“Bottom-up” approach in making verb entries in a monolingual Indonesian learner’s dictionary

Abstract

This research is primarily focused on how to make verb entries in a monolingual Indonesian learner’s dictionary and expected to provide the principles of making such entry. A “bottom-up” approach was applied by drawing up a multiple-choice questionnaire for Bahasa Indonesia untuk Penutur Asing learners to confirm the type of verb entries they prefer. The questionnaire was divided into two parts, for productive and receptive purposes. Each part included four different types of entries: substitutional type with synonym, traditional ‘genus + specifica’ type, contextual type with valency pattern, and jika (‘when’) definition. The result of the survey indicated that, for receptive function, most of the participants preferred traditional genus + specifica type and contextual with valency pattern type of definitions, whereas for productive function, most of the participants chose valency pattern type of definitions. The score distribution in productive task confirmed the result that participants who chose contextual with valency pattern definitions largely gained high scores (3 or 4 points). A detailed analysis of sentences produced by participants revealed several common errors that fell into three categories, i.e. improper context, wrong collocation, non-typical usage, that have to be taken into account to set the principles in making verb entries. The finding suggests that the grammatical information should be more specific and using more common words (synonyms or quasi-synonyms) as genus proximum could be of benefit to potential users. It also recommends to conduct broader surveys involving more participants from more various sources for each part of speech.