This article calls the attention to an equivalence problem in bilingual dictionaries. I present the evidence that the equivalence between aspect verbs is systematically incomplete in bilingual dictionaries. Aspectual mismatches emerge between languages that derive sentential aspect by different means. Two Finno-Ugric languages are compared, Hungarian and Estonian. Mismatches emerge despite the typological relatedness and the identical conceptual coverage for the perfective aspectual category. However, Hungarian relies on the lexical means of encodmg aspect, whereas Estonian uses also grammatical means. Many problems of lexical aspectual mismatches can be solved by editing the dictionaries on the basis of uniformly designed and comparable monolingual knowledge bases, where the lexically and non-lexically determined aspect is distinguished. Recording the lexical aspect of each verb in a database according to a uniform system enables the database tools to notify the lexicographer when an aspectually incomplete translation is created. The equivalence problems that appear in dictionaries of the two typologically related languages discussed here may bepresent in bilingual dictionaries containing typologically less related languages. Aspect is a matter of bilingual lexicography if expressing aspect is determined verbal lexically in at least one of the languages.
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@InProceedings{ELX04-111, author = {Anne Tamm}, title = {Aspectual mismatches in bilingual dictionaries }, pages = {967-972}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX International Congress}, year = {2004}, month = {july}, date = {6-10}, address = {Lorient, France}, editor = {Geoffrey Williams and Sandra Vessier}, publisher = {UniversiteĢ de Bretagne-Sud, FaculteĢ des lettres et des sciences humaines}, isbn = {29-52245-70-3}, }
