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 language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 953-979 |
Number of pages | 27 |
Journal | DELTA Documentacao de Estudos em Linguistica Teorica e Aplicada |
Volume | 32 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2016 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Corpus linguistics
- Full-sentence defi nition
- Lexical patterns
- Semantic analysis