Speaker
Description
In this contribution, we propose and discuss lexicographic devices for the presentation of aspectual properties of verbs in the entries of a monolingual electronic dictionary for advanced learners. The umbrella term ‘verbal aspect’, as we understand it, denotes the interplay of different linguistic devices that contribute to expressing the temporal structuring of events and situations in a language (Comrie, 1976, p. 3), i. e. “how events unfold over time” (Croft, 2012, p. 4). Verbal aspect can thus be seen as a conceptual category that is realised differently in each language (Dessì Schmid, 2014). We assume that the verb is the pivotal element in the expression of verbal aspect and that each verb or verb meaning can be associated with different ‘aspectual properties’ on a semantic as well as a syntactic level (Johanson, 2000, p. 66; Coll-Florit, 2009). For example, the English verb run can, according to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, denote a physical activity as in He ran home in tears to his mother (OALD, s. v. run) or the location of an entity as in The road runs parallel to the river (OALD, s. v. run). From an aspectual perspective, the first meaning is an accomplishment (Vendler, 1957, pp. 145f.), which takes an animate being as the subject as well as a location adverbial or prepositional phrase and which can be used in the progressive form. The second meaning is a state (Vendler, 1957, pp. 146f.) that is associated with an elongated entity in a fixed position and usually does not allow the progressive form. This basic example shows that different aspectual properties of verb meanings can be related to distinctive semantic and combinatorial restrictions. While there is a vast amount of linguistic literature on verbal aspect (for an overview: Sasse, 2002; Filip, 2012; Dessì Schmid, 2014), lexicographic research (and existing dictionaries) have not yet fully recognized the importance of the phenomenon. We are, however, convinced that by explicitly considering verbal aspect, we can render the description of verb meaning and combinatorial properties of verbs more accurate and exhaustive and we can provide learners with additional information that is important for the language production of advanced foreign speakers. The advantages of considering verbal aspect in lexicography will be discussed in relation with a specific dictionary, the Phrase-Based Active Dictionary (PAD), which is currently being developed for German, English and Italian (DiMuccio-Failla & Giacomini, 2022). The dictionary is phraseology-centred in that it subscribes to Sinclair’s claim that a word’s meaning can be identified and described by the occurrence of the word in a distinctive pattern which is determined by: (1) a specific grammatical structure (‘colligation’), (2) associated words (‘collocation’) and (3) associated groups of words with shared semantic features (‘semantic preference’) (i. a. Sinclair, 2003). These patterns are the smallest units of the dictionary entries and can be derived from corpus data (Giacomini et al., 2020; DiMuccio-Failla & Giacomini, 2022). Starting from the usage patterns, the dictionary’s microstructure is constructed to make cognitive relations between the senses and sub-senses of the word in question accessible to its users (DiMuccio-Failla & Giacomini, 2017; 2022, pp. 481–485). Verbal aspect can be included in different parts of the PAD’s dictionary entries. For instance, it is an integral part of each pattern of a verb since each verb meaning necessarily expresses some kind of temporal structure. Beyond that, it can – to different degrees – contribute to meaning variation of a verb or influence its combinatorial preferences. We will show in detail how verbal aspect information can be presented to users, by discussing selected entries for verbs of movement from German, English and Italian in the PAD. We will focus on the way in which different parts of the entry (definitions, usage examples, but also specific items, graphs or usage notes) may convey aspectual information. The presentation of aspect information is based on two desiderata: (1) it should be based on a well-defined set of terms, since the area of verbal aspect is characterised by conflicting views on terminology and concepts (Sasse, 2002, p. 199; Dessì Schmid, 2014, p. 47ff.). (2) The terms should be (made) accessible to users without expert knowledge in the area, since widely used terms such as ‘telic’, ‘imperfective’ or ‘unbounded’ are not readily accessible.
