt à une analyse plus abstraite de la structure.
Danielle Corbin se situe ainsi au coeur des débats sur la notion de base et de dérivation, ne travaillant ni sur le terrain de la sémantique et de la logique, ni sur celui de la lexicographie traditionnelle, mais comme le fait aussi G. Gross, en axant sa recherche sur des règles et des propriétés de langue qu'elle forge patiemment en auscultant son fonctionnement. De ces règles peuvent alors naître, quant au domaine qui nous préoccupe, des dictionnaires expérimentaux qui répondent à des impératifs d'interprétation compositionnelle.
En l'occurrence, en proposant un modèle dérivationnel d'une stricte fidélité à la segmentation en morphèmes, avec des règles d'association dans la construction des mots auxquels sont renvoyés tous les écarts attestés, en respectant l'associativité forme et sens, Danielle Corbin a pu très tôt, avant même la dernière décennie du XXe s., imaginer deux projets complémentaires: d'une part à la fois une Grammaire dérivationnelle du français, c'est-à-dire la liste explicite des règles et principes et contraintes qui gouvernent la construction des mots, et un dictionnaire des préfixes et suffixes, et d'autre part un Dictionnaire dérivationnel du français, dictionnaire expérimental analysant les structures et les interprétations des mots construits, en fonction de cette grammaire.
C'est en grande partie sur ce projet qu'a été créé au sein de l'Institut National de la Langue Française (l'INaLF) le laboratoire installé à l'Université de Lille 3 depuis 1980 où elle professait, laboratoire intitulé `Syntaxe, Interprétation, Lexique' (SILEX). Avec son mari Pierre Corbin, spécialiste de métalexicographie et de lexicographie théorique, elle a forgé là un haut lieu de réflexion sur les mots et sur les moyens de les analyser et de les décrire, où nombre d'étudiants français et de tous pays sont venus s'initier à une lexicologie à la fois très porteuse et très pointue.
Il convient enfin de rappeler que l'oeuvre de Danielle Corbin n'est pas achevée: avec cette extraordinaire énergie qui était la sienne, elle était en train en effet de rédiger un ouvrage révolutionnaire sur la formation des mots, et elle a laissé force documents et fichiers informatiques sur lesquels son mari, Pierre, et un de leurs fils déjà linguiste, François, sont en train de travailler pour que ne se perde pas une pensée aussi riche et fondatrice. Car Danielle Corbin, c'était cela aussi, le coeur d'une famille très unie, tout entière dévouée à la recherche. Une famille qui a profondément marqué la lexicologie et qui continuera de la marquer.
Jean Pruvost
The following is the text of the speech that was made at the ceremony, in acknowledgement of her achievements.
Beryl Atkins - or Sue as she's known to her colleagues and friends - writes dictionaries. She has been from A to Z many times. This may surprise you for a number of reasons. Firstly, it seems odd that anyone should actually write dictionaries. They have the feel of definitive documents - we say `the dictionary' as we say `the bible' - and many people suspect they have been laid down, like the Ten Commandments, by some force greater than mere man or woman. Secondly, why should that be grounds for an honorary doctorate? If people in fact do write dictionaries, then, surely, it is a task that has carried down unperturbed through the ages, with dusty scholars beavering away in ivory towers, and why ever would such work be noteworthy enough to be reason for an honorary doctorate? And thirdly, once you have met Sue Atkins, you will think `how could she possibly be one of those dusty scholars?'
Sue is a writer of dictionaries, or lexicographer, who never allows dust time to settle. She has never seen dictionaries as bible-like; on the contrary, she has been the first to raise questions about whether they get their facts right and whether they are actually helping their users. Her dictionaries have not toed the line. Thanks to her more than anyone else, dictionaries have been changing to meet the needs of people who use them. She has undertaken and applied research on how people use dictionaries (and established that `settling family arguments' is very high on the list) and immediately put the results to use (not just by producing steel-capped dictionaries for those arguments!)
