Dictionaries of today should offer much more than just knowledge about single words, they should rather be regarded as language information tools. However, in most electronic dictionaries of today, complex morphological constructions are not considered, thus users of dictionaries are usually expected to analyse such complex words themselves and to query base forms. With such a task, language learners, especially beginners, are often out of their depth. The question arising now, in particular with regard to learners' dictionaries, is whether and how can we enable an electronic dictionary to analyse complex constructions providing information on their structure and on their meaning? Taking Zulu negation as an example of a complex morphological construction, we first examined the frequency of this phenomenon in the corpora available and found an impressive number of them. So in the latter part of this paper, we try to find options for a practical implementation in electronic dictionaries.
@InProceedings{BOSCH18.12, author = {Sonja Bosch and Gertrud Faaβ}, title = {Options for a Lexicographic Treatment of Negation in Zulu}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {may}, date = {7-12}, location = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {979-10-95546-28-3}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper