Die hantering van neweskikkers en onderskikkers in Afrikaanse woordeboeke

Abstract

The Treatment of Coordinating and Subordinating Conjunctions in Afrikaans Dictionaries. Prompted by the discrepancy between the needs for lexicographic assistance with regard to conjunctions and the relative indifference concerning this in lexicographic research and practice, this study attempts to indicate the unsatisfactory treatment of conjunctions in Afrikaans dictionaries and to offer some constructive lexicographic solutions to the treatment of this part of speech category. A first recommendation would be that the lemmata voegwoord (conjunction), verbindingswoord (connective), neweskikker (coordinating conjunction), onderskikker (subordinating conjunction) and voegende bywoord (conjunctional adverb) provide more in-depth syntactic information with enough examples (also across sentence boundaries). There should be cross-references from the specific conjunction lemmata to these lemmata. The examples provided should indicate typical lexical and grammatical patterns and whether only hypotactic binding is possible or whether incorporation is also possible. In learners’ dictionaries the typical lexical patterns can be in bold print. Care should be taken in inclusive dictionaries, like WAT, to promote faster information retrieval and lexicographers should not equate functions with polysemous meaning distinctions, e.g. there should be two lemmata for of as it is a homonym which clearly requires separate lemmata. Keywords: lexicography; coordinating conjunction; correlative coordinating conjunction; subordinating conjunction; monolingual dictionary; hypotactic binding; incorporation; complement sentences; grammatical guidance; linguistic grounding; word order; clause integration; function word