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 are as follows: 1 February for the March issue, 1 May for the June issue, 1 August for the September issue, and 1 November for the December issue.
The URL of the EURALEX web site is www.euralex.org
2006 Laurence Urdang Award: Deadline 30th October 2006
The deadline for the 2006 Laurence Urdang Award for unpaid lexicographical work is now close. The award may be granted for work on all aspects of lexicography.
In 2006, four awards were made with topics varying from the constitution of a database to the publication of an investigation into Italian lexicography. Reports on previous award projects may be seen on the EURALEX website..
The Laurence Urdang Award is generously Laurence Urdang and is administered by EURALEX. It 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 2006. 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.
One copy of the entire application should be sent to :
2006 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
HSK Supplementary volume
This short notice is intended to inform readers about an ongoing project which will lead to a supplementary volume of the well-known international encyclopedia Dictionaries, Dictionnaires, Wörterbücher:
Dictionaries. An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography.
Supplementary volume: Recent developments with special focus on computational lexicography
Ed. by Rufus H. Gouws (Stellenbosch), Ulrich Heid (Stuttgart), Wolfgang Schweickard (Saarbrücken). Herbert Ernst Wiegand (Heidelberg)
Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter (Berlin/New York)
The trilingual encyclopedia Dictionaries. An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography (ed. by Franz Josef Hausmann, Oskar Reichmann, Herbert Ernst Wiegand, Ladislav Zgusta) was published between 1989-1991 in three volumes, consisting of a total of 335 articles (over 3,300 pages). The envisaged supplementary volume will contain 136 articles in 22 chapters, and it will be published entirely in English.
The supplementary volume links with the objectives formulated in the preface of the first volume (HSK 5.1), and will complement these, to cover theoretical and practical developments of the last 15 years:
- Expansion and extension of the presentation of lexicography – especially the printed and electronic linguistic lexicography – of all language groups of the earth;
- Continuation of the presentation of the status and function of lexicographic reference works within the cultural systems of societies, up to the present time with special reference to the new digital forms of lexicography;
- Continuation of the already presented history of lexicography by means of selected examples of bigger cultures up to the present time (2006);
- Expansion, deepening and modification of presented excerpts of a general theory of lexicography in its four sections, i.e. research into the use of dictionaries, research in dictionary criticism, historical and systematic dictionary research, with the aim of documenting metalexicography as a scientific discipline with an independent formation of a theory that has been established in the last decade;
- Complementation of the description of all phases of the lexicographic process, especially by means of the presentation of new methods based on electronic corpora, by means of the discussion of the new possibilities of computer-assistance as well as by considering the possibilities to link different types of lexicographic processes;
- Presentation of lexicographic training and lexicographic institutions;
- Presentation of new metalexicographic methods;
and as a focus of the volume:
- An extensive and detailed presentation of computational lexicography with regard to its historical development and to all important research fields, research perspectives, methods and tools of the last two decades.
The plan and the structure of the book, with which the outlined objectives of the supplementary volume will be achieved, will be briefly sketched in the following.
The supplementary volume has four chapters directed at new lexicographic concepts and developments. The introductory chapter consists of two articles and addresses problems, perspectives and possible developments of printed dictionaries and of computational lexicography, respectively. The articles in the subsequent chapters present the latest state of lexicographic theory, covering textual structures (e.g. macrostructure, microstructure, access structure etc.), dictionary types and functions (including both, lexicography for general language and for language for special purposes), (seleceted) dictionary subjects and finally research in dictionary production and use (ch. V). All chapters contain articles about new concepts, methods and results of theoretical lexicographic work. Chapter VI deals with organizational questions (among others training of lexicographers, lexicographic associations, evaluation of dictionaries, etc.).
The subsequent block of six chapters (ch. VII-XII) aims at documenting the development of lexicographic research on individual languages, since the 1990s. It addresses language (group)s which were not (sufficiently) covered in HSK 5.1 to 5.3, and it provides updates on other languages and language groups. It covers the ancient languages of the Near East and the Classical Languages, the Romance and the Germanic languages, the Slavic languages, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, as well as selected (South and West) African languages, recognizing in particular the innovations lexicography has produced, over the last 15 years, for these languages.
The last block of chapters (10 chapters, XIII-XXII) is devoted to computational lexicography. It starts with two articles on the history of computational lexicography. These are followed by two chapters on types of electronic dictionaries, both for human users (9 articles, by types of dictionaries) and for machine use (9 articles, by main application fields, as well as one on multifunctional dictionaries for Natural Language Processing (NLP)).
A next chapter (ch. XVI) concerns models for the representation of electronic dictionaries (formalisms, such as XML, databases, etc. assessed with respect to their applicability for electronic dictionaries) and standards in this field. It is complemented by a chapter on the representation of linguistic data in electronic dictionaries, i.e. about the content aspect; this chapter includes 7 articles organized by “levels of linguistic description“, as well as articles on bilingual and on multimodal dictionaries and on the treatment of idiomaticity. Again, standards for mono- and bilingual dictionaries are summarized in specific articles. A separate chapter is devoted to models for non-alphabetical computational dictionaries, of which WordNet ist one of the most prominent examples.
Another three chapters (XIX to XXI) are devoted to the process of dictionary making, as it is shaped by the use of computing. These chapters cover the acquisition of data from corpora and corpus design for lexicography (ch. XIX); furthermore, they describe tools and procedures for data acquisition (not only from corpora, but also from existing electronic versions of dictionaries, and via retrodigitization), and finally computational support tools for the writing of dictionary articles.
The last chapter includes five articles on computational terminology, addressing the represention and exchange of terminological data, large termbanks, and methods and challenges in the extraction of terminological data from texts.
The new volume (maximally 1380 pp.) is intended to give an up to date picture of current lexicographic research. The editors are grateful for any suggestions for additions or modifications. Such suggestions should be sent, before 31.12.2006, to the following address: Herbert.Ernst.Wiegand@gs.uni-heidelberg.de
Forthcoming events
2006
September
6-9 , Turin, Italy: 12th International EURALEX conference. Information: Professor Carla Marello, Università di Torino. E-mail: marello@cisi.unito.it
October
21 – 23, University of Cyprus : Labels and features in dictionaries: What is their future?. Organized by the Department of French Studies and Modern Languages, University of Cyprus, in collaboration with the 30th International Conference in Functional Linguistics, one theme of which is the Lexicon. URL: http://www.ucy.ac.cy/~fabienne/silf.html
22 – 26, Santiago de Cuba : Tenth International Symposium on Social Communication. Information:
Dr. Leonel Ruiz Miyares, Centro de Linguistica Aplicada, Calle 8 Nr. 206 entre
7 y 9, Vista Alegre, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba. C.P. 90400, Telefonos: 53-22-642760,
53-22-656141, Correo Electronico: leonel@lingapli.ciges.inf.cu.
http://www.santiago.cu/hosting/linguistica/sitio-cla/ingles/
http://www.santiago.cu/hosting/linguistica/sitio-cla/espanol/