EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR LEXICOGRAPHY

EURALEX NEWSLETTER

Autumn 1998

Editors: Carla Marello and Rosamund Moon.
Address for correspondence and contributions: Carla Marello
Corso Unione Sovietica 115
I-10134 Torino
Italy
E-mail:
marello@cisi.unito.it
and rosamund@cobuild.collins.co.uk

The EURALEX Newsletter

This quarterly Newsletter is intended to include not only official announcements but also news on EURALEX members, their publications, career moves, and (it is hoped) their opinions. Please try to support this by sending newsletter contributions to Carla Marello at the above address.
The annual deadlines
winter (December)15 September
spring (March)15 December
summer (June)15 March
autumn (September)15 June

The EURALEX Web Site

The URL of the EURALEX web site is http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/euralex.

Contents

1998 Urdang Award

Applications are invited for this Award, formerly known as the Verbatim award, which is funded by Laurence Urdang, and administered by EURALEX. The Award is open to EURALEX members, and it is for the purpose of supporting unpaid lexicographical work of any type, including study. The amount available for this year is GBP 3000 sterling, as no awards were made for 1997. An individual award may vary in size from GBP 250 to the full amount. Applications are normally required by the end of September, with results notified in December and awards presented in the following January. However, if you would like to apply but need more time to prepare your application, please contact Ulrich Heid by e-mail (uli@ims.uni-stuttgart.de) or fax (+49 711 121 1366) to say that you are intending to apply and will submit a full application by 31 October 1998.

Applications should take the form of:

Four copies of the entire application should be sent to:

1998 Urdang Award
EURALEX Assistant Secretary-Treasurer Ulrich Heid
Universität Stuttgart
Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Azenbergstrasse 12
D-70174 Stuttgart
Germany
The Selection Panel consists of the EURALEX President, Ole Norling-Christensen, and the two immediate past presidents, Henri Béjoint and Frank Knowles.

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Yakov Malkiel

Yakov Malkiel, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Romance Philology at the University of California at Berkeley, died on Friday, 24 April 1998, of a heart attack, at the age of 83.

Professor Malkiel was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Kiev in 1914, but civil war forced the family to move to Berlin. By the time he was college age, Germany was becoming an increasingly difficult place for Jews. He had to overcome serious difficulties before he was admitted into Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität, but succeeded in receiving his Ph.D. there magna cum laude, in 1938, specializing in Romance linguistics. The worsening situation for Jews in Germany made his safety tenuous, and he left soon after he received his degree. He came with his parents to the United States in 1940, first working briefly in Wyoming, and then joining the University of California in 1942 as a lecturer, then as an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and later Professor of Romance Philology. He participated in the founding of the Department of Linguistics in 1952, and became a member of that department in 1965, where he taught until his retirement.

In 1948, Professor Malkiel married María Rosa Lida, a brilliant fellow scholar from Argentina, who from then on published under her married name, María Rosa Lida de Malkiel. After her untimely death in 1962, he spent the next years of his career devoting himself to the completion of her unpublished works, and for the rest of his life he kept her memory alive in numerous publications of his own.

Professor Malkiel was the author of more than a dozen books, the editor or co-editor of half a dozen others, and author of literally hundreds of articles. His list of publications is itself monograph length: in 1987, his colleagues and students prepared with him and for him his `Autobibliography', a book listing 822 of his works, with annotations (special issue of Romance Philology, published by the University of California Press). His publications include works on historical linguistics, the history of linguistics, etymology, linguistic typology, and Romance linguistics. Among his best known works are the two books Etymological Dictionaries: a Tentative Typology (1976), and From Particular to General Linguistics: Selected Essays, 1965-1978. An astounding polyglot, he published in English, German, Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish, and lectured as well in Russian. In 1946, he founded and was for many years the editor-in-chief of the journal Romance Philology. He continued to publish until failing eyesight brought his research to a halt just about two years ago.

