EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR LEXICOGRAPHY
Editor: Paul Bogaards. p.bogaards@hum.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 15 January, 15 April, 15 July, and 15 October annually.
The URL of the EURALEX web site is www.euralex.org
Lexique, normalisation, transgression
1er Colloque international des doctorants et jeunes chercheurs. Organisé par le laboratoire LDI en collaboration avec l’école doctorale Droit et Sciences humaines de l’Université de Cergy-Pontoise et l’Association des Sciences du Langage. More information on: http://www.u-cergy.fr/metadif/lnt/en
LDI’s international conference of PhDs and young researchers aims at questioning the various processes that governs the lexicon, whether it is about its standardization or its transgressive uses. These processes will be considered through various disciplines, linguistic, literary and artistic fields will be covered.
This conference takes place around 6 principal axes:
The conference will take place on September the 7th 2010 at the University of Cergy-Pontoise and concerns all PhD and Young researchers who have graduated a year ago. French and English will be the languages of this conference.
Submissions (8 to 10 pages in French or English, bibliography included) should be anonymous and accompanied by an abstract in French. Please, send your abstract on the dedicated web site in .doc or .pdf file following the style sheet before March the 15th 2010.
Notifications of acceptance will be communicated before May the 15th 2010.
Inscription fee of 30 € will be asked to each speaker. This fee includes the proceedings, breaks and lunch. This fee is to be paid before July the 15th 2010.
Since 2004 The Hungarian Academy of Sciences has published the Lexikográfiai füzetek (LexFüz), which is neither a series like for instance Lexicographica Series Maior nor a journal like for instance Lexicographica, but a kind of mixture of both. All the LexFüz-volumes are written solely in Hungarian, but in the end of each article there is an abstract written in English, German or French.
Lexikográfiai füzetek 1 (233 pp.), edited by Tamás Magay, appeared in 2004 and it bears the title A magyar szótárirodalom bibliográfiája (‘Bibliography of Hungarian Dictionaries’). It is an annotated bibliography of Hungarian dictionaries listing 756 titles. On pp. 175–206 the volume also contains a reprint of István Sági’s small bibliography A magyar szótárak és nyelvtanok könyvészete (‘Bibliography of Hungarian Dictionaries and Grammar Books’) published 1922 by A Magyar Nyelvtudományi Társaság (Hungarian Society of Linguistics) in Budapest. This reprint bibliography lists 479 titles. In the main bibliography LSP dictionaries, encyclopaedic dictionaries and encyclopaedias are not included; only language dictionaries are dealt with. In the minor reprint bibliography from 1922 besides LGP dictionaries also LSP dictionaries are listed.
Lexikográfiai füzetek 2 (215 pp.), edited by Tamás Magay, appeared in 2006 and it bears the title Szótárak és használóik (‘Dictionaries and their Users’). The volume is similar to a scholarly journal; besides the preface written by Tamás Magay, from 10 different contributors it contains papers, accounts on ongoing projects and reviews. In the end of the volume (pp. 181–213), there is an update section for the main bibliography in LexFüz 1 listing 118 titles.
Lexikográfiai füzetek 3 (330 pp.), edited by Tamás Magay, appeared in 2007 and it bears the title Félmúlt és közeljövő (‘Near Past and Near Future’). The volume is similar to LexFüz 2 containing different kinds of contributions (preface, tributes, papers, accounts on ongoing projects, reviews and discussions) from 20 contributors and an update section (pp. 303–327) for the bibliography in LexFüz 1 listing 69 titles.
