Gilles-Maurice de Schryver’s research while affiliated with Ghent University and other places

In this contribution Rove Chishman and Bruna da Silva present questions to the President of the European Association for Lexicography, Gilles-Maurice de Schryver. In answering, G-M de Schryver calls a spade a spade: No, there is no theory of lexicography, but yes, there is a future for lexicographers. For that future to be bright, lexicographers will have to join hands with the Big Data companies, and accept that their invaluable input will be all but invisible to the users. Artificial Intelligence components will have to be used in earnest, so that ‘searches’ (not look-ups!) will instantly lead to context-sensitive answers. Browsing lexical data only starts from these answers and proceeds from there in two- (and why not three-) dimensional multimedia spaces. To achieve this, G-M de Schryver points to the most promising research ideas at present, as well as the top teams involved in digital dictionary user research.Keywords: EURALEX; eLex; digital lexicography; e-dictionaries; corpora; automation; crowdsourcing; Corpus Query Packages (CQPs); Dictionary Writing Systems (DWSs); artificial intelligence (AI); user-friendliness; mobile devices; augmented writing assistants; eye-tracking; digital user research.

This paper presents an overview of the verbal tone system of Lower Nyole (LN), a moribund and previously unrecognized variety of Nyole (JE35) in southern Busoga. LN has a reversive tone system with two tonal classes of verbs – (i) verbs which are underlyingly toneless and (ii) historically *H-toned verbs which synchronically have an initial /L/ tone. All known verbal contexts of LN are inflected with a melodic tone pattern, i.e. there are no tonally uninflected constructions. Like other Luyia languages, LN has a large number of tonal inflections, characterized by assigning Hs to positions at the edges of the verb stem. An additional noteworthy property of LN verb tone is that long vowels that precede NC clusters are treated like short vowels by tone assignment principles.

Lusoga is an interlacustrine Bantu language spoken in the eastern part of Uganda in the region of Busoga, which is surrounded by the Victoria Nile in the west, Lake Kyoga in the north, the River Mpologoma in the east and Lake Victoria in the south. According to the 2002 census, this language is spoken by slightly over two million people (UBOS 2006: 12).

Good modern dictionaries increasingly base the compilation of both their macro- and microstructure on electronic corpora. As the microstructure is the subject of this article, the focus is on corpora as the key to writing better dictionary articles, with special reference to African-language lexicography. As such, the impact of corpora as an aid to sense distinctions, the retrieval of typical collocations, the pinpointing of frequent clusters and the selection of representative, authentic examples is given due attention. Throughout the discussion, corpus data are contrasted with native-speaker intuitions, and dictionary articles that were compiled intuitively within the framework of so-called traditional ‘manual lexicography’ are evaluated against those compiled by means of a corpus. All corpus data are culled from two relatively large electronic corpora, one 4-million-word Pretoria Sepedi Corpus (PSC) and one 2.2-million-word Kiswahili Internet Corpus (KIC).

Good modern dictionaries increasingly base the compilation of both their macro- and microstructure on electronic corpora. As the macrostructure is the subject of this article, a few typical macrostructural inconsistencies in existing African-language dictionaries, which can be rectified by the utilisation of a corpus, are discussed. It is shown that the first application of a corpus is the utilisation of word-frequency counts to compile a lemmatised frequency list. Together with data on lemma-sign distributions across sub-corpora, the lemma-sign list of a dictionary can subsequently be derived. These theoretical notions are exemplified with a thorough discussion of how an electronic corpus led to the creation of the macrostructure of a Cilubà-Dutch dictionary. In addition, explicit frequency markers are advanced to further enhance the macrostructural reference quality. The latter is illustrated with both Cilubà-Dutch and Sepedi-English dictionaries. Finally, the article concludes with a series of macrostructural improvements of corpus-aided/based dictionaries over manually compiled ones.

In this article a four-step methodology is proposed for the creation of the lemma-sign list of a Nguni-language reference work. The theoretical principles are illustrated throughout with a full- scale case study revolving around isiNdebele For the suggested approach raw corpus data is utilised, and only standard, straightforward and widely-available software tools are required to process the data. Apart from the inherent value of having an entire macrostructure at one's disposal right from the start of a dictionary project, it is shown how such a list can also be used for both predictions and measurements on lemma-sign, page and time levels As such, drawing up the macrostructure of a dictionary automatically leads to a ‘ruler’ with which the entire lexicographic process can successfully be monitored. Specifically for isiNdebele, suggestions are made for the way ahead.

Foreword by the President of AFRILEX Voorwoord deur die President van AFRILEX

Just as book reviews are written for a variety of reasons, the reviews them-selves serve various purposes. Chief among the latter is probably one's wish to know whether or not one should actually read the book under review. Let me therefore state upfront that, yes, this work should be on every (meta)lexico-grapher's bookshelf, where it should only be allowed to gather dust once it has been carefully studied and its contents seriously pondered. When Sobkowiak himself claimed, on p. 14 of the work under review, that "every lexicographer should read this book", I was sceptical, but after having read through the entire text twice, I have to conclude that he is indeed correct.

: An innovative online Swahili–English dictionary project is presented. A careful study of some of the log files attached to this reference work reveals some hitherto unknown as-pects of true dictionary look-up behaviour, which results in the depreciation of the importance of corpora for dictionary making. Three lexicography software modules are advanced to further enhance the success of the online dictionary. Keywords: LEXICOGRAPHY, SOFTWARE, ONLINE, DICTIONARY, LOG FILE, CORPUS, FREQUENCY, RANK, CORRELATION, SWAHILI, ENGLISH, TSHWANELEX Samenvatting: Zoeken woordenboekgebruikers werkelijk frequente woor-den op? — Over de overschatting van de waarde van corpusgebaseerde lexi-cografie. Een vernieuwend online Swahili–Engels woordenboekproject wordt voorgesteld. Een minutieuze studie van enkele van de log bestanden gekoppeld aan dit referentiewerk onthult tot dusver onbekende aspecten van het echte opzoekgedrag van woordenboekgebruikers, wat leidt tot een devaluatie van het belang van corpora voor het maken van woordenboeken. Drie lexicogra-fische softwaremodules worden naar voor geschoven om het succes van het online woordenboek verder te vergroten. Sleutelwoorden: LEXICOGRAFIE, SOFTWARE, ONLINE, WOORDENBOEK, LOG BE-STAND, CORPUS, FREQUENTIE, RANG, CORRELATIE, SWAHILI, ENGELS, TSHWANELEX