The English Department invites you and your students to a seminar presentation by Prof T. Otlogetswe.
Presenter: Prof. Thapelo J. Otlogetswe
Department of English
The job of the dictionary maker is traditionally seen as the compilation of an inventory of all the words in a language, and to list their various meanings, either by paraphrase in the same language, or by translation into a different language.
Until the mid-1980s, lexicographers were reliant on individually collected citations and introspection for evidence. From the works of Kilgarriff (1997), Sinclair (1991, 1998, 2004), Hanks (2004), Moon (1998) and others there is growing interest in the contribution of phraseology and collocability to the formulation of meaning. There is evidence that meaning is created and understood by pattern matching (subconsciously matching word uses in texts with patterns of word use sorted somehow in our brains). For a lexicographer, a proper account of a word’s lexical contextual meaning is accounted for by contextual analysis of word patterns in a corpus. This is borne from a view that “words don’t have meanings but meaning potential” (Hanks, 2004) which are realized in context. In this study we adopt Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA) to attempt a lexicological study of the Setswana verb bolaya (kill). CPA aims, by careful analysis of data, to establish an inventory of normal phraseological conventions as well as the meaning (semantics and pragmatics) associated with each phraseological norm. We therefore argue that the various phraseological frameworks of the verb bolaya result with a number of meanings which include killing, the presence of disease, physical hurt, negative effect, presence of excess and many others. For our study, we analyse a twenty million-word Setswana corpus through Concordance of Oxford Wordsmith Tools lexical (Scott, 2016) software. The results present a better account of the phraseology of bolaya as well as its broad idiomaticity in the language.