How Do We Make Dictionaries?

The readings for this week continued the trend of building upon the ideas of the prior week. The Atkins-Levin reading discussed semantics and the accuracy of dictionaries in presenting words. The current electronic corpus available to us provides an overwhelming amount of linguistic data. How do we select what to put in the dictionary when words are used in so many ways? More importantly, how do we describe words in a way that makes sense? This prompted a discussion of near-synonyms. The example given was that of the shake verb family, including quake, quiver, shake, shiver, shudder, tremble, and vibrate. Atkins-Levin explored the notion that the transitive and intransitive nature of verbs is idiosyncratic. These idiosyncrasies can make the verbs difficult to define.

            One statement in particular interested me. The sentence “No dictionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect” encapsulated the main issue of the article. Words surprise us. The rules we create to define them and their semantics are so often broken. The internal or external causation of the shake verb family can perhaps determine their idiosyncratic behavior. But, as stated by the article, each dictionary fails at some points in describing with precision the lexicon available. It also raises the question of how to define words at all. Every word that we write down potentially contains its own set of irregularities. This especially appeared in the various dictionary definitions of the shake verb family. Many of the verbs utilized other verbs in the same family for their definitions, introducing these idiosyncrasies into the very definitions of the verbs themselves.

            This idea of a varied, diverse, and difficult to describe nature of language also appears in the writings of Haspelmath. This piece had both a morphological and a syntactical focus. For instance, even when dictionaries define words, as discussed by Atkins-Levin, they do not include every sequence of letters. The dictionary definitions are lexemes, while the words that are actually pronounced and used in text are word-forms. Inflection refers to the relationship between word-forms of a lexeme. Tree diagrams can be helpful in showing the hierarchy of morphology. Two interesting examples I found about the construction of words are lipstick and child support. These words are not lipsstick and children support. Thus, some morphological rule governs the combinations of compound words in a way that doesn’t directly state their meaning.

            Building upon the writings of Haspelmath, Slobin explored the different ways we have of describing different scenarios based on the type of language we speak. The article looked at verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages. It dealt with the story of a frog and how speakers choose to describe events. How is the manner of motion expressed and how is the path of motion expressed? For me, the discussion of English was most interesting because Slobin found that English speakers tend to embellish even further. This is intriguing because English already has so many more words than other languages yet speakers still augment with more adjectives. Finally, Slobin concludes that much of the diversity and irregularity we see in language, as discussed by Haspelmath and Atkins-Levin, derives from habitual patterns shaped by ease of linguistic form and cultural and aesthetic aims.