Her front line area has been English-to-French dictionaries, first at Collins, where the Collins Robert bears her stamp. It broke new ground by giving prominence to how and where particular words were used - their likely neighbours, phrases they occur in, their contexts of use. This is the information that language-learners need in order to select the right word. She moved from Collins to Oxford University Press, where she set in motion a regime of `corpus lexicography' - using computers to find lots of examples of how a word is used, before writing the definition.
While Sue always makes it clear that working from A to Z is the real work, she is very open to new opportunities, and with Sue, a new opportunity explored means a new action plan: whenever one meets her, a torrent of insights, plans, schemes, and ideas comes flooding out. She advised IBM on how they should make use of dictionary data: `I can see the headline now,' someone commented: `Sussex Housewife Takes Over IBM.' Sadly for IBM, perhaps, the takeover never materialized. She inspired computer scientists at Digital in Palo Alto, in many ways: not only to build ambitious links between texts and dictionary, but also to set up an array of no less than six linked monitors for each computer workstation, allowing the researcher unparalleled visual access to the workspace. Later, modesty prevailed, and the six monitors were reduced to three. She instigated the British National Corpus, a resource with a hundred million words of current British English which is now widely used by researchers and learners of the English language all over the globe.
So what does it take to be a star lexicographer? First, linguistic insight. Talk to anyone about Sue, the theme comes up. She has it in spades. While she declares her credentials as a lexicographer, she is hugely respected in theoretical linguistics circles. Her main current project (despite official retirement) is FrameNet. With the renowned linguist Charles Fillmore, of Berkeley University in California, she aims to tell the truth about how a large set of words behave, based on both objective evidence and a theoretical account of how words work, in a project that marries the two worlds, practical and theoretical, lexicographic and linguistic, together. Second, perseverance. It is a long way from A to Z, and you have to keep the project going right to the end. All those people who have stood in the way of plans that Sue has been pursuing stand witness to her perseverance! Third, organization. Adorning the wall of the Collins-COBUILD project was an intricate multicoloured chart looking like an X-ray photograph of the human brain in action. It turned out to be Sue's one-page map of the decision procedures for lexicographical analysis of nouns.
Wit helps too. Sue is extremely witty; wit launched from a flame sharp tongue with so much energy in a stream of words that those who are hostile to lexicography, incompetent or chauvinists, are in mortal danger. (Anyone falling in those categories is advised to tape conversations with Sue in order to listen to it a few times afterwards so that they can pick up on all the things they have missed the first and second time round. They might just discover in listening to the tape for the second time that they were actually verbally abused and not praised as their first impression might have been!) That may be your first impression of Sue Atkins. Then you discover the soft, warm, patient and friendly person who is always eager to help, full of sympathy to those who struggle (to master practical lexicography), a mother who loves her children, a supportive spouse - a wonderful, balanced and gifted person.
You might think a life of lexicography was a long way away from political activity. Not so for Sue. While the end of apartheid in South Africa meant, for most of us, a thrill of relief and cause for celebration, for Sue it meant that but also an opportunity. The South African languages, as well as the South African people, had emerged from second-class status - so needed dictionaries. How, from scratch, do you go about making dictionaries for a set of languages, often without standardized written forms, and with no dictionary-making tradition? Ask Sue! With two colleagues, she pioneered lexicographic training in South Africa with two major training courses. In 1997 she was at Rhodes University, teaching on monolingual lexicography - this was well-timed, as it was on the eve of the establishment of dictionary units for all of the 11 official languages of SA. The second was in 1998, at the University of Pretoria, on bilingual lexicography. She guided the delegates patiently through all the crucial steps in the compilation of dictionaries and tips and traps in the establishment of lexicographic units. Her unique combination of enthusiasm, incisiveness, sheer grasp of all the issues, and indefatigability was inspiring to everyone. Many was the time that the students would be starting to flag towards the end of a long hot day but Sue would re-invigorate and revive everyone with her phenomenal energy.
