Gilles-Maurice De Schryver
Biographic Data
| ID | 241350 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gilles-Maurice De Schryver |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gilles-Maurice |
| FAMILY NAME | De Schryver |
| SIGNATURE | DE SCHRYVER G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ghent University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7272-9878 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 87 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Perceptions of Language Service Technologies and Reference Works by Chinese Users in the Era of Generative AI
As paper dictionaries, digital reference works, machine-translation systems, and emerging AI-based language tools increasingly coexist, there is a need to reassess how users evaluate these resources and what kinds of lexicographic support they now require. Drawing on user reviews and questionnaire data from over one thousand Chinese learners of advanced English, this study shows that, for most of these users, traditional paper and digital diction…
Generative AI and Lexicography
In this article, all ten papers and talks that have been devoted to the use of ChatGPT in lexicography so far are critically analysed, their results tabulated and cross-compared, from which the leading trends are determined. Extrapolating from the trendlines, a single short but robust new prompt is fine-tuned with which articles from different word classes are generated fully-automatically for a dictionary which compares favourably to the best pr…
A diachronic corpus-driven study of the expression of possibility in Luganda (Bantu, JE15)
This article employs a 4-million-word diachronic corpus to examine how the expression of possibility has evolved in Luganda since the 1890s to the present, by focusing on the language’s three main potential markers -yînz-, -sóból- and -andi- , and their historical interaction. It is shown that while the auxiliary -yînz- originally covered the whole modal subdomain of possibility, the auxiliary -sóból- has steadily taken over the more objective ca…
Kisikongo (Bantu, H16a) present-future isomorphism
The North-Angolan Bantu language Kisikongo has a present tense ( Ø-R-ang-a; R = root) that is morphologically more marked than the future tense ( Ø-R-a ). We reconstruct how this typologically uncommon tense-marking feature came about by drawing on both historical and comparative evidence. Our diachronic corpus covers four centuries that can be subdivided in three periods, viz. (1) mid-17th, (2) late-19th/early-20th, and (3) late-20th/ early-21st…
Entre modalité et conditionnalité
In the Bantu language Kirundi (JD62), the verbal prefix oo- has traditionally been described as either conditional or potential. In this article, we show by means of a corpus-based analysis of its uses that it is first and foremost a modal prefix, and its conditional use is only a secondary development. Dans la langue bantoue kirundi (JD62), le préfixe verbal oo‐ a été décrit comme un marqueur soit du conditionnel, soit du potentiel. Dans cet art…
The Relationship Between Dictionary Look-up Frequency and Corpus Frequency Revisited
In an earlier publication it was claimed that there is no useful relationship between Swahili-English dictionary look-up frequencies and the occurrence frequencies for the same wordforms in Swahili-English corpora, at least not beyond the top few thousand wordforms. This result was challenged using data for German by a different team of researchers using an improved methodology. In the present article the original Swahili-English data is revisite…
Langues et évolution linguistique dans le royaume et l’aire kongo
L’ancien royaume Kongo a non seulement donné son nom au fleuve et aux deux pays modernes dont ce cours d’eau constitue une frontière naturelle, mais aussi à la langue bantoue qui fut et est toujours parlée sur son territoire. Ce qui est généralement appelé le kikongo renvoie en fait à un ensemble de plusieurs langues étroitement apparentées, plutôt qu’à un seul et unique parler.
