Documentary lexicography: A case study of building a Nasal dictionary

Abstract

This dissertation presents a conceptual foundation for the notion of documentary lexicography, in the goal of refocusing documentary linguistics to fundamentally include significant lexically-oriented output, and provides a corresponding demonstration through the documentation and description of the Nasal lexicon. It discusses the need for lexicographic work in documentary linguistics and lays out the unique challenges and approaches relevant for this context. In exemplification of the arguments presented, this dissertation additionally details the methodology implemented for producing a first documentation and description, beyond basic vocabulary and translations of wordlists, for the lexicon of the Nasal language (pronounced [nɑˈsɑl]; ISO 639-3: nsy, Glottocode: nasa1289), an Austronesian language spoken by approximately 3,000 people in four villages of coastal southwest Sumatra, Indonesia. The lexical documentation produced as part of this dissertation comprises more than 180 total recording hours consisting of approximately 115 hours of semantic domain discussion, 40 hours of dictionary entry discussion, 20 hours of dictionary focus group discussion, and 5 hours of a community dictionary workshop. The corresponding lexical description contains definitions for more than 10,000 lexemes cross-referenced with a corpus of more than 225,000 token lexical items and informed by a corpus of approximately 2,000,000 token lexical items. This descriptive material is archived in the Kaipuleohone Language Archive (McDonnell et al. 2026) in SQL format and standard LIFT format for reuse in future linguistic research and has been compiled into draft community and academic dictionaries as well as an electronic dictionary. These draft outputs as well as the code developed for generating them are archived alongside the lexical database. Finalized first edition dictionaries are being prepared for publication in collaboration with members of the Nasal community and members of the broader documentation project team.