Abstract
The objective of this PhD project was to propose the design of an online corpus-driven dictionary of Portuguese for university students (DOPU), aimed at both speakers of Portuguese as a mother tongue and as an additional language and covering Brazilian and European Portuguese varieties. For that, the highly innovative semi-automated approach to dictionary-making (Gantar, Kosem and Krek 2016) was adopted, which involves automatic extraction of data from the corpus and import into dictionary writing system. As a method that had never been applied for lexicographical projects of the Portuguese language, it was necessary to experiment the approach for the first time. Thus, all the required pre-requisites were newly developed, namely, a corpus of academic texts, sketch grammar, GDEX configuration, and a specially-tailored procedure for automatic extraction of data. The experiment indicated that not only can this approach be successfully used as a means to provide lexical content for the design of DOPU, but it can also be beneficial to other lexicographical projects of Portuguese.
Highlights
University students are expected to read and write academic texts as part of typical literacy practices in higher education settings
One of the reasons for the current phenomenon of internationalization11 of Portuguese is due to an increasing economic interest in Portuguese-speaking countries like Brazil and Angola. This new trend results in a significant growth in the broad area of Portuguese as an Additional Language (PAL), and to an increased number of speakers of other languages pursuing their studies in universities where Portuguese is the medium of instruction, i.e. in CPLP12 countries or countries where Portuguese is not the official language
In addition to contributing to the characterization of academic Portuguese, these outcomes reinforce the non-monolithic character of such a register, since genre and disciplinary variations have a strong influence on uses and meanings of linguistics resources
Summary
University students are expected to read and write academic texts as part of typical literacy practices in higher education settings The magnitude of these tasks should not be underestimated, as one of the conditions for students to engage in these routine activities involves “learning to use language in new ways” Part II described the process of setting up the semi-automated approach to dictionary-making, which mostly refers to assembling what is needed for application of the method of automatic extraction of data from the corpus and import into DWS As this was the first time that such an approach had been employed in the making of a dictionary of Portuguese, I had to develop specially-tailored tools and resources for the design of DOPU. I compiled a carefully-designed corpus of academic texts – the CoPEP; devised a new sketch grammar for CoPEP; and developed new GDEX configurations based on the characteristics of my corpus and the purpose of the examples
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