Lemmatization of Reflexives in Northern Sotho

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 SlJUnd changes and or semantic shift occur in the formation of the reflexive. 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. 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 frequency of use, which in turn will require extended studies on considerably enlarged. data corpora.

Corpus-driven Bantu Lexicography Part 3: Mapping Meaning onto Use in Lusoga

“…The 'lemmatisation of ...'-formula may be found in the numerous corpusbased lexicographic studies for the various word classes and other word sets of Northern Sotho, including: reflexives (Prinsloo 1992), verbs (Prinsloo 1994, Prinsloo and Gouws 1996, de Schryver and Prinsloo 2001, adjectives (Gouws and Prinsloo 1997), nouns de Schryver 1999, Bosch andPrinsloo 2002), days (de Schryver and Lepota 2001), loan words (Nong et al 2002), copulatives (Prinsloo 2002), terms de Schryver 2002, Taljard and, adverbs (Prinsloo 2003), demonstrative copulatives (de Schryver et al 2004), concords and pronouns (Prinsloo and Gouws 2006), and kinship terms (Prinsloo 2012, Bosch 2012, Prinsloo 2014b). The opposite also occurs, namely when a primarily microstructural aspect impacts the macrostructure, again with examples for Northern Sotho: left-expanded microstructures (Gouws and Prinsloo 2005), reversibility (de Schryver 2006), communicative equivalence (Prinsloo 2006), and paradigms (Prinsloo 2014a).…”