From conditionality to modality in Luganda (Bantu, JE15)
Lusoga (Lutenga)
Lusoga is an interlacustrine Bantu language spoken in the eastern part of Uganda in the region of Busoga, which is surrounded by the Victoria Nile in the west, Lake Kyoga in the north, the River Mpologoma in the east and Lake Victoria in the south. According to the 2002 census, this language is spoken by slightly over two million people (UBOS 2006: 12
Introducing a state-of-the-art phylogenetic classification of the Kikongo Language Cluster
It is shown how past lexicostatistic efforts eventually led to lexically-driven phylogenetic classifications of the Bantu languages. As a new case study, 95 North-West and West Bantu language varieties are sampled across geographical space, with a focus on the wider Lower Congo region. This leads to the discovery of a discrete clade within West-Coastal Bantu, which we term the Kikongo Language Cluster (KLC), a disparate continuum of closely relat…
Linguistic innovation, political centralization and economic integration in the Kongo kingdom
In this article we reconstruct the actuation and transmission of a phonological innovation known as prefix reduction within the Kikongo language cluster situated in the wider Lower Congo region of Central Africa. We argue that this change spread from a focal area coinciding with the heartland of the Kongo kingdom as a classical process of dialectal diffusion. Thanks to a unique Kikongo corpus that starts in the 17th century, we can provide diachr…
African-European Contacts in the Kongo Kingdom (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries)
The Elusive Archaeology of Kongo Urbanism
Diachronic semantics of the modal verb - sóból - in Luganda
In this article the semantic evolution of the modal verb -sóból- in Luganda is \nexamined through the analysis of a diachronic corpus spanning the last 120 \nyears. It is shown that the usage frequency of this verb increased exponentially \nbetween the early 20th century and the present, and that its use as a lexical verb \nhas dramatically decreased during the same time span. The corpus data furthermore \nsubstantiate that its modal uses have be…
Dictionary Users in the Digital Revolution
This contribution examines the digital revolution in lexicography from the perspective \nof the dictionary user. We begin with an observation that in the information age the \nstatus of the dictionary is changing, and so are patterns of user behaviour, with general \ninternet search engines encroaching on the grounds traditionally reserved for lexicographic \nqueries. Clearly, we need to know more about user behaviour in the digital \nenvironment…
On the origin of the royal Kongo title ngangula
This article offers an in-depth historical-comparative linguistic account of the origin and etymology of ngangula. This term is not only a widespread blacksmith term in the Lower Congo region, but also a traditional royal Kongo title attesting to the importance of the blacksmith metaphor in Kongo political ideology. Popular etymology has it that ngangula is related to nganga, reconstructed in Proto-Bantu as *-gàngà and commonly translated as ‘ me…
Grammaticalization and subjectification in the semantic domain of possibility in Kirundi (Bantu, JD62)
This article is a first systematic study of the expression of possibility in Kirundi, more specifically of its verbal markers. Possibility is traditionally seen as one of the core components of the semantic domain of modality. The onomasiological approach of this modal sub-domain has resulted in the identification of four verbal potential markers, i. e., the auxiliaries -bâsh- and -shóbor-, the semi-auxiliary -shóbok-, and the TAM affix -oo-. The…
Trends in Twenty-five Years of Academic Lexicography
Two dedicated lexicographic corpora are presented. The first contains all the material published in IJL to date--the English component 3.5 million words strong, with a time-depth of twenty-five years. The second contains the English contents from all the major lexicographic journals, manuals, encyclopaedia, conference proceedings and some books--16.5 million words in all, with a time-depth of fifty years. Keywords and keyness values are calculate…
Do dictionaries Define on the Level of their Target Users? A Case Study for Three Dutch Dictionaries
The aim of this article is to determine to what extent definitions in a range of monolingual dictionaries satisfy the needs of the specific age groups for which the respective dictionaries were compiled. More particularly, the aim is to determine whether dictionaries for young children, more advanced children, and adult users offer definitions on the appropriate competency levels of these categories of dictionary users. The investigation is conce…
A quantitative analysis of the morphology, morphophonology and semantic import of the Lusoga noun
In this article it is shown how distributional corpus analysis may be used to start the description of a (mostly) undocumented language. The approach is illustrated for Lusoga (JE16), an eastern interlacustrine Bantu language spoken in and around Jinja, Uganda. The topic is the noun in Lusoga, with three levels receiving particular attention : the morphological, morphophonological and semantic. In a first section we show that a relative distribut…
Do dictionary users really look up frequent words? — on the overestimation of the value of corpus-based lexicography
An innovative online Swahili–English dictionary project is presented. A careful study of some of the log files attached to this reference work reveals some hitherto unknown as-pects of true dictionary look-up behaviour, which results in the depreciation of the importance of corpora for dictionary making. Three lexicography software modules are advanced to further enhance the success of the online dictionary. Keywords: lexicography, software, onli…
Bibliometrics in Lexicography
