An experiment on reconstruction of the meanings of the lexical items applied in the jangar epic
Abstract
The Kalmyk Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences conducts work aimed at compiling a Definition Dictionary of the Kalmyk Heroic Epic of Jangar which presents a lot of difficulties and problems. One of the difficulties is to find meanings of the words that have not been automatically analyzed by the TextAnalyzer — the morphological analyzer created within the project on the development of the Kalmyk National Corpus — and the semantics of which is unclear since the words have gone out of use and are nowadays part of the passive vocabulary. The paper examines some of the words (khuvng ‘jar’, khashr ‘jade’, jootu/joetu ‘small (about a shagai)’) that have not been analyzed automatically for a number of reasons. Another goal of the research study is to reveal the reasons of the failure of the analysis in case of certain lexical items. The article attempted to describe the reasoning algorithm based on the analysis of the formal structure of the word, its position within a sentence, the context and its lexical category, with evidence from corresponding lexicographic sources which allowed to make conclusions regarding the semantics of the lexical unit.
About the Author
V. Kukanova
Kalmyk Scientific Center of the RAS (Elista)
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Ph. D. in Philology (Candidate of Philological Sciences), Director
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Review
For citations:
Kukanova V. An experiment on reconstruction of the meanings of the lexical items applied in the jangar epic. Mongolian Studies. 2016;8(1):184-198. (In Russ.)
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