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 spring (March), summer (June), autumn (September) and winter (December), issues are respectively 1 December, 1 March, 1 July, and 1 October annually.
The URL of the EURALEX web site is www.euralex.org
Josette Rey-Debove (1929-2005)
Mardi 22 février 2005, alors qu elle était en vacances au Sénégal, est morte subitement Josette Rey-Debove, la plus grande lexicographe de notre époque. C est au mois d avril 1953 que Josette Debove, née le 16 novembre 1929, capésienne et ex-enseignante (pour six mois) du collège Edgar-Quinet, arrive à Casablanca pour rejoindre Paul Robert et son équipe de rédacteurs du Nouveau Littré . Le dictionnaire en est au huitième fascicule. Josette Debove commence par les articles Châtier et Châtiment.
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Certes, elle avait déjà répondu un an plus tôt à l appel d offre lancé dans Le Monde et dans Le Figaro, mais sa candidature avait été stupidement écartée par un collaborateur de Paul Robert qui, lui, invente un tour de rattrapage sous la forme d un rapport critique sur les caractéristiques originales de son Dictionnaire. Or, le texte qu il reçoit deux jours plus tard provoque sa stupeur, tant il dénote de rares qualités de style et de perspicacité (Robert 1980, 31). Le 11 septembre 1954 - nous en sommes au fascicule 14 [E - Elyme] - Josette Debove épouse son collègue Alain Rey, collaborateur au Dictionnaire depuis mai 1952 [quatrième fascicule - Baignoire]. En avril 1955, Josette Rey met un mois à rédiger l article Faire [fascicule 18], amélioré grâce aux remarques de Robert Le Bidois. C est encore elle qui doit l hiver 56/57 rédiger l article Homme, et ceci à Paris où le Dictionnaire a déménagé un an plus tôt. En avril 1962, le couple Rey participe aux côtés de Paul Robert au Xe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie romanes à Strasbourg. Et lorsque le 28 juin 1964, Robert termine son Grand Robert, Josette Rey est parmi ceux qui signent le compliment Bravo, Patron ! Aussitôt l équipe (sans le patron cette-fois-ci) s attelle au Petit Robert qui naît fin mars 1967.
En décembre 1968, Josette Rey-Debove, qui a déjà publié d importants articles sur la définition (Cahiers de lexicologie 1966, TraLili 1967), soutiendra une thèse de doctorat de 3e cycle. En janvier 1969, le couple Rey acceptera deux postes de professeur associé à Bloomington (université d Indiana) et y séjournera jusqu au mois d août. Il en sortira, pour Josette Rey-Debove, la collaboration avec Th. A. Sebeok pour la direction de la collection Approaches to Semiotics (The Hague : Mouton). C est comme vol. 13 de cette collection que paraîtra en 1971 la thèse sous le titre de Etude linguistique et sémiotique des dictionnaires français contemporains (329 pages), livre-phare, fondateur (avec le Manual of Lexicography de L. Zgusta également paru en 1971) de la métalexicographie moderne. De retour des Etats-Unis, Madame Rey-Debove est mise à contribution pour collaborer au Micro Robert, baptisé le 25 mars 1971.
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A partir de cette époque, l activité de Josette Rey-Debove est triple. Il y a d abord la linguiste universitaire avec les deux grands livres que sont Le Métalangage. Etude linguistique du discours sur le langage (1978, thèse d Etat, Paris : Dictionnaires Le Robert [Collection L ordre des mots], deuxième tirage 1986, Armand Colin 1997) et La Linguistique du signe. Une approche sémiotique du langage (Paris : Armand Colin 1998), ainsi que Lexique. Sémiotique (Paris : PUF 1979) et une centaine d articles. Il y a ensuite la lexicographe artisanale qui collabore chez Robert à de nombreuses réalisations de toutes sortes, que ce soit les diverses éditions du Petit Robert (1977, 1993) ou l immense Dictionnaire universel des noms propres ainsi que Le Petit Robert 2. Il y a pour finir la lexicographe qui innove, qui déchire les horizons en inventant des dictionnaires.
Depuis soixante ans, la France n avait plus vu de sérieux Dictionnaire des anglicismes, lorsque Josette Rey-Debove publie le sien avec Gilberte Gagnon (1980,1984, 1986). D un très haut niveau scientifique (Malkiel 1989 : 64), il plaît parce que pour 2600 anglicismes (anglicismes sémantiques compris) il fournit une abondante documentation ainsi que de longs commentaires d un purisme modéré. L introduction est un modèle de clarté.