Professor Malkiel received many awards and honors in his distinguished career, including three Guggenheim Awards. He had no less than seven honorary degrees - from the University of Chicago (1966), University of Illinois (1969), University of Paris (1983), the Free University of Berlin (1983), Georgetown University (1987), Oxford University (1989) and Universidad de Salamanca (1994), and he was the first Jew to be honored in Salamanca since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

Paula M. Floro
Department of Linguistics,
University of California, Berkeley, USA.

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Lexicographical Work in Progress

Proper name homographs: in progress at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This English lexical research project is based on the Brown University Corpus. The project consists of an inventory and analysis of `Proper name homographs', i.e. word forms which, in isolation, are interpretable both as generic (dictionary) words, with upper or lower case initial, or as proper names, conventionally capitalized and used to refer to or identify a specific person, place, etc. The findings are presented in the form of a frequency list of `proper name homographs' attested in the Brown Corpus (combining the slightly different counts - resulting from different bases of tokenization - recorded in the Corpus-based Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English, Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis, Brown University Press, 1967, and in the Norwegian Computing Centre's Concordance of the Corpus). Generic incidence and proper name realizations are discriminated on the basis of an examination of the context of each occurrence in the Corpus. Most of the proper name realizations are identified as belonging to one of the following categories: person, place, organization, group (sports, musical), trade name (artifact, missile, ship), or journal (magazine, newspaper). The Corpus reference of each proper name realization, the `Genre' (Press, Fiction etc) in which it occurs, and the number of the sample passage within the Genre is indicated.

The findings constitute a meaning-oriented supplement to the Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English and to the Corpus-based Frequency Analysis of English Usage, W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kucera, Houghton Mifflin, 1982. The list of `proper name homographs', while obviously not exhaustive (it has been noted that LEECH, is not attested in the Corpus as either a name or a generic word!), may serve as a time-saving guide to or check of the discrimination of proper names from generic words in proper name homographic entries in word lists derived from other English language corpora, since considerable overlap of incidence seems likely.

Nina Devons
(Ninaa@HUJIVMS.ac.il)
Department of English (EFL)
The Hebrew University
Jerusalem
Israel

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Dizionario Italiano-Russo

Dr. Julia Dobrovolskaya (a Russian teacher of Italian language and literature in Moscow University, now working as a teacher of Russian at Venetian University of Ca' Foscari, as well as a translator of many important Italian writers of these century) together with Dr. Claudia Zonghetti (at Università Statale di Milano), are preparing Dizionario Italiano-Russo, an Italian-Russian Dictionary: the second volume of the bilingual dictionary published by Hoepli, Milan. As with the first volume, this one has been conceived for the Italian market, but could easily be used by Russian speakers as well. The second volume will have around 50,000 entries. Appendices will cover irregular Russian verbs, the translations for common Italian geographical names and adjectives, and Italian acronyms. The main sources for its examples are Italian dictionaries, newspapers, and the most important and recent Italian writers (Verga, Sciascia, Calvino, etc.)

The first volume, Dizionario Russo-Italiano, was begun in April 1993 and appeared in 1997. It has over 50,000 entries and several appendices, covering problematic Russian numerals, proper names and widely used diminutives, geographical names, acronyms, and abbreviations. It emphasizes Russian current usage. Each entry is in cyrillic followed by transcription into the Roman alphabet, with tonic accent. The main sources for its examples and literary quotations were the four-volume dictionary of Russian language of the Russian Academy of Science, and a number of Italian and Russian dictionaries.

Dizionario Russo-Italiano was prepared in two phases, using first File Maker and then Quark Express (both working on Macintosh systems): for the moment, it is available only in printed form. Dizionario Italiano-Russo, in contrast, is being prepared in rich text format files, using Microsoft Word for Windows.

Dr. Claudia Zonghetti
Università Statale di Milano
7/8, via Festa del Perdono
Milan
Italia

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News of members

Tadeusz Piotrowski, one of the Associate Editors of International Journal of Lexicography, found the 90's a busy time. In the seven years of the decade he managed to write his PhD dissertation (in 1990) as well as his postdoctoral dissertation - Habilitationsschrift - (in 1994), both on lexicography. In 1993 he started his term as Deputy Director at the English Department, Wroclaw University, and in 1996 he was elected Director of the Department. In 1997 he went to Opole University, where he was appointed Professor in linguistics. Currently he teaches an MA course, and his nine students explore various aspects of dictionaries for learners of English.

