ABSTRACT |
Dictionaries, whether printed or electronic, push the claim that maximal
abstrac¬tion is necessary to deliver information that is applicable to a
wide range of linguistic contexts. At the same time, due to space
limitations originally associated with dictionaries, the number of
examples for each entry is kept low and they are often reduced to small
fragments. In contrast findings within the domain of cognitive science
show that examples are highly con¬du¬cive to learning at large and
language learning in parti¬cular since learning con¬sists of making
generali¬sations on the basis of concrete examples (Spitzer 2002).
Within the lexical approach maintained in Lewis (1993, 2000) the
resulting example based learning paradigm is put into action.
The online dictionary-cum-corpus system Logotax, which we will present,
is based on these ideas and even takes them one step futher, sketching
new directions for future lexica. It was developed to assist language
students to learn verb noun collocations – collocations in this sense
being understood as be¬ing “conventionalised building blocks of the
lexicon” that give texts their fluency (Heid 1994, S.228). The system is
targeted at advanced learners of German. The global aim of LogoTax is to
enable the language student to act as a “professional” amateur
lexicographer inviting him to systematically in¬clude and explore the
use of those word combi¬na¬tions he is interested in for his own
language produc¬tion. With LogoTax the student can build up and
administer his personal electronic collocation dic¬tionary.
Within this context LogoTax (Ludewig 2001) tries to support the
indi¬vidual learning process of students by offering three
re¬pre¬sentation layers for verb noun collocations. The three layer
repre¬sen¬¬ta¬tion approach pursued within LogoTax aims at overcoming
the existing gap between dictionaries and corpora.
• In the upper layer, collocations are given traditionally in their
cano¬nical form, i.e. as infinitives, offering already a minimal context
with respect to the involved lexical items.
• In the lower layer, concrete examples compiled by the system on the
basis of an integrated corpus, illustrate how the embodied collocations
are actually used by the language commu¬nity.
• Via an intermediate representation layer, which is auto¬ma¬ti¬cally
produced with the help of a syn¬tactic parser and a collocational
evaluation of its parse results, the examples illustrating a given
collocation are classified according to detailed morpho-syntactic
features (e.g. the noun of the col¬lo¬cation is given in plural or the
collo¬ca¬tion is used in passive voice).
Now all those examples sharing a given feature can be bundled and
displayed together in order to stimulate the student’s personal
generalisation skills and raise his language aware¬ness: there are a lot
of contextual conditions to be kept in order to correctly use a
collocation. Of course, the generalisa¬tions that can be made rely on
the quality of the references identified in the corpus to some degree,
hence making them uncertain. For this reason they should not be made by
LogoTax itself. In fact, it is up to the language student to assume
responsibility for his perso¬nal collocation learning. However, LogoTax
can, as we will demonstrate, present the relevant data in a well-structured
manner stimulating the student’s abstraction skills.
Heid, U. (1994): On Ways Words Work together – Research Topics in
Lexical Combina¬torics. In Martin, W., W. Meijs, M. Moerland, E. ten
Pas, P. van Sterkenburg and P. Vossen (Ed.): EURALEX ´94, Proceedings of
the VIth Euralex International Congress, S. 226 – 257, Amsterdam.
Lewis, M. (1993): The Lexical Approach: the state of ELT and a way
forward. Language Teaching Publications (LTP), Hove.
Lewis, M. (2000): Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the
Lexical Approach. Language Teaching Publications (LTP), Hove.
Ludewig, P. (2001): LogoTax – un outil exploratoire pour l'étude de
collocations en corpus. In: tal (traitement automatique des langues),
vol. 42:2, Special Issue on: Natural Language Processing and Corpus
Linguistics / Traitement automatique des langues et linguistique de
corpus. Hermès, Paris.
Spitzer, M. (2002): Lernen – Gehirnforschung und die Schule des Lebens.
Spektrum – Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg.
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