Bibliometric methods may be used to study the impact of a field, the impact of certain trends and researchers within that field, and of course the impact of particular research articles. This is no different for the field of lexicography, and the output of both metalexicographers and dictionary makers alike is increasingly being measured and quantified. Analysing such data enables one (a) to track the growing and waning popularity of certain lexi…
Why Does Africa Need Sinclair
Journal Article Why Does Africa Need Sinclair? Get access Gilles-Maurice de Schryver Gilles-Maurice de Schryver Department of African Languages and Cultures, Ghent University; Xhosa Department, University of the Western Cape; and TshwaneDJe HLT ([email protected]) Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Lexicography, Volume 21, Issue 3, September 2008, Pages 267–291, https:…
Locative trigrams in Northern Sotho, preceded by analyses of formative bigrams
In Northern Sotho one of the strategies to express locality makes use of locative particle groups, being complements preceded by any of the so-called locative particles ka, kua, mo, ga, or go . Current linguistic descriptions shy away from those cases where sequences of such particles are employed. In this article these sequences are termed “locative n-grams” and are studied for the first time. It will be shown that, synchronically, just a handfu…
Concurrent Over- and Under-treatment. A Short Reply
Journal Article Concurrent Over- and Under-treatment. A Short Reply Get access Gilles-Maurice de Schryver Gilles-Maurice de Schryver Department of African Languages and Cultures, Ghent University and Department of African Languages, University of Pretoria [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Lexicography, Volume 18, Issue 1, March 2005, Pages 89–92, htt…
Lexicographers' Dreams in the Electronic-Dictionary Age
The arrival of the modern computer set in motion a series of lexicographers' dreams without equal in the history of dictionary making. Achieving the wildest of those electronic‐dictionary vistas has the potential to result in reference works beyond all recognition. This potential, alas, remains to be realised. The aim of this article is to analyse the major achievements and future prospects when it comes to ‘human‐oriented electronic dictionaries…
The Elusive Archaeology of Kongo Urbanism
African-European Contacts in the Kongo Kingdom (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries)
Bibliometrics in Lexicography
Bibliometric methods may be used to study the impact of a field, the impact of certain trends and researchers within that field, and of course the impact of particular research articles. This is no different for the field of lexicography, and the output of both metalexicographers and dictionary makers alike is increasingly being measured and quantified. Analysing such data enables one (a) to track the growing and waning popularity of certain lexi…
Generative AI and Lexicography
In this article, all ten papers and talks that have been devoted to the use of ChatGPT in lexicography so far are critically analysed, their results tabulated and cross-compared, from which the leading trends are determined. Extrapolating from the trendlines, a single short but robust new prompt is fine-tuned with which articles from different word classes are generated fully-automatically for a dictionary which compares favourably to the best pr…
Dictionary Users in the Digital Revolution
This contribution examines the digital revolution in lexicography from the perspective \nof the dictionary user. We begin with an observation that in the information age the \nstatus of the dictionary is changing, and so are patterns of user behaviour, with general \ninternet search engines encroaching on the grounds traditionally reserved for lexicographic \nqueries. Clearly, we need to know more about user behaviour in the digital \nenvironment…
Lusoga (Lutenga)
Lusoga is an interlacustrine Bantu language spoken in the eastern part of Uganda in the region of Busoga, which is surrounded by the Victoria Nile in the west, Lake Kyoga in the north, the River Mpologoma in the east and Lake Victoria in the south. According to the 2002 census, this language is spoken by slightly over two million people (UBOS 2006: 12
From conditionality to modality in Luganda (Bantu, JE15)
Diachronic semantics of the modal verb - sóból - in Luganda
In this article the semantic evolution of the modal verb -sóból- in Luganda is \nexamined through the analysis of a diachronic corpus spanning the last 120 \nyears. It is shown that the usage frequency of this verb increased exponentially \nbetween the early 20th century and the present, and that its use as a lexical verb \nhas dramatically decreased during the same time span. The corpus data furthermore \nsubstantiate that its modal uses have be…
Trends in Twenty-five Years of Academic Lexicography
Two dedicated lexicographic corpora are presented. The first contains all the material published in IJL to date--the English component 3.5 million words strong, with a time-depth of twenty-five years. The second contains the English contents from all the major lexicographic journals, manuals, encyclopaedia, conference proceedings and some books--16.5 million words in all, with a time-depth of fifty years. Keywords and keyness values are calculate…
Concurrent Over- and Under-treatment in Dictionaries - The Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal as a Case in Point
Consistency all the way through a reference work is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect in lexicography. This is especially true for multi-volume dictionary projects. In this contribution it is shown how a multidimensional lexicographic Ruler can be used to monitor over- and/or under-treatment in terms of number and length of dictionary articles. Since inconsistencies are often directly related to either speeding up or slowing down, acceleratio…
Concurrent Over- and Under-treatment. A Short Reply