During that time he published his two books on lexicography, as well as his four dictionaries, mostly bilingual, and a number of papers on lexicography and translation. His publications received favourable reviews in leading journals in Poland and elsewhere (including IJL and Verbatim). He worked with Zygmunt Saloni on two bilingual dictionaries, which have been generally praised as innovative. The wide-ranging book on Polish and general lexicography Z zagadnié leksykografii (Warsaw, 1994) is treated as a standard textbook on the subject in Poland, and has been adopted for lexicography courses in universities. His most recent publications include a review of the four main dictionaries for learners of English for Lexicographica, and a history of Polish lexicography from the beginnings to 1997, commissioned by Historiographica Linguistica.

As a lexicography consultant he participated in two important projects on bilingual dictionaries with English and Polish. One was a cooperation between British HarperCollins and Polish BGW (resulting in the Collins Polish Dictionary): the other is a joint project between Oxford University Press and PWN. In 1996 he started working with German Langenscheidt KG as a freelance author and reviewer of their English and Polish dictionaries. He also provides consultancy services for publishing houses. For this purpose he established a small private lexicographical firm, Lexis.

It is as the manager of Lexis that he participates in an international project, STEEL, within the INCO-COPERNICUS scheme, funded by the Commission of the European Communities, on developing specialized translation/foreign language comprehension tools for Eastern European languages, involving Czech and Polish. The project, started in 1996 and managed by Xerox Research Centre in Grenoble, brings together scholars and commercial companies from the Czech Republic, France, Germany, and Poland. Tadeusz Piotrowski provided the electronic text of one of the bilingual dictionaries he wrote with Zygmunt Saloni. The dictionary was tagged by means of a self-developed system of TEX-based tags, which for the project are converted into SGML format. Important additional information has also been incorporated in the dictionary, for example part-of-speech labels, which were considered redundant for the human user in the printed dictionary. In addition, Tadeusz Piotrowski's tasks include collection and management of Polish-language corpora and verification of the resulting tools. This project will end in 1999.

Tadeusz Piotrowski (tadpiotr@ii.uni.wroc.pl)

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New Publications

ETS Publishing house, Moscow. The main productions of ETS are electronic and printed dictionaries for professional translating to and from Russian (mainly English-Russian-English and Deutsch-Russisch-Deutsch dictionaries). New publications include Russian electronic books and dictionaries for IBM PCs (for Windows 3.x, 95, NT); Dictionary of Russian Language by V.I. Dal, and Russian Proverbs by V.I. Dal. The full catalogue is available on the ETS web site http://www.ets.ru. For further information, please e-mail ets@ets.ru, or for technical questions, butakov@ets.ru.

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News for Web users

A Bibliography of Phraseology

The EURALEX web site is now home to a Bibliography of Phraseology. This is growing out of work started by Tony Cowie and Peter Howarth, generated by the EURALEX-sponsored Symposium on Phraseology which they organized in Leeds in 1994: they published their `Select Bibliography' in IJL 9/1 (1996), with an appendix by Gloria Corpas Pastor. A number of people at the 3rd Symposium on Phraseology (Stuttgart, 1998) have volunteered additional material, and this is providing increased coverage of work in languages other than English: in particular, French, German, Russian, and Hungarian.

The bibliography includes dictionaries of proverbs, idioms, collocations, and other phraseological units, as well as books, collections, monographs, papers, and articles on different aspects of the broad field of phraseology. It is being coordinated by Rosamund Moon (rosamund@cobuild.collins.co.uk), and it can be found at http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/euralex/bibweb. Further contributions, corrections, and suggestions are very welcome.

Rosamund Moon

Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru

The University of Wales Dictionary of the Welsh Language now has a completely revised website offering much more information than before, including the full bibliography. Much use is made of forms to collect information from readers. The address is unchanged: http://www.aber.ac.uk/~gpcwww.

