EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR LEXICOGRAPHY

Editor: Paul Bogaards. p.bogaards@let.leidenuniv.nl

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 Paul Bogaards at the email address above. The deadlines for winter (December), spring (March), summer (June), and autumn (September) issues are respectively 1 August, 1 November, 1 February, and 1 May annually.

The URL of the EURALEX web site is http://www.euralex.org.

Dr Robert Burchfield died on 5 July 2004, after a long illness. He was well-known as the Chief Editor of the monumental Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, published in four volumes between 1972 and 1986, which was later merged with the main dictionary to form the second edition of the OED of 1989. Born in New Zealand, he came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1949 and was later appointed to a university lectureship in English Language: his main field of study was Middle English. He remained in Oxford for the whole of his long and distinguished lexicographical career.

Obituaries were published in The Times on 6 July 2004, and in The Independent on 9 July 2004. The following tribute by John Simpson appeared on the OED web site (http://www.oed.com), and it is reproduced by kind permission of the OED Project and the author:

John Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary

July 2004

The untimely decease of Irina Fedorova who died, aged 50, filled our hearts with great sadness. Irina was a dedicated university lecturer, a talented researcher in a number of fields and particularly in the field of learner s lexicography. She had a very nice personality and was highly respected by her colleagues.

Irina was a graduate of Moscow Teacher Training University where she received a BA and an MA in EFL and literature. Then she worked as senior instructor at Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering and held that position from 1978 to 1991 delivering courses in English Grammar and English for Science.

In 1982 Irina joined the Postgraduate school of the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University and after three years of studies got her PhD in English Language Education and Literature.

Since 1991 Irina s life had been inseparably connected with Moscow State University. First she taught English as a second language at the International Laser Center of MSU. Irina took special interest in developing methods of teaching EFL including English for Science and, being a creative person, she used every opportunity for that purpose. Thus, together with a group of colleagues she started a project called LETS (Learning English Through Science) and her contribution to elaborating the scientific foundation for the project was invaluable. The results of her research were presented in numerous publications and conferences in Russia and abroad.

It was probably at the time of working with laser physicists that Irina realized the enormous need for a new type of bilingual learner s dictionary which would be clearly and totally learner oriented and would be aimed at a wide range of potential users in any field of knowledge. Since then learner s lexicography became the love of her professional life and she was genuinely dedicated to it. Irina actively cooperated with a group of her Russian and British colleagues in compiling an English-Russian Learner s Dictionary which was published by one of the leading Russian publishing houses Russky Yasik in 1998 and has had four editions since then. Irina herself and her colleagues regarded the dictionary as one of her most significant professional achievements.

As an associate professor at the Faculty of Foreign Languages of Moscow State University Irina delivered courses in dictionary use, learner s lexicography and some theoretical aspects of dictionary studies. Her own dedication to the subject and enthusiasm attracted students to her classes. She generously shared her knowledge and research experience with them, encouraging them to go on with their lexicographic studies.

Irina s industriousness and her ability to work were unique, as well as her organizational talent. She spared neither time nor effort taking an active part in the life of the Faculty. Two of the most important positions she held were Vice-President of the National Association of Applied Linguistics (Russia) and Deputy-Chair of the Scientific and Methodological Council (Ministry of Education, Russian Federation).

Irina will always be remembered for her activities as a EURALEX member. She regularly participated in the EURALEX International Congresses and her personal presence at the paper sessions and other social events was very notable.

Irina s optimistic attitude towards life could set a model for all of us. She fought her illness with remarkable courage and fortitude and she continued her professional activities up to the day of her death.

Irina s death is a great loss not only to the Faculty of Foreign Languages of Moscow State University but to the whole academic community and to all the people who cooperated with her professionally. She will always be remembered by her colleagues and friends in Russia and abroad.

Marina Kozyreva

Moscow State University

The 2004 EURALEX General Assembly was held on July 9, 2004, 17:05 -- 18:45, at Université de Bretagne Sud, Lorient, France

Agenda items

The minutes had been published in IJL 16/1 (March 2003). The minutes were approved as published. There were no matters arising.

The President thanked the Lorient congress organizers for their excellent work and for the wonderful congress. He thanked reviewers who donated their time to evaluate the submissions, the session chairs, Université de Bretagne Sud and the city of Lorient.

He also thanked the sponsors, CNRS (French Science and Engineering Research Council), Air France, Hornby Educational Trust, K Dictionaries, IDM, Larousse, Le Robert, and Région Bretagne for their very valuable contributions, and thanked IDM for providing a very relevant and interesting tutorial.

