engleski

Variation in idioms dictionaries: Lexicographer’s work in the post-editing era

Idioms present a major challenge in dictionary- making. In the digital era, the focus is mainly on automatic identification and extraction of idiomatic expressions. On the other hand, one of the key issues facing lexicographers who compile dictionaries of idioms is variation. Corpus studies of idioms in different European languages show that they vary their lexico-syntactic structure regularly and this variation is systematic. Furthermore, idioms are often creatively exploited in discourse and modifications, i.e. deliberate changes of an idiom’s structure and/or meaning for communicative purposes, are widespread. When it comes to idioms which display flexibility, the organization of dictionary entries fundamentally depends on the lexicographer’s theoretical approach to idiomaticity in general and variation in particular. The aim of this paper is to highlight four practical issues of post- editing work involved in the lexicographic treatment of idiom variation: 1) finding all the conventionalized forms of an idiom in a corpus, 2) identifying the most common variation, 3) distinguishing variations from modifications and 4) finding the most common patterns of modification for individual expressions. We will use entries in the Online Dictionary of Croatian Idioms (under development) as illustrative examples. In this dictionary, items with common lexis which have different grammatical forms are listed in a single entry. Special boxes at the end of some entries include modifications and show what types of changes are typically made to an idiom when it is used creatively. The reason for including modifications is that they are constrained by an idiom’s meaning and the meanings of the individual components. In addition, modifications display some regularity. Overall, even though content is created automatically, post-editing work in idioms dictionaries requires a linguistic background and advanced knowledge of designing corpus queries so as to find variations and modifications. Ultimately, this means creating dictionary entries which show users that idioms are dynamic vocabulary items.

idiom variation ; online dictionary of idioms ; corpus ; Sketch Engine ; Croatian

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