Lexikográfiai füzetek 4 (298 pp.), edited by Zsuzsanna Fábián, appeared in 2009 and it bears the title Szótárírás és szótárírók (‘Dictionary Making and Dictionary Makers’). Like LexFüz 2 and LexFüz 3 it is a volume with contributions (papers, reviews etc.) from different Hungarian scholars. In addition, this volume also contains presentations on new Ph.D.-dissertations. Articles in LexFüz 4: József Terjék deals with the dictionaries of Alexander Csoma de Kőrös (1784–1842). Tamás Magay and Júlia Pajzs write about the EURALEX, reason being the 25th anniversary. The article covers the 25 years of EURALEX, giving highlights of the history, foundation etc. In addition also the EURALEX-congresses are discussed, the highly valued periodical IJL (International Journal of Lexicography) and the Lexicographica Series Maior. Nóra Ittzés contributes a paper on the Comprehensive Dictionary of the Hungarian Language, i.e. A magyar nyelv nagyszótára (2006ff), of which she is the editor-in-chief. The article aims to inform about the history of the dictionary, the lexicographical principles on which it is based etc. After 175 years of preparation and data collection, the final conception of the dictionary (planned to be an eighteen volume set) evolved by the beginning of the 21st century (cf. Pálfi/Pajzs: ‘Das Akademiewörterbuch lebt! […]’ in IJL 20.4: 369–391). Júlia Pajzs contributes a paper with the title ‘Szótár és társadalom’ (‘Dictionary and Society’). Amongst other things she looks at the different expectations of different user groups, how a dictionary reflects the actual social situation, definition styles etc. István Vig writes about the sources of the dictionaries of Faustus Verantius published in the end of the 1500s and the beginning of the 1600s. Péter Gaál contributes a paper on a rather unusual topic: poker dictionaries and glossaries. The specialised language of the card game called poker and the development of the Hungarian poker terminology as a result of the last 4–5 years are being discussed. Loránd-Levente Pálfi and Erzsébet Stokholm contribute a paper on the question: What is lexicography? Comparing inter alia different views and positions held by lexicographers, lexicologists, terminographers, terminologists, linguists, philologists, documentalists, librarians and LIS-scholars in general (i.e. scholars of Library and Information Science) amongst other things the academic status of lexicography as well as the dictionary as a document type are being discussed. Csilla Bernáth writes about a new series of dictionaries published by Corvina Publishers in Hungary claiming it to be a completely new type of dictionary dealing with linguistic as well as encyclopaedic information. However, the position held by Bernáth is erroneous; there is nothing new on the new series of dictionaries launched by Corvina (cf. Pálfi/Nielsen on dictionary typology in IJL 22.3: 340–341). Ildikó Fata contributes a paper on bilingual gastronomic dictionaries for German and Hungarian. As theoretical frame and starting point she uses the Modern Theory of Lexicographic Functions. Presentations of new Ph.D.-dissertations in LexFüz 4: Edit Bérces gives an account of her Ph.D.-dissertation (publicly defended May 25, 2007) dealing with lexicography and terminology of sports. Orsolya Hedvig Kardos gives an account of her Ph.D.-dissertation (publicly defended December 20, 2007) dealing with practical and theoretical questions regarding the selection of a basic vocabulary of Italian as foreign language. Ildikó Fata gives an account of her Ph.D.-dissertation (publicly defended January 16, 2008) dealing with practical and theoretical issues of bilingual LSP dictionaries. Reviews in LexFüz 4: The volume contains six reviews written by Zsuzsanna Ráduly, Béla Hollósy, Ágnes Kovátsné Loch, Éva Oszetzky, Kardos Orsolya Hedvig, and Ágota Fóris. Finally, also the LexFüz 4 includes an update section (pp. 275–295) for the main bibliography in LexFüz 1 listing 52 titles.
Loránd-Levente Pálfi
Centre for Lexicography, Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University, Denmark
llp@asb.dk
The first version of the Danish WordNet, DanNet, was first released in March 2009 under an open source license similar to the Princeton Licence; the present version (1.1, released July 1, 2009) can be downloaded from http:// www. wordnet.dk. This homepage lists also relevant publications describing several aspects of DanNet, and very soon, a user-friendly browser will make the data accessible.
DanNet is a Danish lexical semantic wordnet, i.e. a language resource where the semantic relations between words are expressed in a formal language and thereby made usable for IT systems dealing with intelligent information handling.
The DanNet resource contains presently more than 50,000 Danish concepts represented as so-called 'synsets' (i.e. sets of synonyms) ordered in hypero- and hyponymy relations. All concepts are assigned an ontological type (e.g. Human, Artifact or Activity). Half of the concepts are supplied with detailed relations like 'has_meronym, 'used_for' etc. This is mostly the case for concrete (1st order) concepts, i.e. concepts under the "genstand" (physical object) node. DanNet is still under development within the DK-CLARIN project until the end of 2010. The goal is to extend the number of synsets encoded to 70,000. (For details see Pedersen et al. 2009.)
Being a part of the ‘WordNet family’ (cf. www.wordnet.org), DanNet generally conforms to the framework given in the WordNet Specifications as accounted for in Fellbaum (1998) and Vossen (ed.) (1999). Thus, in DanNet we basically operate with synsets as well as with a fixed set of semantic relations between synsets, the has_hyperonym relation being the central one. However, two former Danish resources have been reused in the compilation of DanNet, encompassing thereby several aspects of the more lexically driven and far more complex SIMPLE resources as accounted for in Lenci et al. (2000), as well as the linguistic specifications of the Danish Dictionary (Lorentzen 2004). This has resulted in the fact that DanNet includes some information types that are not generally given in WordNets, such as some more specific ontological types, information on taxonomical status of a hyponym minimizing thereby the ISA-overload, qualia structure on nouns, connotative values etc.
