Abstract
This paper describes the resources and software procedures used or developed in a major enabling step towards the revision of the scholarly reference work A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles ( DSAE , Silva et al. 1996), namely the semi-automatic generation of a digitally-sourced lexical database on which new and updated dictionary entries will be based; as well as the addition, in parallel, of a new corpus of South African English (SAE) to the project. Drawing on online data sources and an extensive list of known SAE word forms, we have developed a software toolchain to gather, encode, annotate and collate textual sources, producing: (i) a 3.1-billion part-of-speech-annotated corpus of South African English; (ii) a lexical database of illustrative quotations for over 20,000 known SAE word forms, available for selection at the entry-revision stage; and (iii) a list of potential new variant spellings and headword inclusion candidates. These steps replace, where recent electronic sources are concerned, the mechanical aspects of quotation gathering, normally undertaken manually through a reading programme requiring years of teamwork to acquire sufficient coverage (cf. Hicks 2010).
Highlights
Opsomming: Die semi-outomatisering van die leesprogramme van 'n historiese woordeboekprojek
A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (DSAE, Silva et al 1996) is a diachronic variety dictionary, first published as a single-volume print dictionary spanning about 800 pages and available as a pilot online edition at http:// dsae.co.za since 2014
Much of the DSAE's compilation process was directed towards an ongoing reading programme
Summary
A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (DSAE, Silva et al 1996) is a diachronic variety dictionary, first published as a single-volume print dictionary spanning about 800 pages and available as a pilot online edition at http:// dsae.co.za since 2014. With the help of numerous volunteer readers, approximately 300,000 index card citations were collected as illustrative evidence for dictionary entries, their sense-divisions as they evolve through time, and nested lemmas. Of these about 45,000 quotations were included in the printed version of the dictionary, resulting in an average of 10 quotations per entry and producing a full running text of about 1,5 million words.
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