The accounts had been audited and approved. Copies were available for inspection at the meeting.

Particular issues were

The Board proposed increases in subscriptions from Ł37 to Ł39 for individual members, inclusive of IJL, with the corresponding changes for institutional members being from Ł61.50 to Ł65, and for individual members in their first year of membership being from Ł25 to Ł26. The share of the fee to be received by EURALEX would increase from Ł9 to Ł9.50 (institutional members: Ł5 to Ł9.50).

This proposal was made following extensive negotiations with OUP. Also, the Association had agreed, at its general meeting in Stuttgart in 2000 to accept these subscription increases if no better deal could be struck with OUP. In the event, a better deal was struck, and there had been no increase at that point or since, so the Board was now re-proposing an increase which had been agreed before.

Comments from the floor included:

Rik Schutz: was it not possible to express the fee in euros? The Treasurer explained that, to date, OUP had been willing only to receive payments in sterling. The issue would be raised with OUP.

Ilan Kernerman argued that EURALEX should aim to get a better deal from OUP.

Julian Parish said that the cash flow problems resulting from OUP s failure to make payments in good time should be taken up vigorously with OUP. This was agreed by all.

The meeting agreed the new price structure, as proposed.

The International Friendship Fund (IFF) was created by Euralex at the end of the 1980s to assist institutions active in the field of lexicography which faced currency convertibility difficulties and found it difficult to pay for their membership. Euralex has seen an increase in the number of IFF applications and members over the last few years. This has encouraged the Association and its Executive Board to re-examine its policy. It became clear that the primary reason for granting IFF status ("currency convertibility difficulties") was becoming difficult to justify for institutions in countries which joined the European Union in May 2004, and which can now benefit from the same access to research subsidies as other EU members.

It was proposed that, from January 2005, IFF support would be limited to institutions in countries that are not part of the European Union. To ease the transition, it was decided that members from institutions which had been sponsored by the IFF until December 2004 would be eligible to pay the reduced congress fee at the next congress in Torino in 2006, as was the case in the past.

The proposal was agreed.

The editor reported a successful year, with an acceptance rate of 40-50% for papers submitted. There is an average of one year between papers being submitted and being published. This might grow slightly, as there are currently a number of papers in the pipeline, so some will have to wait a little for there to be space for them in the journal.

Electronic access to full papers from the first issue in 2002 is now available to members.

John Williams asked, from the floor, whether OUP could be pressed to make earlier issues available electronically. The editor reported that there were substantial costs involved in amassing earlier papers and transforming them into a suitable format, and he did not know of plans to do this at OUP. [But see the EURALEX Newsletter of December 2004 PB]

The Lawrence Urdang award makes up to Ł1500 per annum available for unpaid lexicographic work, and is administered by EURALEX. Award winners from the 2002 round were from Australia, Germany, Holland, Russia, Slovenia and Spain.

There was currently an open call for applications, with a closing date of 30 Oct 2004.

This would be in Torino (Turin), Italy, Wednesday 6^th-Saturday 9^th September 2006. Our hosts will be the University of Turin, and the chair will be Carla Marello.

Ruth Fjeld asked whether a list of participants at the congress could be made available. Geoffrey Williams explained the technical difficulties which were the reason this had not happened earlier, and announced that lists were now available.

President: Marie-Hélčne Corréard Elected Unopposed

Vice President Anna Braasch Elected Unopposed

Secretary-Treasurer Rosamund Moon Elected Unopposed

Asst Sec-Treasurer Geoffrey Williams Elected Unopposed

Carla Marello has an ex officio position on the Board as Chair of the next congress.

Thierry Fontenelle has an ex-officio position on the Board as Past President.

Krista Varantola leaves the board as outgoing Past President.

Uli Heid and Franti ek Čermák were stepping down from the Board, leaving two existing Board Members (Lionel Kernerman and Adam Kilgarriff) and six new nominees in an election for five places.

There were 83 members present who qualified to vote. Each could vote for up to five members. (It was not allowed to give more than one vote to a candidate.)

Votes were as follows:

New board members joined the old on the podium.

The new President expressed the Board s and Association s great appreciation for the commitment and enthusiasm with which Thierry Fontenelle had contributed to the Association as President, and with which Franti ek Čermák, Uli Heid, Lionel Kernerman and Krista Varantola had contributed as Board Members and in assorted other roles. The meeting joined the President in thanking the outgoing President and members.

Torino, September 2006

I would like to thank the following persons who kindly accepted to review papers for IJL in 2004:

Atkins, B.T.S. (U.K.)

