FieldWorkInLexicography

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AFRILEX2013 Preconference workshop †

• Fieldwork Practices in Lexicography
  • Jacques Van Keymeulen (Gent Univeristy, Belgium)
    • historical linguistics
    • dialect lexicographer

Dictionary of Flemish dialect †

• Dialect continuum
  • West Germanic
  • West Romance
  • North Slavic
  • South Slavic
  • Scandinavian

• Different pronunciations of lopen (to run)
  • French Flanders
  • West Flanders
  • East Flanders
  • Zeeland Flanders

• Dutch vs. Emmen (North Flemish dialect)

Language or dialect? †

• sociological notion
  • selection
  • codification
  • function
  • acceptance

Dialect lexicography †

• Flemish = Belgium Dutch; a dialect group in the south-west of the Dutch language area
• Brabantic
• Limburgian
• Zeelandic

Word loss †

• Lexicon is the first language component to be affected.

Material loss †

• Changes in technology
  • disappearance of traditional tools or instruments
  • disappearance of buildings or all the related terms

Thematical dialect lexicography †

• Weijnen's school (Nijmegen University)
• Three parallel regional dictionaries for the southern Dutch dialects
  • Dictionary of the Brabantic Dialects (1960, 1967-2005)
  • Dictionary of the Limburgian Dialects (1960, 1983-2008)
  • Dictionary of the Flemish Dialects (1972 to present)

• Data collection
  • Preparation
    • ethnology: studying the realia
    • conceptual categorization of the world by the dialect speaker
  • inventory of lexical relevant concepts

• Aims
  • Collect
  • Preserve
  • Publish

• Sources
  • 200 collaborators
  • geographical points for questionnaire surveys.

Input in the datebase †

• Every dialect is put in in its normalized (to a Dutch) headword form.
  • e.g. uuflakke in Gent --> hoofdvlakke
  • e.g. verkiesges in Mater

Thematical arrangement †

• Ethnology enriches the description of lexicography

Preparation in Fieldwork †

• How to find informants
  • representativeness
  • lexical knowledge unevenly distributed
  • how to find respondents
    • intermediary: school teachers or clergymen

• Profile
  • Subjective criteria: motivation/intelligence/linguistic introspection/verbalistic
  • Objective criteria: NORM-respondent for dialectology
    • NON-MOBILE, OLD, RURAL, MALE (NORM)
    • Men are conservative, generally speaking
    • Women are vanguards; Civilization is passed onto the next generation by women.
    • people born before the world war II are usually chosen, otherwise so many external factors (modernization, media influence) will affect informants' language.

• Methods of fieldwork may vary according to language component:
  • Macrostructure
    • lexicon
    • semantics
  • Microstructure

• self-observation
  • describe your own language
  • one cannot always trust one's own knowledge
  • control necessary
• observations of spontaneous speech
  • notebook-method
  • high validity of the data
  • important for the closed word categories
  • hard to systematize observations
• systematic fieldwork
  • recording and transcribing free speech
    • interview about a specific topic
    • unified transcription protocol needed
    • metadata should be recorded
    • orthographical transcriptions
  • lexicographical questionnaires
    • oral interview
    • investigation by correspondence (indirect method)
    • contact language dialect (oral)

• Onomasiological questions
  • What is the word for X?
• Semasiological question
  • Do you know word X and what does it mean?