A NEW APPROACH TO BILINGUAL LEXICOGRAPHY USING FRAME SEMANTICS
Beryl T. Sue Atkins · University of Zagreb University Computing Centre (SRCE) · 2002
This paper presents the results of work carried out with CharIes J. Fill more, University of Caliiornia, Berkeley.I describe the way in which one particular theoretical framework (Fillmore's frame semantics, combined with amstruction grammar, the work of Fillmore and his colleague Pau! Kay) may be applied in standard bilinguallexicography.This approach helps lexicographers to prioritize information from corpus data, so that the essential semantic and grammatical facts are recorded for use in the dictionary entry.Taking this further, I propose a new graphie method for showing equivalences and divergences between source and target lan guages in a bilingual dictionary.My practical examples use the English verb crawl and the French verb ramper. Beryl T. S. Atkins, A new approach to bilinguallexicography usingframe semanticsFILOLOGijA36-37(200l),1-22 some important aspect of the word's behaviour has been overlooked.When the bilingual dictionary editors come to the task of formulating the actual dictionary entry, they are of course faced with a double problem: first, the selection of material to go into the entry, and second, the identification in the target language of the most appropriate equivalent or set of equivalents for the headword in its various uses.Here again, in the absence of any theoretical underpinning, they have no means of ensuring that their approach to these tasks is consistent from A to Z of the dictionary -a process which may cover a number of years and involve a large team of lexicographers.It is my experience that the most useful theoretical framework for a practical lexicographer is that offered by the work of Charles Fillmore, frame semantics, and the attendant approach to grammatical description, construction grammar, developed by Charles Fillmore and his colleague at the University of California at Berkeley, Paul Kay.In this essay, we show how frame semantics offers a new way not only of analysing data, selecting from it, translating from source language item to target language item, but also of displaying semantic relationships of polysemous words across languages .