An analysis of practical lexicography: a reader (Ed. Fontenelle 2008)

Intended as a companion volume to The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography (Atkins and Rundell 2008), Fontenelle's book aims to bring together the most relevant papers in practical lexicography. This review article presents a critical analysis of the success thereof, both in quantitative and qualitative terms

Lexicography and its interdisciplinary contacts, with special reference to Linguistics and Onomasiology

The article attempts a first conspectus of what is known about interdisciplinary con-tacts between the fields of Lexicography and Linguistics, and in the process asks a range of fundamental questions on whether and how the subject matter is shared, and how we can improve mutual relations. Firstly, some opinions and arguments in the literature are reviewed, with par-ticular attention to (a) what criteria determine the status of a discipline, (b) how various relations between Lexicography and Linguistics can be modelled, (c) how practice and theory interact, and (d) what parallels there are between the two disciplines, in terms of such notions as description, codification and remediation. Secondly, views from the position of Linguistics are categorised his-torically and systematically, first by tracing the development from historical comparative or dia-chronic linguistics (philology) to structural-descriptive (synchronic) linguistics as well as applied linguistics, and then by combining five of the linguistic 'levels' with the three semiotic 'dimensions', and relating them to various interdisciplinary or problem-solving fields, such as sociolinguistics and computational linguistics. Thirdly, several points of view in Lexicography are presented, and an explicit framework is developed for displaying its place relative to its 'mother', 'sister' and 'daughter' disciplines as well as some of its 'data-supplying' disciplines, paying special attention to the problem of methodology. Fourthly, as a special case study, the territory of 'onomasiology' is discussed to illustrate the limitations and possibilities of various approaches to the analysis, de-scription and lexicographic presentation of synonym and antonym sets of vocabulary. The conclusion is reached that ways must be found to understand the interdisciplinary nature of Lexico-graphy, and a plea is made to move from mutual neglect to deliberate collaboration. (Several dia-grams are used to display networks of relations; bibliographical references focus on recent work and include representative reference works for the major disciplines mentioned.) Keywords: lexicography, metalexicography, theory and practice, de-scription, codification, remediation, application, interdisciplinary con-tacts, linguistics, onomasiology, mother disciplines, sister disciplines, daughter disciplines, data-supplying disciplines, methodology, reference science, semiotic

Recent Conceptual Consequences of Loop Quantum Gravity. Part II: Holistic Aspects

Based on the foundational aspects which have been discussed as consequences of ongoing research on loop quantum gravity in the first part of this paper, the holistic aspects of the latter are discussed in this second part, aiming at a consistent and systematic approach to eventually model a hierarchically ordered architecture of the world which is encompassing all of what there actually is. The idea is to clarify the explicit relationship between physics and philosophy on the one hand, and philosophy and the sciences in general, on the other. It is shown that the ontological determination of worldliness is practically identical with its epistemological determination so that the (scientific) activity of modelling and representing the world can be visualized itself as a (worldly) mode of being.Comment: 20 page

Lexical typology : a programmatic sketch

The present paper is an attempt to lay the foundation for Lexical Typology as a new kind of linguistic typology.1 The goal of Lexical Typology is to investigate crosslinguistically significant patterns of interaction between lexicon and grammar

Verso la costruzione di una biblioteca digitale.

A data base of the "Antonio Zampolli Fund" has been created and the respective catalogue has been published1. The work of analysis and selection of texts for cataloguing helped in creating this bibliography, in large part built on references extracted by books and journals. Very old bibliographical references have also been retrieved by curricula prepared by Professor Zampolli for various projects and commissions

Natural Language Processing at the School of Information Studies for Africa

The lack of persons trained in computational linguistic methods is a severe obstacle to making the Internet and computers accessible to people all over the world in their own languages. The paper discusses the experiences of designing and teaching an introductory course in Natural Language Processing to graduate computer science students at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, in order to initiate the education of computational linguists in the Horn of Africa region

Portuguese corpora of the 18th century: old Medicine texts for teaching and research

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the application of the methodologies of Corpus Linguistics and of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to an 18th century medicine book. The general objective of this work is to apply the digital humanities tools to a text that has not yet received this kind of approach, in view of teaching an research activities

Technologies in computerized lexicography

Since the early eighties, computer technology has become increasingly relevant to lexicography. Computer science will probably not be the only technological discipline which may have implications for future computerized lexicography. Some developments in the fields of language technology, information technology and knowledge engineering, may support lexicographical practice and enhance the quality of the resulting dictionary. The present paper discusses how the analysis and interpretation of electronic corpus data by the lexicographer may be improved by automatic linguistic analysis, by better access to the corpus, and by a more flexible communication with the computer system. As a frame of reference, first an indication of the state of the art in computerized lexicography will be given, by a concise discussion of three projects at the Institute for Dutch Lexicology INL considered in an international context: the conversion of the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal WNT (Dictionary of the Dutch Language Based on Historical Principles) to electronic form, the compilation of the Vroegmiddelnederlands Woordenboek (Dictionary of Early Middle Dutch) in a computerized lexicographer's workbench, and the INL Taalbank (INL Language Database). Although the topic of this paper is technology, focus is on functional rather than technical aspects of computerized lexicography.Keywords: computerized lexicography, electronic dictionary, electronic text corpus, lexicographer's workbench, integrated language database, automatic linguistic analysis, information retrieval, user interfac