Abstract
The aim of this article is to evaluate current strategies in the lemmatization of reflexives in Northern Sotho. In particular the so-called "traditional" approach according to which reflexives are lemmatized randomly, as well as the more "rule orientated" alternative, will be critically evaluated mainly against the background of principles such as user friendliness, avoidance/tolerance of redundancy, constant application of rules versus ad hoc decisions, and practical versus linguistic/scientific considerations. The scope is furthermore narrowed down to learners' dictionaries with the target user defined as a mother tongue speaker of English or Afrikaans who studies Northern Sotho. Special attention is given to those cases where <i>sound changes</i> and or <i>semantic shift</i> occur in the formation of the reflexive. The importance or relevance of the category "reflexives", the scope, nature and amount of sound changes, and the viability of an in-depth frequency study on reflexives will be determined from the output of a recently conducted frequency study on 15 randomly selected Northern Sotho books and magazines. It will be concluded that due to serious shortcomings in both the traditional and rule-orientated approaches, reflexives should be lemmatized on the basis of <i>frequency of use</i>, which in turn will require extended studies on considerably enlarged data corpora.
Highlights
Dictionaries may be readily available for a language like NorthernSotho, Gouws (1990: 53,55), is correct when he says:"An analysis of the dictionary types available in the various [African] languages indicates a complete lack of lexicographical planning
The importance or relevance of the category "reflexives", the sco~e, nature and amount of sound changes, and the viability of an in-depth frequency study on reflexives will be determined from the output of a recently conducted frequency study on 15 randomly selected Northern Sotho books and magazines
Pioneering efforts towards real lexicographical study for the African languages have been made by Van Wyk and Prinsloo in the fields of practical versus linguistic dictionaries, word frequency studies, prescriptiveness versus descriptiveness, etc
Summary
"An analysis of the dictionary types available in the various [African] languages indicates a complete lack of lexicographical planning. The majority of dictionaries for African languages are the products of limited efforts not reflecting a high standard of lexicographical achievement ... Pioneering efforts towards real lexicographical study for the African languages have been made by Van Wyk and Prinsloo in the fields of practical versus linguistic dictionaries, word frequency studies, prescriptiveness versus descriptiveness, etc. Much work still has to be done to put generally accepted lexicographical principles such as these into practice for Northern Sotho. As far as the lemmatization of nouns and verbs are concerned, no serious effort has been made to formulate a lexicographical policy or even to lemmatize nouns and verbs in a consistent manner, not to mention the arrangement required to make it computer compatible. Since it is impossible even to scratch the surface of the problems regarding the lemmatization of nouns and verbs in the scope of this article, the discussion will be focused on only one problematic aspect concerning the lemmatization of verbs, namely lemmatizing reflexives.
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