Deux ans plus tard paraît Le Robert méthodique (1982, 1989, 1994) qui deviendra Le Nouveau Robert méthodique (2003) et enfin Le Robert Brio (2004), le dictionnaire Robert qui va le plus loin dans la description linguistique des structures lexicales, puisqu il ajoute aux structures analogiques la totalité des structures morpho-sémantiques, le tout intégré dans un dictionnaire complet de 34 000 mots. En même temps, son auteure, se plaçant dans la tradition de l enseignant qu était Pierre Larousse, entendait faire uvre de démocratisation du savoir linguistique.
Nous espérons comme Pierre Larousse, écrit-elle dans la préface de 2004 avoir pris une décision sociolinguistique pédagogique, sans rien renier de la tradition philologique des historiens de la langue. Puisse ce dictionnaire répondre à la demande intelligente des personnes qui ne connaissent que le français ! [et qui ignorent le latin] .
En 1988, autre défi de lexicographie pédagogique, Josette Rey-Debove publie Le Petit Robert des enfants qui devient en 1991 Le Robert des jeunes. Ce dictionnaire de 16 000 mots, qui simplifie les définitions et ne laisse aucune acception sans phrase-exemple, invente pour toutes ces phrases une histoire cohérente recomposable comme un puzzle grâce à un personnel fixe, familier aux utilisateurs. L introduction se terminait sur ces paroles à la fois graves et affectueuses :
Le Petit Robert des enfants est donc un ouvrage ambitieux, et nous souhaitons qu il joue un rôle important dans le nouveau programme d éducation auquel travaillent, en France, toutes les personnes responsables de l avenir des enfants. Les remarques des lecteurs seront les bienvenues, et nous répondrons volontiers, comme d habitude, aux écoliers qui nous adressent de bien belles lettres, dont certaines commencent par Cher Petit Robert
En 1996, le Robert Quotidien se voulait un dictionnaire de 50 000 mots à profondeur historique avec 6 000 remarques encadrées qui avaient pour ambition d émanciper les lecteurs du joug des puristes. Josette Rey-Debove leur disait ces fortes paroles :
Le temps est révolu où des puristes cultivés dictaient leur loi sans disposer de données très nombreuses sur l usage réel. La référence à l usage d une époque antérieure a peu de valeur, dans la mesure où la langue évolue chaque jour sans pour autant dégénérer autant qu on le dit. [ ] Nous avons souhaité rendre au lecteur le vif intérêt qu il a naturellement pour la langue et que quelques-uns voudraient limiter à l orthographe anecdotique qui est génératrice d arbitraire et de désarroi.
La langue française se porte bien, elle vit une époque de créativité et de richesse lexicale due à une plus grande liberté d emploi qui la préserve des emprunts étrangers trop massifs. Mais chacun de nous est partie prenante dans cette somme de discours et d échanges sociaux. C est une des ambitions du Robert Quotidien de faire connaître au lecteur que son rôle n est pas de subir mais de choisir, et qu il peut argumenter ses choix en faveur d une langue plus claire, plus précise, plus logique et plus élégante (VIII-IX).
Pour finir, notre lexicographe essaie de combler une des lacunes les plus évidentes de la lexicographie française, celle d un dictionnaire pédagogique du français langue étrangère. Et c est en 1999 le Dictionnaire du français. Référence - Apprentissage, qui fournit pour 20 000 mots des définitions lisibles et systématiquement des phrases-exemples, dictionnaire d une convivialité exemplaire. [J.R.-D. ne savait pas que dans ce dictionnaire, parmi les mots du grand âge (sénat, senior, sénile) se trouvait le mot présage de sa mort sénégalaise].
Quelqu un d aussi lucide que Madame Rey-Debove ne pouvait pas ne pas être meurtrie par les inévitables compromis que le métier de lexicographe impose quotidiennement à celui ou à celle qui désire tout simplement réaliser ses rêves lexicographiques. On peut considérer comme un testament la liste des neuf utopies lexicographiques concernant l apprentissage des langues sur laquelle se termine La linguistique du signe et qui culmine dans un constat digne de La Rochefoucauld : la mode et la routine rivalisent souvent d absurdité (277).
