Lexicographic presentation of grammatical divergence in Sesotho sa Leboa

Abstract

Relying on existing insights from the field of theoretical lexicography this article gives an innovative application to the relation of divergence by introducing the notion of grammatical divergence. In bilingual dictionaries with English and Sesotho sa Leboa as language pair lexicographers are confronted with a real challenge in their endeavours to present the diverse class specific concords or pronouns as equivalents for single English forms. This article emphasizes the need for a corpus-based approach to the lexicographic practice and introduces the slash and dot conventions as a method to give the necessary lexicographic treatment to English lemma signs with different concords and pronouns as translation equivalents. The concept of remote textual condensation is explained and it is indicated how problems regarding the textual condensation prevailing when the dot convention is used can be solved by employing a text in the back matter section complemented by a functional cross-reference system.