Journal Article Concurrent Over- and Under-treatment. A Short Reply Get access Gilles-Maurice de Schryver Gilles-Maurice de Schryver Department of African Languages and Cultures, Ghent University and Department of African Languages, University of Pretoria [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Lexicography, Volume 18, Issue 1, March 2005, Pages 89–92, htt…
Lexicographers' Dreams in the Electronic-Dictionary Age
The arrival of the modern computer set in motion a series of lexicographers' dreams without equal in the history of dictionary making. Achieving the wildest of those electronic‐dictionary vistas has the potential to result in reference works beyond all recognition. This potential, alas, remains to be realised. The aim of this article is to analyse the major achievements and future prospects when it comes to ‘human‐oriented electronic dictionaries…
Translating technical texts into Zulu with the aid of multilingual and/or parallel corpora
The single biggest problem that translators have to contend with when translating from an international language such as English into a so-called minor language or language of limited diffusion (LLD) such as Zulu, is the lack of terminology in the majority of specialist subject fields. In this article we demonstrate how special-purpose multilingual and parallel corpora can be utilised as a translator's tool in finding suitable term equivalents wh…
Concurrent Over- and Under-treatment. A Short Reply
Journal Article Concurrent Over- and Under-treatment. A Short Reply Get access Gilles-Maurice de Schryver Gilles-Maurice de Schryver Department of African Languages and Cultures, Ghent University and Department of African Languages, University of Pretoria [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Lexicography, Volume 18, Issue 1, March 2005, Pages 89–92, htt…
Concurrent Over- and Under-treatment in Dictionaries - The Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal as a Case in Point
Consistency all the way through a reference work is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect in lexicography. This is especially true for multi-volume dictionary projects. In this contribution it is shown how a multidimensional lexicographic Ruler can be used to monitor over- and/or under-treatment in terms of number and length of dictionary articles. Since inconsistencies are often directly related to either speeding up or slowing down, acceleratio…
Locative trigrams in Northern Sotho, preceded by analyses of formative bigrams
In Northern Sotho one of the strategies to express locality makes use of locative particle groups, being complements preceded by any of the so-called locative particles ka, kua, mo, ga, or go . Current linguistic descriptions shy away from those cases where sequences of such particles are employed. In this article these sequences are termed “locative n-grams” and are studied for the first time. It will be shown that, synchronically, just a handfu…
Why Does Africa Need Sinclair
Journal Article Why Does Africa Need Sinclair? Get access Gilles-Maurice de Schryver Gilles-Maurice de Schryver Department of African Languages and Cultures, Ghent University; Xhosa Department, University of the Western Cape; and TshwaneDJe HLT ([email protected]) Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Lexicography, Volume 21, Issue 3, September 2008, Pages 267–291, https:…
Bibliometrics in Lexicography
Bibliometric methods may be used to study the impact of a field, the impact of certain trends and researchers within that field, and of course the impact of particular research articles. This is no different for the field of lexicography, and the output of both metalexicographers and dictionary makers alike is increasingly being measured and quantified. Analysing such data enables one (a) to track the growing and waning popularity of certain lexi…
A quantitative analysis of the morphology, morphophonology and semantic import of the Lusoga noun
In this article it is shown how distributional corpus analysis may be used to start the description of a (mostly) undocumented language. The approach is illustrated for Lusoga (JE16), an eastern interlacustrine Bantu language spoken in and around Jinja, Uganda. The topic is the noun in Lusoga, with three levels receiving particular attention : the morphological, morphophonological and semantic. In a first section we show that a relative distribut…
Do dictionary users really look up frequent words? — on the overestimation of the value of corpus-based lexicography
An innovative online Swahili–English dictionary project is presented. A careful study of some of the log files attached to this reference work reveals some hitherto unknown as-pects of true dictionary look-up behaviour, which results in the depreciation of the importance of corpora for dictionary making. Three lexicography software modules are advanced to further enhance the success of the online dictionary. Keywords: lexicography, software, onli…
Do dictionaries Define on the Level of their Target Users? A Case Study for Three Dutch Dictionaries
The aim of this article is to determine to what extent definitions in a range of monolingual dictionaries satisfy the needs of the specific age groups for which the respective dictionaries were compiled. More particularly, the aim is to determine whether dictionaries for young children, more advanced children, and adult users offer definitions on the appropriate competency levels of these categories of dictionary users. The investigation is conce…
Grammaticalization and subjectification in the semantic domain of possibility in Kirundi (Bantu, JD62)
This article is a first systematic study of the expression of possibility in Kirundi, more specifically of its verbal markers. Possibility is traditionally seen as one of the core components of the semantic domain of modality. The onomasiological approach of this modal sub-domain has resulted in the identification of four verbal potential markers, i. e., the auxiliaries -bâsh- and -shóbor-, the semi-auxiliary -shóbok-, and the TAM affix -oo-. The…
