Slipping Through the Cracks in e-Lexicography

Abstract

Despite the remarkable advances made in recent years to facilitate the lexicographer’s work of interpreting and synthesizing the complexity of language uncovered by corpora, an uncritical use of cutting-edge corpus tools and resources can instill a false sense of assurance. In this paper, authentic examples pertaining to wordlist use, collocation research and example selection that arose when compiling a real-world lexical database are discussed through the lens of problems that can easily slip through the cracks in e-lexicography. In doing so, we emphasize the importance of solid training and sound lexicographic judgment when using corpora, corpus tools and corpus-derived resources, and provide an opportunity to reflect on how e-lexicography can be further refined in the future.

In the melting pot of web‐crawled texts: The challenges of extracting English words from Croatian corpora

“…As Frankenberg‐Garcia et al. (2020, p. 14) remarked, “whereas there is no doubt that word sketches make compiling a collocation database much more efficient, it is essential to bear in mind their results hinge on a number of factors operating silently behind the scenes.” In our research, these factors most likely included the size of our corpus (868,709,843 tokens) and the representative nature of the web‐crawled texts. It is our belief that the ENGRI corpus is satisfactory both in size and representativeness, and since we also checked our results against the HrWaC corpus, we would argue our corpus search yielded reliable data and a fairly comprehensive word list of English words in Croatian.…”

Media Ecology and Language Innovations (Infolexicographic Literacy)

“…Mass communication is considered in the context of its correctness and ecological safety (information literacy) (Frechette, Williams, 2016); language innovations quickly enter mass communication, which leads to numerous semantic errors in the future. To prevent this when replicating, e-lexicography becomes relevant (Frankenberg-Garcia et al, 2021;Granger, Paquot 2012). This type of innovative lexicography quickly develops according to the demands of the time, which is particularly productive in the context of the Digital Age (Sujon, Dyer, 2020).…”

Recommendations for the meanings of words by Estonian language planning – justified and necessary, or not?

“…(Paet & Risberg 2021: 970) Corpus methods empower lexicographers to work in a more systematic and objective manner, encompassing not only their own intuition but also the regular structures observed in the Estonian language community. All these advantages are widely acknowledged in contemporary international lexicography (e.g., see Storjohann 2021;Frankenberg-Garcia et al 2021). Still, in Estonia, there has been some confusion about the benefits of usage-based linguistics and corpus data for language planning (Veldre 2022;Vider 2022).…”