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p>Abstract: The ideophone, a word class not unique to but highly characteristic of the Bantu languages, presents particular challenges in both monolingual and bilingual lexicography. Not only is this part of speech without a counterpart in most other languages, the meaning of ideophones is highly elusive. In this research article these challenges a...
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... Context always contributes to meaning-making, but the evidence suggests that ideophones do have semantic content, and that important aspects of this content can be captured in multimodal folk definitions. To get a better view of the semantics of ideophones, then, we need to go beyond traditional elicitation methods, which have never worked all that great for ideophones (Childs 1993;Noss 1999;Lydall 2000;de Schryver 2009;Blench 2010). Folk definitions are of course only one of several possible methods for studying the meaning and use of ideophones, reviewed elsewhere (Dingemanse 2012). ...
This study uses the motion semantic grid (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2019) to analyze the semantics of literary Chinese ideophones that depict motion (N = 313). I offer strategies for handling missing values in the Grid and enhancements specific to Chinese data, such as the inclusion of semantic radicals. Utilizing multiple correspondence analysis ( mca ), I identify the most salient elements and distances between items. The findings reveal that (1) all first-level components in the Grid play a role, e.g. figure, ground, motion, path, manner, cause, event extension ; (2) of second-level components Animacy, Quanta, Basic level, Motor-pattern, Semantic radical, Motion, Direction, and Aspect contribute most to the first three latent dimensions; (3) motion ideophones cluster in salient groups. This study confirms the motion semantic grid’s utility for studying motion ideophones but highlights the need for language-specific adaptations and strategies for handling missing values absent from the original proposal.
The present chapter examines the peculiarities of lexicography linking two languages. It addresses the following broad issues: Can bilingual dictionaries legitimately be called translation dictionaries? What language pairs do they normally cover? Who uses them? What are the most persistent problems faced by bilingual lexicography and what time-honored theoretical assumptions are they grounded in? Why is lexicographic equivalence a problematic notion? How is the bilingual dictionary currently changing and what is its future likely to be? The discussion is preceded by a few words of general introduction.
The present chapter examines the peculiarities of lexicography linking two languages. It addresses the following broad issues: Can bilingual dictionaries legitimately be called translation dictionaries? What language pairs do they normally cover? Who uses them? What are the most persistent problems faced by bilingual lexicography and what time-honored theoretical assumptions are they grounded in? Why is lexicographic equivalence a problematic notion? How is the bilingual dictionary currently changing and what is its future likely to be? The discussion is preceded by a few words of general introduction.
In this article a little-known dictionary manuscript from the 1930s, the Lexique kikongo-français by the Jesuit missionary Charles Polis, is analysed in great detail. Section 1 expounds on the goal and raison d'être of the study, Section 2 introduces the manuscript, its author as well as the Kikongo variety dealt with, Section 3 presents the inner workings of the Lexique on macro-, micro-and mediostructural levels, Section 4 gives a lexicographical appreciation based on a large selection of the entries, Section 5 joins the international debate on the exact nature of a dictionary's macro-structure, access structure and access route, and Section 6 compares Polis's work with a dictionary from the same region and period. Conclusions are offered in Section 7, chief among them the fact that Polis designed the most innovative outer access structure of any Bantu dictionary.