Trends in Twenty-five Years of Academic Lexicography
Two dedicated lexicographic corpora are presented. The first contains all the material published in IJL to date--the English component 3.5 million words strong, with a time-depth of twenty-five years. The second contains the English contents from all the major lexicographic journals, manuals, encyclopaedia, conference proceedings and some books--16.5 million words in all, with a time-depth of fifty years. Keywords and keyness values are calculate…
On the origin of the royal Kongo title ngangula
This article offers an in-depth historical-comparative linguistic account of the origin and etymology of ngangula. This term is not only a widespread blacksmith term in the Lower Congo region, but also a traditional royal Kongo title attesting to the importance of the blacksmith metaphor in Kongo political ideology. Popular etymology has it that ngangula is related to nganga, reconstructed in Proto-Bantu as *-gàngà and commonly translated as ‘ me…
Diachronic semantics of the modal verb - sóból - in Luganda
In this article the semantic evolution of the modal verb -sóból- in Luganda is \nexamined through the analysis of a diachronic corpus spanning the last 120 \nyears. It is shown that the usage frequency of this verb increased exponentially \nbetween the early 20th century and the present, and that its use as a lexical verb \nhas dramatically decreased during the same time span. The corpus data furthermore \nsubstantiate that its modal uses have be…
Dictionary Users in the Digital Revolution
This contribution examines the digital revolution in lexicography from the perspective \nof the dictionary user. We begin with an observation that in the information age the \nstatus of the dictionary is changing, and so are patterns of user behaviour, with general \ninternet search engines encroaching on the grounds traditionally reserved for lexicographic \nqueries. Clearly, we need to know more about user behaviour in the digital \nenvironment…
Introducing a state-of-the-art phylogenetic classification of the Kikongo Language Cluster
It is shown how past lexicostatistic efforts eventually led to lexically-driven phylogenetic classifications of the Bantu languages. As a new case study, 95 North-West and West Bantu language varieties are sampled across geographical space, with a focus on the wider Lower Congo region. This leads to the discovery of a discrete clade within West-Coastal Bantu, which we term the Kikongo Language Cluster (KLC), a disparate continuum of closely relat…
Linguistic innovation, political centralization and economic integration in the Kongo kingdom
In this article we reconstruct the actuation and transmission of a phonological innovation known as prefix reduction within the Kikongo language cluster situated in the wider Lower Congo region of Central Africa. We argue that this change spread from a focal area coinciding with the heartland of the Kongo kingdom as a classical process of dialectal diffusion. Thanks to a unique Kikongo corpus that starts in the 17th century, we can provide diachr…
African-European Contacts in the Kongo Kingdom (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries)
The Elusive Archaeology of Kongo Urbanism
Lusoga (Lutenga)
Lusoga is an interlacustrine Bantu language spoken in the eastern part of Uganda in the region of Busoga, which is surrounded by the Victoria Nile in the west, Lake Kyoga in the north, the River Mpologoma in the east and Lake Victoria in the south. According to the 2002 census, this language is spoken by slightly over two million people (UBOS 2006: 12
Langues et évolution linguistique dans le royaume et l’aire kongo
L’ancien royaume Kongo a non seulement donné son nom au fleuve et aux deux pays modernes dont ce cours d’eau constitue une frontière naturelle, mais aussi à la langue bantoue qui fut et est toujours parlée sur son territoire. Ce qui est généralement appelé le kikongo renvoie en fait à un ensemble de plusieurs langues étroitement apparentées, plutôt qu’à un seul et unique parler.
From conditionality to modality in Luganda (Bantu, JE15)
The Relationship Between Dictionary Look-up Frequency and Corpus Frequency Revisited
In an earlier publication it was claimed that there is no useful relationship between Swahili-English dictionary look-up frequencies and the occurrence frequencies for the same wordforms in Swahili-English corpora, at least not beyond the top few thousand wordforms. This result was challenged using data for German by a different team of researchers using an improved methodology. In the present article the original Swahili-English data is revisite…
Kisikongo (Bantu, H16a) present-future isomorphism
The North-Angolan Bantu language Kisikongo has a present tense ( Ø-R-ang-a; R = root) that is morphologically more marked than the future tense ( Ø-R-a ). We reconstruct how this typologically uncommon tense-marking feature came about by drawing on both historical and comparative evidence. Our diachronic corpus covers four centuries that can be subdivided in three periods, viz. (1) mid-17th, (2) late-19th/early-20th, and (3) late-20th/ early-21st…
Entre modalité et conditionnalité
In the Bantu language Kirundi (JD62), the verbal prefix oo- has traditionally been described as either conditional or potential. In this article, we show by means of a corpus-based analysis of its uses that it is first and foremost a modal prefix, and its conditional use is only a secondary development. Dans la langue bantoue kirundi (JD62), le préfixe verbal oo‐ a été décrit comme un marqueur soit du conditionnel, soit du potentiel. Dans cet art…
Linguistics (24 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Lexicography and Language Studies (13 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Bantu languages (10 works) · Lexicography (10 works) · Artificial Intelligence (8 works) · History (8 works)