Andrew Hawke (ach@aber.ac.uk)
Golygydd Cynorthwyol/Rheolwr Systemau - Assistant Editor/Systems Manager
Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru - University of Wales Dictionary
Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru - National Library of Wales
Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3HH, UK

Svenska Akademiens Ordbok

A prototype version of the Swedish historical dictionary Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB), 1898-, is now available on the Internet. There will be a test period from May until October 1998. During this period no access fees will be charged. More information (in Swedish) can be found on the web site http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/saob/.

Yvonne Cederholm
(Cederholm@svenska.gu.se)
The OSA Project, Språkdata
Dept. of Swedish, Göteborg University
Box 200
S-405 30 Göteborg
Sweden

ALSIC

ALSIC (Apprentissage des Langues et Systèmes d'Information et de Communication) est une revue Internet francophone pour chercheurs et praticiens: http://alsic.univ-fcomte.fr. Elle se veut un lieu fédérateur permettant la présentation et l'échange de travaux théoriques et pratiques menés en didactique, sciences de l'éducation, et linguistique informatique. Le numéro 1 (15 Juin 1998) propose 6 rubriques: Recherche, Pratique et Recherche, Analyse de Livres, Analyse de Logiciels, Points de Vue/Echanges, et Lettres d'Information. La revue est d'accès libre et gratuit, mais pensez à vous inscrire (procédure gratuite)! Le numéro 2 paraîtra en décembre 1998. Envoyez dès maintenant vos propositions d'articles!

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Forthcoming events

1998

October
1-3 , Bolzano-Bozen, Italy: Accademia Europea di Bolzano-Europäische Akademie Bozen, Convegno/Tagung: Linguistica giuridica italiana e tedesca: obiettivi, approcci, risultati - Rechtslinguistik des Deutschen und Italienischen: Ziele, Methoden, Ergebnisse. Info: Dr.ssa Daniela Veronesi, Accademia Europea-Europäische Akademie, via Weggenstein 12/a, I-39110 Bolzano-Bozen, Italy. Tel.: +39 471 306116. E-mail: linjus98@eurac.edu. Web site: http://www.eurac.edu/linjus98.

2-3, Savonlinna, Finland: Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Translation and Cognition. Contact: Riitta Jääskeläinen, University of Joensuu, Savonlinna School of Translation Studies, P.O. Box 48, 57101 Savonlinna, Finland. E-mail: riitta.jaaskelainen@joensuu.fi.

7-10, Frankfurt am Oder, Germany: Bundesverband Anwendungsorientierter Fremdsprachenphilologien (BAF), Bundesverbandstag, Europa-Universität Viadirina, Frankfurt am Oder. Info: Prof. Thomas Stehl, 1. Vorsitzender des BAF, Universität Bremen, Fachbereich 10, D-28334 Bremen, Germany.

8-10, Milano, Italy: IX International Congress of Linguists. Info: Prof. Giancarlo Bolognesi, Istituto di Glottologia, Università Cattolica, Largo Gemelli 1, 20123 Milano, Italy. E-mail: istglott@mi.unicatt.it.

29-31, Budapest, Hungary: XXXII Congresso internazionale di Studi della Società di Linguistica Italiana, `Semantica e Lessicologia storiche'. Info: Prof. G.P. Salvi, Olasz Nyelv es Irodalom Tanzek, Muzeum korut 4, Building C second floor, Budapest, Hungary. Tel./fax: +36 2667284. E-mail: salvi@isis.elte.hu.

November
16-21, Habana, Cuba: IV IberoAmerican Symposium of Terminology. Organizing association: RITerm - Red Iberoamericana de Terminología (IberoAmerican Terminology Network). Info: Manuel Barreiro Sánchez, Comité Nacional Preparatorio del VI RITerm, 19 de mayo, no 14, esq. Ayestarán - Municipio Plaza, Ciudad de la Habana, Cuba CP 10600. E-mail: ulcuba@ceniai.inf.cu.

