Speaker
Description
Today there are numerous frequency dictionaries marketed as learner’s dictionaries, with various source languages and mostly with English as target language. They typically contain 5000 lemmas, which happens to coincide with a rule of thumb (though without much academic substance) that this number of words provides the lexical text coverage (95-98%) necessary for an adequate text comprehension.
For a learner of a foreign language it must be a daunting task to learn so many words in frequency or alphabetical order, or rearranged in thematic groups, as is often the case for learner’s dictionaries. From a receptive perspective, it is however not necessary to learn all of them as vocabulary items, thanks to intralingual and interlingual facilitating factors.
Intralingual aspects: In a compounding language like German, complex words are more or less transparent and can be interpreted from their component affixes and root morphemes. The concept of “word family” in frequency studies usually means words in different parts of speech transparently derived from each other, for example information, inform, informative. Word family can also denote groups of words with a deeper morphological relationship, such as presented in the German “Wortfamilienwörterbuch” by August (2009), for instance Mund: Mundwinkel, Mundart, mundfaul, mündlich, münden, Mündung, ausmünden, einmünden, etc. To distinguish these deeper word formation families from the more superficial word family, the term used here is “root family” when etymologically related words are grouped around a primary word. A “primary word” is a word with one lexical root and at the same time the most central in its word and root family, such as Mund/mouth.
Interlingual aspects: Different language pairs, such as French–English or English–Finnish, have a varying proportion of cognates, understood here as any two words with an etymological link. A structural analysis of all the primary words in a German frequency dictionary (Tschirner & Möhring 2020) shows that over 90% of them has a distinguishable Swedish cognate. A study conducted with adult beginning learners of German at Stockholm University (Winnerlöv 2013) suggests that 70% of the primary content words can be understood thanks to their Swedish (or sometimes English) cognate. The rest of the cognates follow certain patterns and could be deciphered with some instruction, and when the patterns are less clear, they could at least serve as mnemonic help.
The new etymology-based German–Swedish learner’s dictionary proposed here incorporates the above aspects and covers the majority of the words from the analysed frequency dictionary as well as some other words. During the presentation samples will be shown (where relevant with English rather than Swedish translations) from its main chapters, consisting of 1) some full cognates for pronunciation practices 2) cognate pairs according to predictable patterns 3) other more diverging cognates 4) non-cognate primary words with 1-1 translation equivalents 5) analytical articles for false friends, polysemic words, and other words that need comments 6) function words in paradigms 7) other words learnt in semantic paradigms or series, and finally 8) root family groups. Since the dictionary is meant to be read in its entirety, and reviewed repeatedly, it is called a “textbook dictionary”.
The dictionary is conceived to serve as a model for learner’s monodirectional textbook dictionaries for other language pairs. The relative size of the intralingual versus the interlingual parts will depend on the structural distance between the languages in question, and also on the extent to which other commonly known languages such as English come into play. Common for all possible language versions is the design to reduce the relevant word population to a minimum number of primary words that need to be memorized as traditional vocabulary items, while relying on other cognitive strategies for grasping the meaning of the remaining words.
While the psycholinguistic aspects of cognates are well researched, there are still few scientific studies on their practical use in language pedagogy, which may reflect the traditional reluctance of language instructors to make the etymological dimension explicit, especially for younger and less advanced learners. Yet in a vocabulary learning experiment conducted with US university students of German, Stratton (2022) found that instruction in historical linguistics was helpful for learning German–English cognates that were not readily recognizable at first sight.
The prospective intralingual method with root families, though commonly used by expert language learners, appears to be unexplored in the scientific literature. The proposed textbook dictionary, in addition to being an immediate help for language students who want to expand their receptive lexical knowledge rapidly, could serve as a foundation for research into the effectiveness of explicit etymology – both interlingual and intralingual – as a pedagogical tool in second language learning.