D. J. Prinsloo

Principles and practice of South African lexicography

CITATION: Gouws, R.H. & Prinsloo, D.J. 2005. Principles and practice of South African lexicography. Stellenbosch: AFRICAN SUN MeDIA. doi:10.18820/9781919980911.

Cross-referencing as a lexicographic device

The mediostructure, that is the system of cross-referencing, is a lexicographic device that can be used to establish relations among different components of a dictionary. This paper focuses on different mediostructural strategies and their practical application in general synchronic dictionaries. The structure of dictionaries is discussed from a metalexicographic perspective in order to explain the system of cross-referencing. It is shown how textual cohesion, achieved by the interaction of the various structural components, is promoted by the use of a system of cross-referencing and improved by an innovative approach towards a mediostructure-orientated lexicography.

Formulating a new dictionary convention for the lemmatization of verbs in Northern Sotho

The aim of this article is to formulate a new dictionary convention in order to satisfy the need for the inclusion and appropriate lexicographical treatment of Northern Sotho verbs ending in -e/-e. It will be argued that from a user perspective and on the basis of frequency of use, compilers of learners dictionaries, or restricted pocketsize dictionaries with Northern Sotho as the target language can no longer ignore or under-treat this important phenomenon.

Lemmatization of verbs in Northern Sotho

Currently available dictionaries for Northern Sotho reflect the incapability of compilers to satisfactorily lemmatize verbs in especially pocket- and medium-size dictionaries. With this article I present the first serious attempt to analyse/troubleshoot the verb in Northern Sotho from a lexicographical point of view. Secondly, to critically evaluate traditional efforts towards reducing/selecting the number of possible entries, or the consequences of ignoring the necessity for such a reduction/selection from the numerous verbal derivations. It will be argued that any attempt to lemmatize verbs for Northern Sotho today must be conducted against the background of (a) the user perspective; (b) physical limitations of the dictionary; and (c) current standing/status and availability of dictionaries.

The Compilation of Electronic Dictionaries for the African Languages

Lexicographers increasingly acknowledge the enormous potential of electronic dic- tionaries. The great capacity and speed characteristic of electronic products, combined with enhanced query and data retrieval technology, pave the way to a new generation of dictionaries unimagined in the paper-dictionary era. It is amazing to see how many of the lexicographers great- est obstacles disappear in the electronic dictionary. This article will, firstly, attempt to give a per- spective on typical features of electronic dictionaries. Secondly, electronic-dictionary entries will be designed as a solution to some of the most burning lemmatization problems encountered by lexico- graphers for African languages in paper dictionaries.

Computational features of the dictionary application “TshwaneLex”

The aim of this article is to introduce and to elaborate on computational aspects of TshwaneLex, a new South African software application for dictionary compilation. A brief introduction to the lexicographic needs for such a computer program in South Africa will be given, followed by a description of the most salient features of the software package. Four key features of TshwaneLex will then be analysed, viz. (a) the data presentation in a tree structure, (b) the extendible input/output architecture, (c) database loading issues, and (d) the cross-reference system. For each of these the challenges encountered and/or the design decisions that have been made will be examined.

Towards computer-assisted word frequency studies in Northern Sotho

Preventing the erroneous omission of essential words, and selecting the ‘correct’ corpus of lexical entries for a specific dictionary are two of the lexicographers worst nightmares! The aim of this paper is to offer a solution to both these problems by means of a computerized option for word frequency studies in African languages developed at the University of Pretoria (WFS-Project)2. The latest results obtained from an analysis of different types of data corpora exceeding 155 000 words will be interpreted for Northern Sotho and discussed in more detail. These findings enable lexicographers for African languages to commence word frequency studies in any African language without having to rediscover the wheel, and could contribute to the ultimate goal of bringing the compilation of dictionaries and word frequency studies in African languages on a par with internationally appreciated projects such as the British Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) Corpus and its American counterpart, the Brown Corpus.

Lemmatisation of adjectives in Sepedi

One of the great challenges to compiling better dictionaries for the African languages is to develop sound strategies and procedures for planning the structure of the dictionaries. In this regard all the structural components of a dictionary, including the macrostructure, microstructure, mediostructure and access structure, come into play. Most dictionaries for African languages, including Sepedi dictionaries, fail even at this level. In this article the planning of especially the macrostructure in respect of one lexical category which has been unsatisfactorily treated in Sepedi dictionaries, namely the adjective, will be attempted. Secondly the lemmatisation of adjectives in six Sepedi dictionaries will be critically evaluated. This will be done with the emphasis on various metalexicographical aspects.

Part-of-Speech Tagging of Northern Sotho: Disambiguating Polysemous Function Words

A major obstacle to part-of-speech (=POS) tagging of Northern Sotho (Bantu, S 32) are ambiguous function words. Many are highly polysemous and very frequent in texts, and their local context is not always distinctive. With certain taggers, this issue leads to comparatively poor results (between 88 and 92% accuracy), especially when sizeable tagsets (over 100 tags) are used. We use the RF-tagger (Schmid and Laws, 2008), which is particularly designed for the annotation of fine-grained tagsets (e.g. including agreement information), and we restructure the 141 tags of the tagset proposed by Taljard et al. (2008) in a way to fit the RF tagger. This leads to over 94% accuracy. Error analysis in addition shows which types of phenomena cause trouble in the POS-tagging of Northern Sotho.

Spellcheckers for the South African languages, Part 1: The status quo and options for improvement

In this article an annotated diachronic overview is presented of the field of spelling and grammar checkers with specific reference to the underlying computational techniques. Where appropriate, the various methods are illustrated with data drawn from the official South African languages. The performance of the current South African spellcheckers is subsequently studied, which leads to the conclusion that improvements are needed for especially the Nguni group. Various potential future options to that intent are then looked into. Most illustrations and calculations are carried out on an authentic set of parallel texts entitled “What is the African National Congress?” (ANC, [sa]).