26-27, Veldhoven, The Netherlands: 3rd International Conference on Maintenance and Loss of Minority Languages. Info: Conference Secretariat, Tilburg University, Research Group on Languages and Minorities, P.O. Box 90153, NL-5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands. E-mail: language.loss@kub.nl.

1999

January
25-28, Santiago de Cuba: 6th International Symposium on Social Communication (social communication processes from the perspectives of Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Voice Processing, Medicine, the Mass media, and Ethnology and Folklore; workshops on Lexicological and Lexicographical research, and Computational Linguistics). Info: Dr. Eloina Miyares Bermudez, Secretaria Ejecutiva Comité Organizador, Apartado Postal 4067, Vista Alegre, Santiago de Cuba 4, Cuba, 90400. Tel: +53 226 42760 or +53 226 41081. Fax: +53 226 41579. E-mail: leonel@lingapli.ciges.inf.cu. Web site: http://wwwseti.cs.utwente.nl/Parlevink/cuba.

February
5-6, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: symposium `Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies: Empirical Approaches'. Topics include: contrastive lexicology (in particular, contrastive phraseology), bilingual/multilingual lexicography, contrastive semantics, contrastive syntax, contrastive pragmatics, compiling and exploiting bilingual/multilingual computerised corpora, software tools for the analysis of bilingual corpora, bilingual corpora and automatic/computer-aided translation. Info: Sylviane Granger, Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, Université Catholique de Louvain, Place Blaise Pascal 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. E-mail: granger@lige.ucl.ac.be. Web site: http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/FLTR/GERM/ContraEngl.htm

April
14-17, Newcastle upon Tyne, England: 2nd International Symposium on Bilingualism. Info: Mrs Gillian Cavagan, ISB Organising Committee, Department of Speech, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK. Fax +44 191 2226518. E-mail: gillian.cavagan@newcastle.ac.uk. Web site: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~nspeech/isb2.htm.

May
27-29, Berkeley, USA: X11th Biennial Meeting of the Dictionary Society of North America. Info: DSNA 1999, Department of Linguistics, Dwinelle Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. E-mail: dsna@trill.berkeley.edu.

August
2-6, Tokyo, Japan: 12th World Conference of Applied Linguistics (AILA '99). Web site: http://langue.hyper.chubu.ac.jp/jacet/AILA99/.

30-3 September, Bolzano-Bozen, Italy: 12th European Symposium on Language for Special Purposes (LSP '99), `Perspectives for the new millennium'. Organized by the European Academy of Bolzano/Bozen in co-operation with the recently-founded University of Bolzano/Bozen and the AILA Scientific Commission on Language for Special Purposes. Info: LSP '99, Section `Language and law', European Academy, Via Weggenstein 12/a, I-39100 Bolzano-Bozen, Italy. E-mail: LSP99@eurac.edu. Web site: http://www.eurac.edu/LSP99.

September
3-10, Mons-Hainaut, Belgium: XV World Congress of the International Federation of Translators (FIT). Web site: http://www.umh.ac.be/atim/fit/congres.html.

2000

April
26-29, Maastricht, The Netherlands: 3rd International Maastricht-Lodz Duo Colloquium, `Translation and Meaning', Maastricht session. Info: Drs Marcel Thelen, School of Translation and Interpreting, Hogeschool Maastricht, P.O. Box 964, 6200 AZ Maastricht, The Netherlands. Tel: +31 43 3466 471. Fax: +31 43 3466 649. E-mail: m.m.g.j.thelen@ftv.hsmaastricht.nl.

August
8-12, Stuttgart, Germany: 9th Euralex Congress. E-mail: elx2000@ims.uni-stuttgart.de.

September
21-24, Lodz, Poland: 3rd International Maastricht-Lodz Duo Colloquium, `Translation and Meaning', Lodz session. Info: Prof. Dr habil. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Department of English Language, University of Lodz, Al. Kosciuszki 65, 90-514 Lodz, Poland. Tel: +48 42 36 63 37. Fax: +48 42 36 63 37, +48 42 36 63 72. E-mail: duoduo@krysia.uni.lodz.pl.
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