Systematising corpus-based defi nitions in second language lexicography

Irene Renau, Araceli Alonso Campo

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

This study explores the application of a semantic analysis methodology to the creation of defi nitions of learners' dictionaries. Defi ning words is a delicate art, traditionally left to the general writing skills of the lexicographer, introspection, or even intuition. In the past decades, many efforts have been directed towards systematising the technique, particularly in the pedagogical dictionaries momentum. In this paper, we try to demonstrate that there is still room for improvement, and that a systematic corpus analysis can be applied to build better explanations for the meaning of words. We explain the theoretical background chosen for our study, the associated methodology and fi ve specifi c strategies which can guide the lexicographer through his/her task. In order to give a concrete example, we show our work with a Spanish dictionary project for foreign learners which is currently under development and has a core of very frequent Spanish verbs already available on the Internet.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)953-979
Number of pages27
JournalDELTA Documentacao de Estudos em Linguistica Teorica e Aplicada
Volume32
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016

Keywords

  • Corpus linguistics
  • Full-sentence defi nition
  • Lexical patterns
  • Semantic analysis

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Systematising corpus-based defi nitions in second language lexicography'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this