Archi morphology from a lexicographic perspective

The paper illustrates the development of an electronic dictionary of the Daghestanian language Archi, and discusses the problems that such a morphologically complex language poses for lexicographers. The dictionary is built on a Microsoft Access database, and the paper discusses the linguistic issues of designing this. First, we provide general information about the Archi language (Section 1), then we give a brief sketch of its morphology, stressing the issues that are relevant for the dictionary (Section 2). Section 3 discusses the structure of lexical entries and describes the database. Section 4 discusses the general lexicographic problems that arise when one works on a dictionary of an unwritten language.

Published online: 17 August 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.178.14chu