LINGUIST List 6.1785

Sat Dec 23 1995

Sum: Topic Dictionary

Editor for this issue: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselinemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Douglas A Walter, Re: 6.1774, Calls: Lexical Representation

Message 1: Re: 6.1774, Calls: Lexical Representation

On November 25, 1995, I posted a request for information regarding a
"topical dictionary" The request was worded as follows:

> Dear Linguists,
>
> Do any of you have knowledge of a "word book" arranged by topic, a
> topical dictionary, if you may? If so, would you be so kind as to
> indicate where I might find such a book or work or perhaps any
> bibliographic information that might be useful. Thank you.
>
> Douglas A Walter


Below is a compilation of the responses that I received. I am grateful
to all of you who responded to my request. Thank you! DAW....

***********************************************************************

Summary...

Harrap's Spanish Vocabulary.
	Published in 1988 by
	Harrap's Books Limited
	Chelsea House, 26 Market Square
	Bromley, Kent
	BR1 1NA
	Great Britain

Roget's thesaurus

Webster Thesaurus

WordNet - http://clarity.princeton.edu/pub/wordnet.
	- ftp://clarity.princeton.edu/pub/wordnet/

Longman Lexicon of the English Language.

Inso in Boston has. - Software Co.
	electronic reference and writing tools
	222 Berkeley Street, 11th floor, Boston, MA, USA
	phone: (617) 252 3000

WordPerfect(r) 3.0a

The 1911 Roget's thesaurus
	Project Gutenburg,
	courtesy of Patrick Cassidy
	Micra Inc:
	ftp://mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu/etext/etext91/roget13a.txt

_Hopi domains_ by Voegelin

BBI Combinatory Dictionary (Benjamin)

Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Indo-Eurpean Synonyms

Oxford Picture Duden?

MacMillan Visual Dictionary?

WORD MENU by Stephen Glazier (Random House, 1992)

LEXICON OF CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH by Tom McArthur (Longman, 1981)

Der deutsche Wortschatz nach Sachgruppen by Dornseiff

***********************************************************************

	York University, Toronto, Canada

...your question reminded me of a vocabularybook that I used while
studying Spanish as a second language both in High School and
university. It is a mini-book called

Harrap's Spanish Vocabulary.
Published in 1988 by:
Harrap's Books Limited
Chelsea House, 26 Market Square
Bromley, Kent
BR1 1NA
Great Britain

The book is organized by topic - 65 different ones like "Describing
People, " "Jobs and Work," "Emotions," "Housework," "The City,"
"Politics," ""Accidents," "Materials," etc.

Each section has verbs, nouns, adjectives and idioms to do with each
topic, plus their English translations. There are over 6000
vocabulary items in the whole thing.

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------


though no-one uses it this way, roget's thesaurus
is organized by semantic relatedness. that is, the
first half of the book is in categories:

 the body and the senses
 feelings
 place & change of place
 measure & shape
 living things
 natural phenomena
 behavior & the will
 language
 human society & institutions
 values & ideals
 arts
 occupations & crafts
 sports & amusements
 the mind & ideas
 science & technology

the second half of the book is the index, which cross-refers each word
to its various synonyms in the first half. this the part that we use
to look up synonyms. get a copy of one of the hardback editions (i
believe the 5th is the latest); the paperbacks are just synonym
dictionaries, and lack the two-part organization.

 -don davis, boston

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------


I posted a similar question some time ago. I'll forward you the
replies I received. The best things I eventually found were pointed
out to me by reference consultants in my library; in fact, the
reference department had a whole shelf of dictionaries of this
kind. The best one was the Longman Lexicon of the English
Language. Another nice thesaurus can be downloaded from
clarity.princeton.edu/pub/wordnet. It's a large free electronic
thesaurus called WordNet, easy to use, offering generic terms for
every words, as well as hyponyms (names of kinds), names of parts,
synonyms, and antonyms.

