Where does the lexicon data come from?

Introspection
Empirical investigation
- Questionnaires
- Corpus investigations

Corpora

Collection of
- texts
- language recordings
- language related material
- ...
Annotations
- Additional bits of information
- in linguistics: linguistic information
Corpus management and creation
- SL: Praat, Transcriber, Audacity, Wavesurfer, ...
- WL: Concordancers, integrated lexicography suite: The Field Linguist's Toolbox

The connection in theory

Illustration of the relation between different abstraction levels of corpus
and lexicon according to Gibbon 2005

Concordances

Simple corpus based lexicons
List of words with their position in a corpus
Available for written and spoken language corpora (!)
Sometimes called KWIC (KeyWord In Context)
Extremely useful in many contexts

The outsider's view

Corpus of road and shop signs

Another simple corpus

Then I must be thy lady: but I know
When thou hast stolen away from fairy land,
And in the shape of Corin sat all day,
Playing on pipes of corn and versing love
To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here,
Come from the farthest Steppe of India?
But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,
Your buskin'd mistress and your warrior love,
To Theseus must be wedded, and you come
To give their bed joy and prosperity.

Who knows the source?

The source is of course William Shakespeare Midsummer Night's dream, Act II Scene 1, Titania speaking, in this case modified from http://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/full.html

Task

Create a wordlist of five verses
Count how often each word appears
Reference the verse

What you should have noticed

Many words appear more than once, especially function words
Different inflected forms from standard English
"Old fashioned" words

The bread and butter: IGT

Original	Then	I	must	be	thy	lady:	but	I	know
Gloss	then	I	will	be	your	wife	but	I	know
Gloss (German)	dann	ich	muss	sein	deine	Dame	aber	ich	weiß
POS	DP	PP	Aux	V	Possesive Pron	N	Conj	PP	V
"Translation"	If you say you are my husband, then it sounds logical to me that I am your wife.

Resulting lexicon

then: Modern: then; German: dann; POS: DP

I: Modern: I; German: ich; POS: PP

Creating a lexicon: It's magic

Specialized tools: The Field Linguist's toolbox
Software available for free: SIL
Currently only available for Windows and Mac, Linux with emulator
Current version: 1.5.5
Objective: Insert text, create a morphological lexicon, create a lexicon on the fly

Homework for next week

Read about Toolbox and its predecessors. What do you think is the etymology of the predecessor's name? What is the purpose of the tool according to this article?
Go to The E-Meld School of Best Practices in Digital Language Documentation Find the Tool Room, Software, software database. How many Lexicon Managing Tools and concordancing tools can you find? Which one of them has the funniest name for you? Why? Which ones do you know already? How can you use them for creating lexicons?
Define Interlinear Gloss according to at least two types of definitions!
Find examples for Interlinear Glossed Texts. Can Odin help?

Class website

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Universität Bielefeld, 2009-01-13

How to make a dictionary: WS 2008-9

Lexicography (2-3)