📄 TEI-Lex0 Guidelines for the Encoding of Dictionary Information on Written and Spoken Forms

Summary

The TEI Guidelines for dictionary encoding offer several ways to encode the same thing. As a result, retrodigitized dictionaries marked up in different projects are poorly interoperable. The TEI-Lex0 initiative, jointly led by ENeL, DARIAH and PARTHENOS, simplifies the TEI "Print Dictionaries" chapter into a compact baseline format. It is not meant to cover every possible case, only the most common ones. This paper describes only part of the work: the encoding of the headword form, that is, how to mark up the orthography, pronunciation and grammatical features of the lemma and its inflected forms. The authors propose a restricted set of rules. The recursive element form must always have a @type attribute. Grammatical features are recorded with a generic gram carrying a type rather than with specialized elements. Features are inherited from higher levels of the entry down to lower ones, and a lower level may override them. The paper contains no quantitative results: the rules are explained through XML examples from several languages. TEI-Lex0 is not intended for day-to-day dictionary work. It is an intermediate format for data exchange, federated search and visualization, so explicit markup matters more to it than concision.

Key points

• Values of the @type attribute for form: lemma (the headword), inflected (individual inflected forms, such as go → went), paradigm (a partial or full paradigm, whose kind is specified by @subtype) and variant (spelling or pronunciation variants).
• Part of speech as a feature of the whole entry is recorded in entry/gramGrp. Features of the lemma itself or of individual forms are placed in the corresponding form, and, if the entry is divided by part of speech, in sense/gramGrp.
• Instead of specialized TEI elements, gram type="..." is used. Thus, if TEI later adds new elements, the TEI-Lex0 guidelines will not need to change.
• Examples of variation: two American pronunciations of the word caramel in IPA; the transliterations Osama/Usama, linked through seg with @corresp; a regional variant in the Mixtepec-Mixtec language, marked with usg[@type="geo"]/placeName and the BCP 47 private-use subtag mix-x-YCNY.
• An example of a full verbal paradigm is the Spanish perder. The authors stress that at the time of publication (eLex 2017), TEI-Lex0 was not yet a finalized specification.