Regards,
Ari

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------


 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
 Date: 06 Oct 1995 16:36:02 +0200
 From: Alice Carlberger <alicespeech.kth.se>
 To: asolovyoindiana.edu
 Cc: alicespeech.kth.se
 Subject: Re: A Thesaurus Question

In <Pine.HPP.3.91.951005141356.20741C-100000hamlet.ucs.indiana.edu>, Ari
Solovyova wrote:
>
>
>Dear subscribers,
>
>Does anyone of you know if there exists a thesaurus (for any language)
>that for each word lists some related words of different parts of speech,
>i.e. not just synonyms, quasi-synonyms, homonyms, etc.; e.g., for "eye" it
>would list "tear", "look", and "cry", among others.
>
>Thank you very much in advance for anything you might suggest.
>
>Yours,
>Ari Solovyova
>

Dear Ari,

How about the Longman dictionary series? I know they have it at least
for English and maybe for other languages as well. I'm afraid I don't
have any more specific reference -- all I know is that I've perused
some of the Longman works in the book shops. You might also want to
check what Inso in Boston has. It's a software company that develops
electronic reference and writing tools for a number of languages.
Their address is 222 Berkeley Street, 11th floor, Boston, MA, USA,
(phone: (617) 252 3000, I believe). Please ask to talk to John Riley
or one of the other sales reps.

Best wishes,

Alice Carlberger

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

wordperfect 3.0a on a mac gives for 'eye'

verb:
look at
survey
watch

gawk
ogle
stare at

noun:
guard
observation
surveillance
vigilance

center
core
focus
hub

ant:
ignore

periphery


I think, if you want relations as you indicated, the list would
immediately have several hundred entries!


Henning Reetz
eMail: henning.reetzuni-konstanz.de

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------


 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
 Date: Fri, 6 Oct 95 20:39:14 PDT
 From: t-marklmicrosoft.com
 To: asolovyoindiana.edu
 Cc: corporahd.uib.no
 Subject: Re: A thesaurus with parts of speech



Hi Ari,

The 1911 Roget's thesaurus is freely available and lists words of four
parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective and adverb) for each category.

|Does anyone of you know if there exists a thesaurus (for any language)
|that for each word lists some related words of different parts of speech,
|i.e. not just synonyms, quasi-synonyms, homonyms, etc.; e.g., for "eye" it
|would list "tear", "look", and "cry", among others.

For example, '#441 Vision' includes amongst the
81 verbs: "peer", "look" and "pry",

However, it does not make the jump from "eye" to "cry".
It might be possible to establish the link indirectly though.
Category '#839 Lamentation', which includes "tear" and "cry",
also contains the following:
 with moistened eyes
 cry one's eyes out
 with watery eyes

You can get it from Project Gutenburg, courtesy of Patrick Cassidy
at Micra Inc: ftp://mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu/etext/etext91/roget13a.txt

The file is in human readable form and so requires a bit of massaging
to get a machine tractable version. I have done this already for
the nouns (see Lauer, 1995; Resnik, 1995), and if anyone would
like to use my version, please email me and I will try to get
back to you as soon as I can.

Another possibility is to use WordNet, a freely available lexical
taxonomy consisting of small synonym sets (about 4 words in each)
linked by various semantic relations (ISA, HAS_PART, etc), which also
includes the 4 parts-of speech given above. However, it sounds like
you want a broader notion of 'related' than it offers. It was
developed by George Miller (1990) and associates. It contains around
167,000 word senses, including nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
ftp://clarity.princeton.edu/pub/wordnet/wn1.5unix.tar.gz.a


Best wishes,

Mark Lauer
Microsoft Institute
Sydney, Australia

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------


Hello, try and look at _Hopi domains_ by Voegelin (I think from the
fifties). It's a dictionary of Hopi arranged according to semantic
groups.

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------


 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
 Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 10:37:07 +0100
 From: Antoinette Renouf <antrdues.liv.ac.uk>
 To: asolovyoindiana.edu
 Cc: antliverpool.ac.uk
 Subject: Re: A Thesaurus Question

Dear Ari What you are describing is something which is represented to
some extent in the BBI Combinatory Dictionary (Benjamin). To the
extent that the `related words of different parts of speech' which you
refer to are listed if they are in a collocational relationship with
the headword in question. So, to take your example, where `tear',
`look' and `cry' are collocates of `eye'. Actually, this may not
happen very often. I can't think of many typical phrases containing
these pairs:

eye(s) filled with tear(s)
brought a tear to his eye
a tear in her eye

look someone (straight etc) in the eye
a (wild etc) look in his eye

nothing for cry

Otherwise, I can't think of a publication of these sort of associated
words. There are lists of lexical fields, irrespective of word
class. I think Longman did one, called a `lexicon'.

