A New Way to Lemmatize Adjectives in a User-friendly Zulu–English Dictionary

Abstract

Abstract: Traditionally, Zulu adjectives have been lemmatized under their stems only. In this research article, an in-depth analysis is undertaken to make a case for the lemmatization of all frequent adjectival forms with their adjective concords rather. It is shown that the supposed explosion in size of the dictionary may be contained within a corpus-driven Sinclairian framework. The advantages of such a word-like treatment far outnumber the generalizations that have hitherto characterized
the lexicographic treatment of adjectives in Zulu. The study is supported by ample dictionary extracts from a Zulu–English dictionary project aimed at junior users. Comparisons with existing dictionaries and textbook data are also made.

Keywords: LEXICOGRAPHY, LINGUISTICS, GRAMMAR, DICTIONARY, BILINGUAL, CORPUS, LEMMATIZATION, FREQUENCY, ZULU (ISIZULU), ENGLISH, ADJECTIVE,
ADJECTIVE STEM, QUALIFICATIVE ADJECTIVE, COPULATIVE ADJECTIVE, USER-FRIENDLY, REAL EXAMPLE, COLLOCATION, COMBINATION, DERIVATION, IDIOMATIC USE, SEMANTIC PROSODY