Mais ce n est là qu une de ces larmes d amertume sans lesquelles le bonheur (d être lexicographe) n existerait pas. Car quel extraordinaire bilan de vie que celui de Josette Rey-Debove ! Très jeune embarquée volontaire dans une aventure intellectuelle et éditoriale sans pareil, celle de Paul Robert, occupant bientôt la place de second (avec son mari) sur ce navire au long cours, profitant, à l arrivée, de son incomparable expérience pour en sortir par le haut, réfléchissant - à un niveau rare - à la théorie de la langue et du dictionnaire, s étant fait linguiste en self-made-woman, et ce, tout en réalisant, en éclaireur, des découvertes lexicographiques en pays inconnu, collaborant un peu partout à l énorme machine qu était devenue la maison Robert et formant la petite bande de jeunes - de jeunes femmes pour la plupart - qui doivent maintenant lui succéder : voilà une vie professionnelle remplie s il en fut, vie qui depuis plus de 50 ans ne connaissait ni répit ni retraite et qui, d après ses propres paroles, a été tout sauf triste (Rey-Debove 2003, 109). Au terme d une vie aussi généreusement mise au service du dictionnaire, nous nous inclinons et disons en dernier adieu : bravo et merci !
Franz Josef Hausmann
Malkiel, Y. 1989. Wörterbücher und Normativität. Dictionnaires. Encyclopédie internationale de lexicographie (dir. F.J. Hausmann/O. Reichmann/H.E. Wiegand/L. Zgusta). Tome Premier. Berlin/New York : de Gruyter, 63-70.
Rey-Debove, J. 2003. La philosophie des dictionnaires Le Robert ou les chemins de l intelligible. Les dictionnaires Le Robert. Genèse et évolution (dir. M.C. Cormier et al.). Montréal : PUM, 100-109.
Robert, P. 1980. Au fil des ans et des mots 2. Le grain et le chaume. Paris : Laffont.
Electronic access to IJL
As the possibilities of electronic access to IJL are constantly updated, it seems important to give an overview of the actual situation.
Paul Bogaards,
Editor IJL
The EURALEX mailing list
Euralex has got hold of the new web domain: http://www.euralex.org in 2005. The site is hosted by the Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic.
The Euralex mailing list has moved as well. It takes advantage of the Mailman program. To reach all the list members, send an e-mail to euralex@euralex.org. The list web interface is available at http://www.euralex.org/mailman/listinfo/euralex.
All the e-mail addresses from the mailing list managed in Stuttgart were added automatically. New members can subscribe on the web page given above. The unsubscribe option is provided there as well.
Various options can be set in the Mailman program. The current members can visit http://www.euralex.org/mailman/options/euralex, fill in their membership e-mail address and push the password reminder button. The program will send them the password they can use to log in.
Once logged in, you can browse the subscribers list, change the preferred language of your Mailman web interface (27 languages currently supported), set the digest mode and many other options.
If you need a help with the mailing list, please feel free to contact Pavel Smrz via euralex-mailadmin@euralex.org.
Pavel Smrz
2005 Laurence Urdang Award
Extended deadline: 30 October 2005
Laurence Urdang is continuing his very generous award for unpaid lexicographical work. Applications are welcome on all aspects of lexicography. Examples of previous funded projects can be seen on the EURALEX website.
The Laurence Urdang Award, which is funded by Laurence Urdang and administered by EURALEX helps to support unpaid lexicographical work of any type, including study. The amount available is GBP £1500 sterling, and an individual award may vary in size from GBP £205 to the full amount. Applications must be received by 30th October 2005. Results will be announced by early 2006, and awards will be presented as soon as possible after notification of the results.
Applications should take the form of:
1. a letter specifying the amount applied for;
2. a statement giving full details of the purpose to which the funds would be put, and an indication of expected tangible results (e.g. publications);
3. a curriculum vitae including qualifications, details of previous lexicographical or related work, and publications;
4. one professional or academic reference;
5. details of funding received or applied for in relation to the project for which the Laurence Urdang Award is being sought.
Four copies of the entire application should be sent to :
2005 Laurence Urdang Award,
EURALEX Assistant Secretary-Treasurer Geoffrey Williams,
Université de Bretagne Sud
U.F.R. Lettres et Sciences Humaines
4, rue Jean Zay
B.P. 92116
56321 LORIENT Cedex
France
In addition an electronic version (Word or RTF) should be sent to the following address:
Email : geoffrey.williams@univ-ubs.fr. If no acknowledgement is received within a reasonable period, candidates are asked to contact the EURALEX Assistant Secretary-Treasurer at the above address.
