Elsabe Taljard

• University of Pretoria

The need for electronic resources for (under-resourced) African languages is an often stated one. These resources are needed for language research in general, and more specifically for the development of Human Language Technology (HLT) applications such as machine translation, speech recognition, electronic dictionaries, spelling and grammar checke...

Background: In recent reviews of autism spectrum disorder screening tools, the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers, Revised with Follow-Up (M-CHAT-R/FTM) has been recommended for use in lower middle-income countries to promote earlier identification. Aim: The study aim was to culturally adapt and translate the M-CHAT-R/FTM into Northern Soth...

Optimization of Free Online/Electronic Resources for Dictionary Compilation — A Trilingual Dictionary Experiment. The availability of multilingual dictionaries is crucial, not only for direct target users, but also for indirect target users, especially in the case of languages with scarce resources such as Venda. This article explores the optimal u...

This article represents follow-up work on unpublished presentations by the authors of text and corpus cleaning strategies for the African languages. In this article we provide a comparative description of cleaning of web-sourced and text-sourced material to be used for the compilation of corpora with specific attention to cleaning of text-based mat...

Background: In recent reviews of autism spectrum disorder screening tools, the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers, Revised with Follow-Up (M-CHAT-R/F TM ) has been recommended for use in lower middle-income countries to promote earlier identification. Aim: The study aim was to culturally adapt and translate the M-CHAT-R/F TM into Northern So...

Although a considerable body of corpus-based metaphor research—with Conceptual Metaphor Theory as theoretical framework and heuristic tool—has been published internationally, South African studies in this field are lagging behind. This article aims to demonstrate how cross-linguistic metaphor research within a cognitive semantics framework can bene...

Children's dictionaries are instrumental in establishing a dictionary culture and are the gateway to sustained and informed dictionary use. It is therefore surprising that very little attention is paid to these dictionaries in scholarly research. In this article we reflect on the design of two series of dictionaries and one free-standing dictionary...

This article reports on an evaluation of the Sepedi Helper (http://www.sepedihelper.co.za/), an online writing assistant. The focus of the evaluation is on the verbal moods in Sepedi (Northern Sotho). The evaluation takes the form of a user study, and data collection was done by means of a questionnaire, administered to 81 first- and second-year st...

Being a multilingual country rich in culture and diversity, South Africa has residents who use a variety of the 11 official languages for daily communication. Multilingual communication occurs especially in hospitals and clinics. People visiting healthcare facilities often struggle to locate a health professional that shares the same language or ev...

African Language Lexicography: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. This article aims to give a perspective on African language lexicography's response to developments in international lexicographic practice in relation to new trends and changes mainly brought about by the electronic era. The development of African language lexicography will be compared...

Hierdie artikel vorm die tweede deel van 'n reeks van twee oor die Woordelysgedeelte van die Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls (AWS). Die aanlyn weergawe van die woordelysgedeelte van die AWS is in 2010, net nadat die tiende uitgawe van die AWS in 2009 die lig gesien het, aan gebruikers beskikbaar gestel. Hierdie weergawe van die 2009-Woordelys wor...

In 2017 the Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls (AWS) celebrates its centenary year. Our contribution commemorates this milestone with a (re)evaluation of this standard and wellknown reference work - in particular of the wordlist sections of the AWS. This article - the first of two - offers a historical overview of the function, nature and scope of t...

In 2017 sal die Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls (hierna afgekort as AWS) 'n volle eeu oud wees, en hierdie bydrae gedenk die mylpaal met 'n (her)waardering van veral die woordelysdeel van die AWS. Aanvanklik word ʼn historiese oorsig gegee oor die ontstaan en ontwikkeling van die woordelys met 'n fokus op sy funksie, aard en omvang. 'n Evaluasie v...

This article aims to give a perspective on African language lexicography's response to developments in international lexicographic practice in relation to new trends and changes mainly brought about by the electronic era. The development of African language lexicography will be compared to that of mainly English paper and electronic dictionaries. T...

This article offers a distributional corpus analysis of the Northern Sotho noun and gender system. The aim is twofold: first, to assess whether the existing descriptions of the noun class system in Northern Sotho are corroborated by information provided by the analysis of a large electronic corpus for this language, with specific reference to singu...

