The article presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, focusing on general monolingual dictionaries. The survey is the broadest survey of dictionary use to date, covering close to 10,000 dictionary users (and non-users) in nearly thirty countries. Our survey covers varied user groups, going beyond the students and translators who have tended to dominate such studies thus far. The survey was delivered via an online survey platform, in language versions specific to each target country. It was completed by 9,562 respondents, over 300 respondents per country on average. The survey consisted of the general section, which was translated and presented to all participants, as well as country-specific sections for a subset of 11 countries, which were drafted by collaborators at the national level. The present report covers the general section.
IntroductionResearch into dictionary use has become increasingly important in recent years. In contrast to 15 years ago, new findings in this area are presented every year, e.g. at every Euralex or eLex conference. These studies range from questionnaire or log file studies to smaller-scale studies focussing on eye tracking, usability, or other aspects of dictionary use measurable in a lab. For an overview of different studies,
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.
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