Bound roots

[Gary Persons]

In FLEx 8.2.1 is “Is Abstract Form” the same as “Exclude As Headword”. I don’t see “Exclude As Headword”. The Introduction to Lexicogrphy indicates this box should be checked and put the word to use as Headword in the “Citation Form” field.

 

Gary

[Kevin Warfel]

Gary,

 

I’m not familiar with the “Exclude As Headword” option, except in the context of excluding an entire entry from publication. What you’re talking about sounds different than that, so maybe it’s something that used to be part of FLEx, but has been eliminated in the meantime? It sounds to me that you are dealing with a situation like the one in Phuieŋ (pug), a West African language I am familiar with. In that language, some roots are bound, in that they always require some sort of affix to be attached, but having this “incomplete” form appear as a headword in a Phuieŋ dictionary would be meaningless or even appear “wrong” to a native speaker of the language because that form can never occur. Example: chur- ‘(to) cover’ is a bound root; a Phuieŋ speaker would expect to see churì as the headword in a dictionary, as that is the incompletive form of the verb and recognizably its ‘basic’ form.

 

To accomplish this, I put chur-in the Lexeme Form field and churì in the Citation Form field. When FLEx chooses what to use as the Headword in a publication, it looks first in the Citation Form field; if there is something there, it uses that as the Headword. If Citation Form is blank, it uses what is in the Lexeme Form field. So putting a fully inflected form in the Citation Form field is all you need to do to get that form to be used as Headword in place of what is in the Lexeme Form field.

 

So what purpose does the Lexeme Form field serve in this case? Glad you asked! First of all, it serves to show the true form of the root. Secondly, the contents of the Lexeme Form field are what the parser uses in analyzing words into morphemes. Only by ticking the “Is Abstract Form” box can you get the parser to ignore the contents of the Lexeme Form field. That is the purpose of the “Is Abstract Form” tick box.

 

Hope that helps,

Kevin

 

Kevin Warfel

Associate Dictionary and Lexicography Services Coordinator

a.k.a. Dictionary Development Coordinator

SIL International

 

Current technology makes it possible to provide those translating into just about any language with both a dictionary and a thesaurus in the target language, the standard tools of the trade for professional translators, so why are mother-tongue translators in minority languages still expected to do their work without these tools?  Ask me about Rapid Word Collection after reading about it at rapidwords.net.

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[Beth Bryson]

Hi, Gary.

No, they are not the same thing.  "Is Abstract Form" only makes a difference when using the parser--it tells the parser not to look for that actual surface form in text, but that it can be an underlying form.

"Exclude as Headword" was changed several versions ago because once we added the ability to have several publications, it all got a lot more complicated.  If there are different publications, it might be included in one but excluded from others.

Now we have a section called "Publication Settings".  This is in the Lexicon Edit view, at the very bottom of the lexical entry.  In order to see all of the fields, you may have to check "Show Hidden Fields".  There are several fields there, each relating to a different aspect of whether a word is included in a certain publication. 

For instance:

  - Should this word show up as a headword?

  - Even if it's not a headword, can it be referred to in cross-references?

  - Could it be a subentry?

There are several fields, and we have tried to put explanations of them in the tooltips that will come up if you hover over the field name.  Also, if you click the blue triangle that appears when you select the field, you can go to a Help topic about that specific field.

In addition to being able to exclude an entry from a specific publication, it is also possible to exclude a specific Sense or Example.  Both of these sections also include a "Publish In" field.

Try it out, and if you have more questions, let us know.

-Beth

On Oct 29, 2015, at 4:15 AM, Gary Persons wrote:

In FLEx 8.2.1 is “Is Abstract Form” the same as “Exclude As Headword”. I don’t see “Exclude As Headword”. The Introduction to Lexicogrphy indicates this box should be checked and put the word to use as Headword in the “Citation Form” field.

 

Gary

[Ron Moe]

The "Exclude As Headword" field was in earlier versions of FLEx. It has been removed and replaced by the "Publication Settings" section at the bottom of the Entry pane. The Introduction to Lexicography paper needs to be updated.

Ron Moe

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 2:15 AM, Gary Persons <gary_p...@sil.org> wrote:

In FLEx 8.2.1 is “Is Abstract Form” the same as “Exclude As Headword”. I don’t see “Exclude As Headword”. The Introduction to Lexicogrphy indicates this box should be checked and put the word to use as Headword in the “Citation Form” field.

 

Gary

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[Gary Persons]

Thanks Beth,

 

That helps a lot. Knowing the purpose of a field helps to clarify how to use it. I assumed the “Exclude As Headword” must have been dropped and I can understand now, why. I’ll work with them as I need them, we are planning on at least two different presentations of the dictionary.

 

Gary

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/flex-list/EEC66208-ADC2-4A94-88B9-CB0EA7597CDA%40sil.org.

[Gary Persons]

Hi Kevin,

 

Yes, that helped. That is the situation that I am dealing with and the direction that I had decided to go but was trying to find the correct way to do it in FLEx. There’s about 2,000 of these bound roots that have been identified plus a few bound stems, so I’ve got a bit of work ahead of me. Many of the dictionaries in other languages here list only the root word but a native speaker does not naturally recognize it as a word in the language but seems to accept it as a dictionary form. It would be an “incompletive” form that I would choose as head word but I still need to sort out which aspect of the several “incompletive” forms is the more natural to have as the headword. I am leaning toward a non-prefixed form but that will not work or is not the most natural in some cases.

 

Thanks for your help,

Gary

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[Kim Blewett (gm)]

Hi Gary,

It is possible to use a "prefixed form" as headword and still sort on the Lexeme form, so that verb roots starting with 'a' will sort alongside 'a' nouns, even though the prefix is there.

The language we work with needs a 'bo' article in front of about 60% of the roots/stems. It works very well to sort by Lexeme; if we didn't the natural grouping of entries would be a mess.

Kim Blewett