South Africa has 11 official languages and speakers of different languages communicate with each other on a daily basis, especially at hospitals and clinics. Sometimes it is difficult for a patient to find a health professional that speaks a language he/she understands. The University of Pretoria addresses potential language barriers in the health...

This article considers the importance of including various types of collocations in a terminological database, with the aim of making this information available to the user via the user interface. We refer specifically to the inclusion of empirical and phraseological collocations, and information on grammatical patterning. Attention is also given t...

Communication plays a vital role in everyday life and in some situations multilingual communication is a necessity. The South African constitution recognises 11 official languages. Multilingual communication therefore occurs almost everywhere, like at hospitals and in clinics. When the need arises for someone (who does not speak a global language l...

In Northern Sotho, a separate colour lexicon is distinguished, containing terms which are believed to be used exclusively as colour terms to describe not only the colours, but also the colour patterning found among domestic animals, particularly cattle. According to current literature, the use of these terms is restricted to the description of catt...

In a previous article (Faaß et al., 2012), a first attempt was made at documenting and encoding morphemic units of two South African Bantu languages, i.e. Northern Sotho and Zulu, with the aim of describing and storing the morphemic units of these two languages in a single relational database, structured as a hierarchical ontology. As a follow-up,...

The abundant and systematic presence of metaphor in language has in particular been explored by departing from the embodied nature of many metaphors. In the current research we investigate the manner in which the concept EATING in two nonrelated languages, namely Afrikaans (a Germanic language) and Northern Sotho (a Bantu language) gives rise to me...

The availability of large-scale electronic language corpora has led to revolutionary changes in the landscape of linguistic research. Corpus linguistics has in the past few decades developed from an alternative methodology of linguistic investigation to a fully-fledged theoretical approach to linguistic study. Furthermore, having access to electron...

Studies on corpus-based language teaching are notably absent within the South African educational context; more so with regard to the teaching of African languages. This article explores the possibilities offered by the availability of an electronic corpus to enhance language teaching, and more specifically, the teaching of Northern Sotho as a seco...

This article describes the design of an electronic knowledge base, namely a morpho-syntactic database structured as an ontology of linguistic categories, containing linguistic units of two related languages of the South African Bantu group: Northern Sotho and Zulu. These languages differ significantly in their surface orthographies, but are very si...

In this article, we describe an element of a suite of computational tools for assigning word-class tags (as a preparation for part of speech (POS) tagging) to word forms in unrestricted Northern Sotho texts. POS-tagging is a step towards a linguistic analysis of the texts, which in turn allows for advanced data extraction. The tool component that i...

The use of variable copulative prefixes in copulative structures is an unusual phenomenon, since a verbal element—in this case a subject agreement morpheme—is prefixed directly to a nonverbal complement. In this article it is argued that these prefixes are the grammaticalized remnants of full copulative verbs. This point of view is illustrated by m...

Daar word algemeen aanvaar dat naamwoordstukke se temakrag deur bepaalde semantiese en diskoerseienskappe be- paal word. Aangesien indirekte Objekte in dubbeloorganklike strukture die kenmerke vertoon wat allerweë met temakrag geassosieer word, volg dit dat hierdie objekte oor sterker inherente temakrag as direkte Objekte beskik en der- halwe in 'n...

The use of variable copulative prefixes in copulative structures is an unusual phenomenon, since a verbal element—in this case a subject agreement morpheme—is prefixed directly to a nonverbal complement. In this article it is argued that these prefixes are the grammaticalized remnants of full copulative verbs. This point of view is illustrated by m...

In tradisionele grammatikas word daar normaalweg 'n onderskeid tussen morfologies gemarkeerde en ongemarkeerde indirekte objekte in dubbeloorganklike konstruksies in Noord-Sotho gemaak. Daar is tot dusver aanvaar dat die indirekte objeksrelasie òf deur die gebruik van een van twee verbale suffikse òf deur 'n sogenaamde lokatiewe partikel ku (Zulu),...