Baayen, H. (The Netherlands)

Béjoint, H. (France)

Bergenholtz, H. (Denmark)

Braasch, A. (Denmark)

Cermak, F. (Czech Republic)

Clayton, M. (U.S.A.)

Cormier, M. (Canada)

Corpas Pastor, G. (Spain)

Corréard, M.-H. (France)

Cowie, A.P. (U.K.)

Daelemans, W. (Belgium)

De Schryver, G.-M. (Belgium)

Dolezal, F. (U.S.A.)

Duval, A. (France)

Fellbaum, C. (U.S.A)

Fontenelle, T. (U.S.A.)

Granger, S. (Belgium)

Hacken, P. ten (U.K.)

Hausmann, F.J. (Germany)

Heid, U. (Germany)

Janssen, M. (France)

Kilgariff, A. (U.K.)

Kuzar, R. (Israel)

Laufer, B. (Israel)

McCreary, D. (U.S.A.)

Mittmann, B. (Germany)

Moon, R. (U.K.)

Nesi, H. (U.K.)

Nuccorini, S. (Italy)

Prinsloo, D. (South-Africa)

Rundell, M. (U.K.)

Seyed-Gohrab, A. (The Netherlands)

Simpson, J. (Australia)

Sinclair, J. (Italy)

Verlinde, S. (Belgium)

Villeda, B. (The Netherlands)

Paul Bogaards

Editor IJL

The third DWS Workshop was held in Brno, Czech Republic, September 6-7, 2004, following 2002 and 2003 events in Brighton, UK. It was run as a pre-conference workshop to the Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD) conference.

Our goal was to attract people from different communities and provide an opportunity for their active interaction, informal as well as formal. Special emphasis was laid on the practical side of the dictionary writing process with each participant given an opportunity to test, evaluate and compare several existing DWSs.

Participants

There were over 40 participants from 15 countries all over the world. The map of the DWS community covers the Earth from 158° W to 175° E, and from 60° N to 41° S, and represents a triangle of Honolulu, Oslo and Wellington, New Zealand.

Differing in background and scope of interest, participants could be divided into two main groups - those creating dictionaries and those producing software for creating the dictionaries. The first group was mostly composed of lexicographers and researchers from academic institutions. Various DWS producing companies, computer scientists, and software engineers made up the second group. The publishing houses (Cambridge University Press, Gyldendal Publishers, Longman Dictionaries) occupied an intermediate position.

The fact that participants had different interests affected planning the workshop programme, too. We avoided overloading the participants with theoretical discussions and gave them more time for playing with various DWSs. Thus, each morning a session was reserved for presentations of research papers while, in the afternoon, the sessions included demonstrations, training, and hands-on experience.

The lexicographers, editors, and linguists were asked to prepare oral presentations, keeping to the same questionnaire:

The DWS producers were asked to give practical answers to those questions and propose the solutions to the problems the lexicographers face. They demonstrated various DWSs at work, with all the participants playing with them, testing and probing (e.g. building a dictionary of Olympic terminology using one of the supplied DWSs). I found this the most interesting part of the Workshop.

There were three systems provided for the hands-on sessions: Dictionary Publishing System by IDM, Matapuna Dictionary Database System by Thinktank Consulting Ltd, and TshwaneLex by TshwaneDJe Human Language Technology. Two more systems were demonstrated: iLex by EMP, and Sketch Engine by Lexical Computing Ltd. Some of them were introduced at the workshops in 2002 and 2003, this time their progress being presented; some others were shown for the first time. The organizers would like to thank the companies who presented their software for their engagement with the event.

Further details on the Workshop programme, abstracts and presentations can be found at http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/dws2004/

After the Workshop, the forum to support the community and promote discussion about DWS among dictionary writers, software providers, publishers, and other interested people (dws-forum@thinktank.co.nz) was organised. We welcome and encourage a wide range of discussions concerning DWS and other related matters on this mailing list. If you want to subscribe to the DWS forum or find out more about the list, please use the following link:
 http://pacific.thinktank.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/dws-forum

We would like to express our special thanks to Dave Moskovitz for organising and supporting this service.

Anna Sinopalnikova

STO: A Danish Lexical Database for NLP/HLT applications

The STO (SprogTeknologisk Ordbase) Lexicon is currently the most comprehensive computational lexicon of Danish comprising approx. 81,530 entry words, and it is well integrated with the European activities in the field of lexicon development. The STO lexical database is available on CD-ROM via the European Language Resources Association (ELRA), http://www.elda.fr/catalog.html.