Best wishes
Antoinette

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: meyers <meyersacf2.NYU.EDU>

The closest I could think of is WordNet, which arranges words by
hypernyms and hyponyms. Visit their web site at:
 http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/

Also there are plenty of jargin dictionaries in print, but I thought
that WordNet was closer to what you would want. I am not sure exactly
what you mean by "topic dictionary".

Adam
meyerscs.nyu.edu

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: Peter Daniels <pdanielspress-gopher.uchicago.edu>

Before the 1960s or so , Roget's Thesaurus was organized semantically
(with 1000 divisions). You'd need to hunt in used-book stores, because
all the recent versions have been reorganized alphabetically.

Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Indo-Eurpean Synonyms, is
really the only such tool available (recently repringted, U of Chicago
Press): it has hundreds of short chapters giving the words in as many
IE languages as possible for each meaning, and the meanings are again
grouped semantically.

Larousse has published qute a few "pictorial dictionaries"--mostly
French- English, but also monolingual French and I might have seen an
all-English one. Look in the children's book section for similar
books!

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: Stephen P Spackman <spackmanulix.net>
 Reply to: Stephen P Spackman <stephenacm.org>
 To: Douglas Walter <waltdomoonbase.wwc.edu>
 Subject: Topical Dictionary

I may have completely misunderstood, but I think what you are
describing is a thesaurus; you should find a selection in any
bookshop. The original Roget's, or a "Roget's International" is
actually arranged by semantic category (in someone's mind), rather
than being alphabetised under arbitrary keywords. The categories
themselves are still arbitrary, of course.

regards
stephen

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: "Kathleen M. O'Neill" <koneil1uic.edu>

Have you tried the Oxford Picture Duden? Or the MacMillan Visual
Dictionary?

Of course these are both picture dictionaries, but their topical
arrangement often proves very useful for me.

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: Waruno Mahdi <warunoparadox.rz-berlin.mpg.de>

You're probably going want to kick yourself in the you-know-where when
you read this, but what you are looking for is known as a "thesaurus".
The two best I know of (they also tend to be mutually complementary)
are "Roget's Thesaurus" and the "Webster Thesaurus" (of the English
language). You should be able to get one in pocketbook form at just
about any larger bookstore in the US.

Regards, Waruno

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: Gordon Wilcox <gwilcoxmaine.com>

WORD MENU by Stephen Glazier (Random House, 1992) may be exactly what
you're looking for. One can find "walrus" via

 Part I: Nature
 2. Living Things
 . Vertebrates
 . Mammals
 . Pinnipeds ("mammalian order of aquatic carnivores..."
 . walrus

LEXICON OF CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH by Tom McArthur (Longman, 1981),
although not having as many words (15,000), may be more useful for
someone learning English. It contains parts of speech and pictures (of
'things') when appropriate.

Hope this helps,

Gordon Wilcox
gwilcoxmaine.com

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: Derek Gross <dgrossjupiter.inso.com>
 To: waltdomoonbase.wwc.edu
 Subject: topical dictionary

In print, try _Word Menu_, by Stephen Glazier, Random House, 1992,
 ISBN 0-679-40030-3, or ISBN 0-679-42916-6 with software.

On line, try WordNet, http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/.

Derek

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: "ursula.doleschal" <ursula.doleschalWU-WIEN.AC.AT>

Depends, which language. For German there is the ver old one "Der
deutsche Wortschatz nach Sachgruppen" by Dornseiff, and I could
indicate some Russian ones. If you need more information, write!

Ursula Doleschal (ursula.doleschalwu-wien.ac.at)
Institut f. Slawische Sprachen, Wirtschaftsuniv. Wien
Augasse 9, 1090 Wien, Austria
Tel.: ++43-1-31336 4115, Fax: ++43-1-31336 744

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------

 From: Waruno Mahdi <warunoparadox.rz-berlin.mpg.de>

What you are looking for is known as a "thesaurus".The two best I
know of (they also tend to be mutually complementary) are "Roget's
Thesaurus" and the "Webster Thesaurus" (of the English language). You
should be able to get one in pocketbook form at just about any larger
bookstore in the US.

Regards, Waruno


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