The Selection Panel consists of the EURALEX President, and two past presidents. The Award is open to EURALEX members only, but applications will be accepted from people who have applied for EURALEX membership and are awaiting confirmation of this. If you wish to join EURALEX please write to: Ms Paula Thomson, EURALEX Society Liaison, OUP Journals, Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Fax: +44 1 865 267 485. Email: thomsonp@oup.co.uk.
Fifth Annual Lexicom International Workshop : Lexicom 2005
Our fifth Lexicom was held from 10-14 June 2005 in Brno, Czech Republic, and was splendidly hosted by Masaryk University. Once again, the focus was on dictionary-making: learning how rather than learning about . The 40 or so participants represented 15 countries in Europe, Asia, America and Africa, and came from many different backgrounds: publishing houses (lexicographers and editors), universities (linguists, computational linguists, computer scientists, and graduate students), software houses (software engineers and computational linguists) and research institutions. The team photo can be seen at www.lexmasterclass.com : go to the Training and Workshops|Lexicom workshops pages, where you can also find the workshop programme and participants comments.
Each seminar introduced and discussed a key topic, which was then further explored in practical exercises at the computer. As well as the basics of practical lexicography, the programme covered corpus design and annotation, the extraction of information from corpus data, and an introduction to frame semantics as a practical approach to corpus analysis. Two invited speakers presented their dictionary writing software: Philippe Climent from IDM Paris, and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver from TshwaneLex. In the parallel Master Class sessions, Sue Atkins and Michael Rundell led a hands-on tutorial on building a lexical database and a dictionary from corpus data, while the theme of Adam Kilgarriff s tutorial was building a corpus query system on the model of his Word Sketch Engine. On the final day, the working groups presented dictionary entries they had compiled, initiating discussions of various theoretical and methodological issues. As always, participants received complete documentation of all the seminars in a bound copy of the Course Notes.
Brno proved a delightful setting, and the guided walk around the old town followed by the Workshop dinner in a cellar beneath the Old Town Hall gave us a splendid taste of historic Moravia.
The course was led by Sue Atkins, Adam Kilgarriff and Michael Rundell, of the Lexicography MasterClass. It was hard work but it was great fun, and we all learned a lot.
Plans for next year s Workshop are well in hand, and registration will probably have started by the time this announcement is published. Participation will be limited to 40. Discounts are available for full-time students, and for people whose national currencies make the course fee disproportionately expensive. The programme and general approach will be substantially the same, with a few enhancements suggested by this year's group. Pre-registration is already taking place on our website: go to the News page for details.
Sue Atkins
Words in Asia, A report on the 4th Asialex conference, Singapore, 1-3 June 2005
Singapore is an easy city. In contrast to many Asian cities, the pavements are broad, clean and relaxing to stroll along. Maps, in English, are available everywhere, and the street signs are in Latin script and easy to follow. The eye is treated to soaring skyscrapers or pretty old houses or vividly decorated temples at every turn.
Like the city, the conference was elegant, impeccably organised, and with delicious things to eat at every juncture. It was a packed three days, with streams for lexicography, sociolinguistics and literature, brought together under the title of Words in Asian Cultural Contexts .
The opening plenary was a welcome contribution from the giant of Asian cultural contexts: mainland China. Prof. Yihua Zhang for Guangdong showed us how the Chinese are using new technologies to combine traditional methods of word formation with the latest innovations, mixing characters and letters and numbers to make new Chinese words. The participant list showed just two people present from mainland China, which made it all the more welcome that one of them set the conference off to a vigorous start.
To treat Chinese as a single language is to sweep rather a lot under the carpet, and Hong Kong s official policy biliterate and trilingual acknowledges that while there is, to a first approximation, one written language, the same cannot be said for the spoken language: Hong Kongers need to be able to read and write in Chinese and English, and to be able to speak in Cantonese (the local Chinese language), Putonghua (the official, Beijing-based form of the spoken language) and English. For us Europeans, with alphabets deep in our consciousness, this in itself is a challenge to comprehend, but for Jacqueline Lam, Lan Li and Tom McArthur it is much more. It is the project of preparing a bi-tri dictionary.