Morphology: PoS, inflectional patterns, agreement features, noun compounding, spelling variants, etc. Syntax: subcategorisation frames (categorical and functional valence), alternation, diathesis, reflexivity, etc. Semantics: three different levels of specificity. The most specific is Level 3, which contains sense distinction, ontological type, selectional restrictions, semantic structures, domain information, etc. Level 2 is a proper subset of Level 3 representing a lean semantics, whereas Level 1 provides information on source domain only.

STO is a valuable resource also to linguistic researchers, teachers and learners of Danish. A web interface provides easy access to a large part of the material facilitating word searches, searches for morphological and syntactic patterns, noun compounds, etc., and also corpus investigations. The interface (in Danish) is accessible at URL: http://cst.dk/sto/uk.

Further information: Center for Sprogteknologi (CST), University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Contact us: Hanne Fersře, Anna Braasch; e-mail to {hanne, anna}@cst.dk

Ivanovo State University, Russia, September 12-15, 2005.

Guest-lecturer of the Conference: Prof. Dr.h.s. Heribert Picht, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. The sessions to be held during the Conference will be headed by prominent scholars from Russia and other countries. They are:

The working languages of the Conference are Russian and English. The Organizing Committee is planning to publish Conference Proceedings.

For further information please contact Conference Coordinator Katerina A. Shaposhnikova, tel.: +7 (0932) 37 54 02, e-mail: lexico2005@ivanovo.ac.ru or karpova@interline.ivanovo.ru , fax: +7 (0932) 32 66 00.

March

23, Cergy-Pontoise, France : Journée des dictionnaires. Colloque international et exposition Cent ans du Petit Larousse (1905-2005) . Information : Professeur Jean Pruvost, Université de Cergy Pontoise, pruvost.jean@wanadoo.fr.

May

18-21, Maastricht, The Netherlands: Maastricht Session of the 4^th International Maastricht-Łódź Duo Colloquium on Translation and Meaning . Information: Drs Marcel Thelen, Department of Translation and Interpreting, Maastricht School of International Communication, Hogeschool Zuyd, P.O. Box 634, 6200 AP Maastricht, The Netherlands. E-mail: m.m.g.j.thelen@hszuyd.nl. Tel.: + 31 43 346 6471, Fax: + 31 43 346 6649. Web site: http://www.hszuyd.msti.translation-and-meaning.nedweb.com

June

1-3, ASIALEX 2005 Singapore (National University of Singapore) Words in Asian Cultural Contexts . Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 December 2004. For further details: http://asialex.nus.edu.sg/

June

8-11, DSNA XV Biennial Meeting, Boston University, Boston MA. Information: David Jost, Houghton Mifflin Co., davidarthurjost@yahoo.com and http//polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dsna/DSNABostonMtg.html. Membership in DSNA can be obtained via the form at
http//polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dsna/membform.html.

June

16 18, COMPLEX 2005, 8th Conference on Computational Lexicography and Text Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Institute for Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary. Information: Júlia Pajzs pajzs@nytud.hu. Phone: (36 1) 32 14 830, Fax: (36 1) 32 29 297

July

13 15, Bloemfontein, South Africa: 10th International AFRILEX Conference. Information: Dr. Elsabé Taljard, Department of African Languages, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa. Tel.: + 27-12-420-2494, Fax: + 27-12-420-3163, E-mail: etaljard@postino.up.ac.za, Web site: http://www.up.ac.za/academic/libarts/afrilang/homelex.html

July

24 29, Madison, Wisconsin, USA, AILA 2005. Information: Robert Ranieri, American Association for Applied Linguistics, 3416 Primm Lane, Birmingham, Alabama 35216, USA, Web site: www.aila2005.org

September

23-25, Łódź, Poland: Łódź Session of the 4^th International Maastricht-Łódź Duo Colloquium on Translation and Meaning . Information: Prof. Dr habil. Barbara-Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Department of English Language, University of Łódź, Al. Kosciuszki 65, 90-514 Łódź, Poland. E-mail: duoduo@krysia.uni.lodz.pl. Tel.: + 48 42 636 6337, Fax: + 48 42 636 6337/ ..6872. Web site: http://www.hszuyd.msti.translation-and-meaning.nedweb.com

October

13-15, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: The many faces of Phraseology. An interdisciplinary conference. Information: Prof. Sylviane Granger, granger@lige.ucl.ac.be and www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/fltr/germ/etan/cecl/cecl.html

September

6-9 , Turin, Italy: 12^th International EURALEX conference. Information: Professor Carla Marello, Universitŕ di Torino. E-mail: marello@cisi.unito.it