References:
Fellbaum, C. (ed). 1998. WordNet – An Electronic Lexical Database. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England.
Lenci, A., Bel, N., Busa, F., Calzolari, N., Gola, E., Monachini, M., Ogonowski, A., Peters, I. Peters, W., Ruimy, N., Villegas, M. & Zampolli, A. 2000. SIMPLE – A General Framework for the Development of Multilingual Lexicons. T. Fontenelle (ed) International Journal of Lexicography, Vol 13: 249–263. Oxford University Press.
Lorentzen, H. 2004. The Danish Dictionary at large: Presentation, Problems and Perspectives. G. Williams and S. Vessier (eds): Proceedings of the Eleventh EURALEX International Congress: 285–294. Lorient, France.
Pedersen, B.S, S. Nimb, J. Asmussen, N. Sřrensen, L. Trap-Jensen, H. Lorentzen. 2009. ’DanNet – the challenge of compiling a WordNet for Danish by reusing a monolingual dictionary. In: Language Resources and Evaluation, Computational Linguistics Series, Springer.
Vossen, P. (ed). 1999. EuroWordNet, A Multilingual Database with Lexical Semantic Networks. Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands.
Lexicon
The Iwasaki Linguistic Circle (Tokyo) has published Lexicon no. 39 (2009). The two articles included are: Y. Kobayashi: ‘Profiling Metadiscourse Markers in Native and Non-Native English’, and T. Kanazashi et al.: ‘An Analysis of the Longman Advanced American Dictionary, New Edition: A Pedagogical Viewpoint’.
Thierry Fontenelle
Former
president of Euralex Thierry Fontenelle, who worked for several years at
Microsoft in Seattle (U.S.), has been appointed as Head of the General Affairs
Department of the Translation Center for the Bodies of the European Union in
Luxemburg. His new address is :
Thierry.Fontenelle@cdt.europa.eu
Oxford Northern Sotho-English Bilingual Dictionary
Coinciding with International Translation Day on 30 September, Oxford University Press Southern Africa scooped the South African Translators’ Institute award for Outstanding Translation: Dictionaries for the Oxford Bilingual School Dictionary: Northern Sotho – English / English – Northern Sotho, at an awards ceremony held at the University of Johannesburg on 2 October 2009.
This dictionary is the first for Northern Sotho to focus on the needs of school learners in grades 4 to 9, whether they are learning English or Northern Sotho. It is also the first to include key terms from the school curriculum (with bilingual definitions), a guide to pronunciation, sample emails and letters, and help with writing SMSs.
More than two and a half years in the making, it was created by a team of experts including mother-tongue speakers of English and Northern Sotho, as well as experts in dictionary-making. The team was led by Dr Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, Extraordinary Professor in the Xhosa Department at the University of the Western Cape and an Assistant Professor of African Languages and Cultures at the University of Ghent in Belgium. The team was supported by language engineers, and used TshwaneLex, home-grown, state-of-the-art dictionary compilation software developed by David Joffe of TshwaneDJe. Mamokgabo Mogodi, the main compiler for Northern Sotho, received the prize on behalf of the development team.
Forthcoming events
February
2-4, Academy of Sciences, Moscow RU: The Word and the Language (International Conference in Honour of Juri Apresjan). Information at http://aprconf.iitp.ru/
March
10-12, SITLeC, Universitŕ di Bologna, Forlě IT: Lessicografia e ideologia: Tradizione e scelte d’autore
16-18, Oxford GB: International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology (ICHLL 5). Information at: www.le.ac.uk/ee/jmc21/ishll.html
July
19 – 21, Gaborone, Botswana, AFRILEX 2010 (15th International Conference of the African Association for Lexicography). Pre-conference workshop theme: Traditions, trends and changes in lexicography (Presenters: Prof. D. J. Prinsloo, M. S. Mogano et al.) Conference keynote speaker 1: Prof. Robert Lew (Poznan, Poland). Conference keynote speaker 2: Prof. K. B. Kiingi (Kampala, Uganda). Latest info: http://afrilex.africanlanguages.com/
September
7, Université de Cergy-Pontoise, France, 1er Colloque international des doctorants et jeunes chercheurs : ‘Lexique, normalisation, transgression’. Information at http://www.u-cergy.fr/metadif/lnt/en