English language teaching was the topic of many talks, particularly from Japan. (Although there were twenty-three talks from Japan, twenty were about ELT. Of the other three, one was on Japanese and Turkish, one evaluated a monolingual Japanese resource by comparison with English ones, and the third was by an Englishman.) It was the use of new technology that was most intriguing. Consider, for example, the comment from the floor following Shigeru Yamada s presentation on web-based EFL dictionaries: COBUILD used to be available on-line but Collins took it down because it was too popular . It is true that extracting a revenue stream from the web is a challenge, but nonetheless, as the rest of the world scrambles for as many web hits as it can possibly get, I can t help but sense an ostrich at work.
Prof. Yukio Tono chaired a session on handheld electronic dictionaries in Japan, with contributions from Seiko and Casio. The handhelds are rapidly coming to dominate the market. (Some schoolteachers require all their students to have one.) We heard about Seiko s Pop Song Translation competition, in which Japanese schoolchildren were invited to translate five chart-topping English songs into Japanese. They had 18,000 entries. Their study concludes Up until now, we designed electronic dictionaries the same way as Pocket Dictionaries, however, for the future, we should consider the user interface to inspire users learning activity .
While the lexicography stream was the most relevant for most Euralex members, the other aspects offered complementary insights: a paper by Richard Powell explored how the transition from English to Malay as the language of the law in Malaysia is the subject of Government-sponsored terminological activity, but also raises questions of conservatism and status in the legal profession: will a lawyer be taken as seriously if they speak Malay? What strategies are there for lawyers to add weight to their arguments, and is there a status advantage, however slight, in speaking English? These sorts of questions are also close to the surface in Singapore, a multilingual society with four official languages (Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil). English is the lingua franca , and a large share of Singaporeans have English (or the local variant, Singlish) as mother tongue. I discovered an interesting relationship between Chinese-descended Singaporeans speaking and writing Chinese: while they will operate freely in spoken Chinese, the number of school hours required for learning a large vocabulary of characters is not easily found in an English-based school curriculum, so many Chinese-descended people are not literate in Chinese but only in English.
While Asian talks and themes were central, there was nothing exclusive about it. The two dictionary publishing systems presented were from South Africa (Gilles-Maurice de Schryver s Tshwanelex) and New Zealand (Dave Moskovitz s Matapuna). The final plenaries were from an Australian (Susan Butler, exploring the English of Southeast Asia, with its rich mix of coinings of thoroughly mixed parentage), a Chinese American (Lily Wong Fillmore, on the fearsome obstacles non-native English speakers face in the US education system) and an American (Charles Fillmore, showing how lexical semantics works with syntax and discourse structure to build the meanings that language exists to convey).
Asia is not an easy concept. With half the world s population, stretching (geographically and culturally) from Israel in the West to Japan in the East (with Australia and New Zealand semi-detached to the South), with China and India moving to dominate global capitalism while, across much of the continent, Islamic values are key, a unifying principle is hard to find. Yet the conference made sense of the diversity. It was good to find presentations from Kuwait, Israel and Iran (the local team are to be applauded for their commitment in obtaining visa clearance for the Iranian delegate). While India had few delegates, it will host the next conference, in Chennai (formerly Madras) in 2007. Post-colonialism, political and economic systems with histories of recent trauma and question marks over their stability, the meeting of ancient cultures and languages in contexts of rapid, sometimes explosive, economic growth and state-of-the-art technology, that was the Asia I saw at Asialex.
Singapore is pre-eminently a meeting-point of trading routes around Asia, and the view from the conference hotel (once you were high enough to see over the other skyscrapers) was of the biggest port in the world thousands upon thousands of bright-coloured containers stretching over a vast acreage in the tropical sunlight, the sea beyond dotted with ships carrying wares to all corners of the world. The conference charted how words, too, travelled, and changed, and brought about change. My sincerest thanks to Anne Pakir and her team, and the National University of Singapore, for organising a very rich and thought-provoking conference.
Adam Kilgarriff
Lexicography MasterClass Ltd
2005
September
12-15, Ivanovo State University, Sixth International School in Lexicography, Semantics, Lexicography and Terminography in Russian, American and Other Cultures Information: Professor Olga Karpova, , lexico2005@ivanovo.ac.ru
September
23-25, Łódź, Poland: Łódź Session of the 4th 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
6, Université de Montréal, Canada : Deuxième Journée québécoise des dictionnaires Pierre Larousse et les dictionnaires Larousse : tout le savoir du monde . Information : Monique C. Cormier, colloque-larousse@umontreal.ca
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
2006
September
6-9 , Turin, Italy: 12th International EURALEX conference. Information: Professor Carla Marello, Università di Torino. E-mail: carla.marello@unito.it