This article reports on the results of a broad evaluation of the efficacy of the Multilingual Explanatory Science Dictionary and Multilingual Explanatory Math Dictionary in a multilingual educational environment. The aim of the investigation is to ascertain (a) whether the target users possess the necessary dictionary using skills to make use of th...

The advent of electronic corpora has revolutionized linguistic investigation internationally and is starting to make inroads into the study of the South African Bantu languages. In this article, it is argued that the move from traditional language studies to corpus-based investigation would be a natural one for South African Bantuists, since it pro...

p class="AP">One of the many implications of the process of language democratization which started post-1994 in South Africa is the empowerment of the previously marginalized South African Bantu languages to become languages of higher functions, i.e. languages of learning and teaching, and also of scientific discourse. This in turn implies the deve...

Foreword by the editor of Lexikos 21Voorwoord deur die redakteur van Lexikos 21

In response to a number of recent government publications on the promotion of science and technology training, the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (South African Academy for Science and Art) initiated the compilation of a multilingual explanatory dictionary for chemistry. The need for such a dictionary is especially urgent in learnin...

Corpus-based terminology is currently gaining ground on the international front. Itis therefore important that terminologists working on the South African Bantu languages not onlytake note of this development, but that they should also follow this trend, even if they do not havethe same measure of access to highly sophisticated software. The aim of...

p>Abstract: Worldwide, semi-automatically extracting terms from corpora is becoming the norm for the compilation of terminology lists, term banks or dictionaries for special purposes. If Africanlanguage terminologists are willing to take their rightful place in the new millennium, they must not only take cognisance of this trend but also be ready t...

p>Abstract: In response to a number of recent government publications on the promotion of science and technology training, the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (South African Academy for Science and Art) initiated the compilation of a multilingual explanatory dictionary for chemistry. The need for such a dictionary is especially urgen...

p>Abstract: In this article it is shown how a corpus-based dictionary grammar may be compiled — that is, a mini-grammar fully based on corpus data and specifically written for use in and inte-grated with a dictionary. Such an effort is, to the best of our knowledge, a world's first. We exem-plify our approach for a Northern Sotho mini-grammar, to b...

p>Abstract: The focus of this article is the planning and design of a bilingual, explanatory dictionary for industrial electronics with a clearly delimited and very specific target user in mind. Since the number of lemmas to be treated in the dictionary is limited to 500, special care must be taken to select those lemmas that are relevant for both...

p>Abstract: Corpus-based terminology is currently gaining ground on the international front. Itis therefore important that terminologists working on the South African Bantu languages not onlytake note of this development, but that they should also follow this trend, even if they do not havethe same measure of access to highly sophisticated software...

p>Abstract: In this research article an in-depth investigation is presented of the lexicographictreatment of the demonstrative copulative (DC) in Sesotho sa Leboa. This one case study serves asan example to illustrate the so-called 'paradigmatic lemmatisation' of closed-class words in theAfrican languages. The need for such an approach follows a di...

The focus of this article is the planning and design of a bilingual, explanatory dic-tionary for industrial electronics with a clearly delimited and very specific target user in mind. Since the number of lemmas to be treated in the dictionary is limited to 500, special care must be taken to select those lemmas that are relevant for both the purpose...

In this article it is shown how a corpus-based dictionary grammar may be compiled — that is, a mini-grammar fully based on corpus data and specifically written for use in and inte-grated with a dictionary. Such an effort is, to the best of our knowledge, a world's first. We exem-plify our approach for a Northern Sotho mini-grammar, to be included i...

Corpus-based terminology is currently gaining ground on the international front. It is therefore important that terminologists working on the South African Bantu languages not only take note of this development, but that they should also follow this trend, even if they do not have the same measure of access to highly sophisticated software. The aim...

In this research article an in-depth investigation is presented of the lexicographic treatment of the demonstrative copulative (DC) in Sesotho sa Leboa. This one case study serves as an example to illustrate the so-called 'paradigmatic lemmatisation' of closed-class words in the African languages. The need for such an approach follows a discussion,...

In response to a number of recent government publications on the promotion of science and technology training, the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (South African Academy for Science and Art) initiated the compilation of a multilingual explanatory dictionary for chemistry. The need for such a dictionary is especially urgent in learnin...

