Orð og tunga - 01.06.2012, Side 23

Matthew Whelpton: From human-oriented dictionaries
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Where a wordnet has a hyponymy hierarchy, saldo has a central-
ity hierarchy based on motherhood. So, sol 'sun' has a number of sib-
lings that share the same mother, lysa 'shine':
(17) verbs: inform, sparkle, shine, twinkle, shimmer, lnstre,flash,
glitter, glimmer, glisten, gleam, flimmer, blink, illuminate;
nouns: light, star, moon, lantern, lamp, comet,flash, candle,
light house; adjectives: shining, fluorescent, light/bright
Some of these are full siblings that also share the same father, himmel
'sky':
(18) comet, rnoon, star
At the core of saldo are the roots of these hierarchies: 51 lexical primi-
tives on which all other items depend (Borin & Forsberg 2009: 9, their
Figure 1).
(19) all 'all', annan 'other', anvdnda 'use', att 'that', bara
'only', bra 'good', genom 'through', den 'it', fort 'fast',
framme 'arrived',fdrg 'color', fór2 'for',förbi 'gone/past',
fóre 'before', en2 'a/one', göra 'do', ha 'have', hur 'how',
hcinda 'happen', i2 'in',ja 'yes',just 'just', kunna 'be able',
Ijud 'sound', Ijus 'light', med 'with', men 'but', mycken
'much', mdste 'must', namn 'name', natur 'nature',
ndr 'when', och 'and', om 'if', om2 'about', pd 'on', rak
'straight', röra 'move', sdga 'say', tal 'speech', till 'to',
tanka 'think', vad 'what', var 'where', vara 'be', varm
'warm', vem 'who', veta 'know', vid 'by', vilja 'want',
öppen 'open'
This way of looking at the semantic relations between words is obvi-
ously vety different from the wordnets. One striking difference, when
considering the roots of the hierarchies, is that in WordNet we find ab-
stract terms like "entity" which are added to draw together the forest of
more lexically articulated and conceptually substantive trees beneath,
whereas in saldo we find highly frequent and often substantive terms
such as "light" and "warm" and "say". This is because saldo is driven
to a large extent by conceptual saliency and centrality and to that extent
it is reminiscent of the core vocabulary in Wierzbicka and Goddard's
Natural Semantic Metalanguage (nsm)4 (Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard
2008), with which Borin & Forsberg (2009: 8f) compare their work.
4 http://www.une.edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/semantics-in-brief.php