For her insight, for all the people she has inspired, for the astonishing impact she has had on lexicography - making dictionaries ever more useful to the people who use them, pushing it to look outside itself, building collaborations with linguists, language teachers, computer scientists - for all this, we would like to grant Sue Atkins an honorary doctorate.
The University of Brighton
On July 9-10, a lexicographical conference was held in Florence, Italy, organized by Prof. Pietro G. Beltrami and his staff of the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, a major lexicographical centre where Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origine, i.e. a historical dictionary of Italian is being compiled. The goal of the conference was to present some of the major European lexicographical projects including the Oxford English Dictionary, the great Dutch dictionary, the great Czech Dictionary of Idioms, a Galician dictionary, and of course the Italian historical dictionary. A proposal for a closer lexicographical cooperation in various domains was discussed, including support of the exchange of lexicographical knowledge, especially in the field of methodology, and of researchers. Plans for publishing a European Lexicographical Review and setting up a web page were also discussed, and joint projects where a number of academic partners from Europe could cooperate were considered. Some of these may be submitted to the European Union for funding.
Frantisek Cermák
Laurent Gautier, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon
The Tokyo course will run from 27-29 March, following a JACET workshop on dictionaries on 26 March. It will held at Seisen University, and the course fee will be Yen 30,000. For information, please write to Professor M. Ohsugi, Seisen University, 3-16-21 Higashi-Gotanda, Shinigawa-ku, Tokyo 141-8642, Japan. Email: ohsugi@seisen-u.ac.jp.
The Exeter course will run from 23-27 April, and the course fee will be GBP 300 (this excludes accommodation and board). For information, please write to Dr R.R.K. Hartmann, Dictionary Research Centre, School of English, University of Exeter, Queen's Building, Exeter EX4 4QH, GB. Email: r.r.k.hartmann@exeter.ac.uk.
Details can also be found on the DRC web site: http://www.ex.ac.uk/drc.
March
27-29, Tokyo: InterLex 15. See item in the main newsletter.
April
9-11, Rome, Italy: Fourth International Symposium on Phraseology. The
main themes of the Symposium will concern cross-cultural and
typological issues, although all aspects of phraseology are
embraced. Info: ISP4, Dipartimento di Linguistica - Department of
Linguistics, Università di Roma Tre, Via Castro Pretorio, 20,
00185 Roma, Italy. Fax: +39 06 4957333. Tel: +39 06 4959354. Email:
ISP4@uniroma3.it. Web site: http://www.uniroma3.it/ling/isp4.
23-27, Exeter, GB: InterLex 15. See item in the main newsletter.
May
6-9, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA: XIIIth Biennial Meeting of the
Dictionary Society of North America. The 2001 meeting will give DSNA
members an opportunity to join with the University of Michigan in
celebrating the completion of the Middle English Dictionary and
the electronic publication of the Middle English
Compendium. Web sites: http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dsna/
and http://www.hti.umich.edu/dsna/.
July
2-4, Pietersburg, South Africa: 6th International Conference on
Lexicography. Conference theme: `Computerized lexicography and the
development of corpora'. Info: Prof. D.J.Prinsloo, African Languages,
University of Pretoria, Pretoria, 0002, South Africa. Email: prinsloo@postino.up.ac.za.
Web site: http://www.up.ac.za/academic/libarts/afrilang/homelex.html.
August
8-10, Seoul, Korea: Biennial Conference of the Asian Association for
Lexicography (ASIALEX). The second ASIALEX conference, with the theme
`Asian Bilingualism and the Dictionary,' will be hosted by the Center
for Linguistic Informatics Research (formerly, Lexicographical Center)
of Yonsei University, Seoul. Info: Dr Jitai Sohn, ASIALEX, Centre for
Linguistic Informatics Research, (Lexicographical Center), Yonsei
University, Seoul 120-749, Korea. Tel: +82-2-2123-3511, 4197. Fax:
+82-2-393-5001. Email: asialex@lex.yonsei.ac.kr.
Web site: http://asialex.yonsei.ac.kr.
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