Worldwide, semi-automatically extracting terms from corpora is becoming the norm for the compilation of terminology lists, term banks or dictionaries for special purposes. If Africanlanguage terminologists are willing to take their rightful place in the new millennium, they must not only take cognisance of this trend but also be ready to implement...

Identifying copulative constructions in Bantu can be classified into three broad categories, viz. nominal copulative structures, copulative structures in which invariable copulative prefixes appear as copulas and copulative structures in which copulative verbs function as copulas. In this article the diachronic relation between these three types of...

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 tagset...

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 tagset...

Translating technical texts into the South African Bantu languages, and to a lesser extent into Afrikaans, is an activity fraught with problems, the biggest one being the lack of terminology in these languages. In this article-undertaken within the framework of Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS), and more specifically within the subfield of App...

The aim of this article is to describe the design and implementation of a verb guesser that will enhance the results of statistical part of speech (POS) tagging of verbs in Northern Sotho. It will be illustrated that verb stems in Northern Sotho can successfully be recognised by examining their suffixes and combinations of suffixes. Two approaches...

On the development of a tagset for Northern Sotho with special reference to the issue of standardisation Working with corpora in the South African Bantu languages has up till now been limited to the utilisation of raw corpora. Such corpora, however, have limited functionality. Thus the next logi- cal step in any NLP application is the development o...

A comparison between cattle colour terminology found in the Khoikhoi languages and that found in South African Bantu languages brings noticeable similarities to light, leading to the assumption that both the cattle and the terms used to describe their characteristic features were acquired by the South Eastern Bantu-speakers through contact with Kho...

In this article it is shown how a corpus-based dictionary grammar may be compiled - that is, a mini-grammar fully based on corpus data and specifically written for use in and integrated with a dictionary. Such an effort is, to the best of our knowledge, a world's first. We exemplify our approach for a Northern Sotho mini-grammar, to be included int...

In Northern Sotho one of the strategies to express locality makes use of lo- cative particle groups, being complements preceded by any of the so-called locative particles ka, kua, mo, ga ,o rgo. Current linguistic descriptions shy away from those cases where sequences of such particles are employed. In this article these sequences are termed ''loca...

Northern Sotho and Zulu are two South African Bantu languages that make use of different writing systems, viz. a disjunctive and a conjunctive writing system respectively. In this article it is argued that the different orthographic systems obscure the morphological similarities and that these systems impact directly on word class tagging for the t...

In this research article an in-depth investigation is presented of the lexicographic treatment of the demonstrative copulative (DC) in Sesotho sa Leboa. This one case study serves as an example to illustrate the so-called 'paradigmatic lemmatisation' of closed-class words in the African languages. The need for such an approach follows a discussion,...

The associative copulative in Northern Sotho distinguishes itself from other copulatives in that it is realised in a variety of morphological structures. In this article the relationship, whether synchronic or diachronic, between these different manifestations is investigated and it is argued that these different forms actually represent different...

This article opposes the view that the conditional verb form of Northern Sotho should be regarded as an autonomous mood, and shows that the notion of condition is nothing but one of several modalities which can be expressed by indicative verbs. It is argued that although both situative and conditional verb forms can be used in conditional clauses,...

Worldwide, semi-automatically extracting terms from corpora is becoming the norm for the compilation of terminology lists, term banks or dictionaries for special purposes. If African- language terminologists are willing to take their rightful place in the new millennium, they must not only take cognisance of this trend but also be ready to implemen...

We describe an architecture for the parallel construction of a tagger lexicon and an annotated reference corpus for the part-of-speech tagging of Nothern Sotho, a Bantu language of South Africa, for which no tagged resources have been available so far. Our tools make use of grammatical properties (morphological and syntactic) of the language. We us...

Terminology as independent discipline, as well as its practical applications is not yet well established for the South African Bantu languages. The aim of this paper is to illustrate some strategies that are currently employed to ensure sound terminology practice in a non-standardized environment, and at the same time contribute to terminology and...

Thesis (MA)-Universiteit van Pretoria, 1988.