Shallow hierarchies

The following thesauri are built on one or two levels.

2.3.1.2.1 Laffal's Concept Dictionary of English

Julius Laffal first published his Concept Dictionary of English in 1973 for the purposes of automatic content analysis. He was a psychologist by background, and he had studied word association behaviour and methods for isolating the natural cognitive sets to which words seem to belong (Huntsman, 1975, p. 46). Laffal originally created his system for analyzing the content of psychiatric materials, but he also applied it, for instance, to the analysis of literature (e.g. Laffal, 1995) as well as to free speech and conversations (e.g. Laffal, 1967).

In the preface to his dictionary, Laffal (1973, p. x) mentions that the dictionary follows the tradition demonstrated by Roget and Dornseiff. However, Laffal’s approach differs from the other thesauri discussed here in that his dictionary could be described as a thesaurus in reverse. While a thesaurus traditionally starts from categories of different types under which words are grouped, Laffal's concept dictionary lists the words first and then after each word includes one to five categories13 which, in his view, are related to the word in question (Laffal, 1995, p. 339). After the alphabetical listing, however, the dictionary also contains a listing of all words by category.

Laffal’s categories are not arranged in a hierarchy but on one level only. In the first edition in 1973, he used 114 categories (Laffal, 1970, p. 175), while in the 1990 edition the number had been increased to 168 (Laffal, 1995, p. 339). The categories are identified by two- to four- character mnemonic names and are presented in alphabetical order. The following list

displays the first 20 categories, along with two prototypical example words of each category (Laffal, 1995, p. 350):

AFAR Distant, Strange AGEN Repeat, Again AGGR Aggression, Anger AGRE Concur, Agree AID Help, Support ANAL Anality, Excrement ANGL Angle, Bend ANML Animal, Dog ARM Arm, Elbow ART Art, Sculpture ASTR Astronomy, Sky BACK Rear, Behind BAD Evil, Bad

BGIN Start, Commence BIND Constrain, Tie BIRD Bird, Eagle BLOK Prevent, Stop BLUR Vague, Dubious

BODY Body, Torso BONE Bone, Tooth

Note that the system is not entirely theory-neutral. For instance, the category "ANAL" is influenced by psychoanalysis, referring to the anal stage which is, according to Sigmund Freud, the second stage in the human psychosexual development.

2.3.1.2.2 Dornseiff's Wortschatz nach Sachgruppen

Der deutsche Wortschatz nach Sachgruppen, created by Franz Dornseiff and first published in 1933, is another noteworthy thesaurus of German. Dornseiff as well had aspirations related to universality, and in the preface to the first edition he wrote that the dictionary had linguistic goals which could also be useful for languages other than German (Dornseiff, 1970, p. 5). In fact, he had originally proposed a conceptually organized

dictionary for Old Greek, but eventually this was realized for German (Hüllen, 1990, p. 156). The hierarchy in Dornseiff’s classification consists of two levels. The top level is formed by 20 categories which all expand further into 14–121 subcategories. The top level category with the largest number of subcategories is "Society and Community", whereas the top level category with the smallest number of subcategories is "Literature. Science". All in all, there are 910 subcategories. The following lists the categories on the top level:

1. Inorganic World, Matter

2. Plants, Animals, Man (Physically) 3. Space, Location, Form

5. Nature, Relationship, Event 6. Time

7. Visibility, Light, Colours, Sound, Temperature, Weight General Situation of the Whole, Odor, Taste

8. Change of Location 9. Wanting and Acting 10.Feelings of the Senses

11.Feeling. Emotional State. Personality Traits 12.Thinking

13.Signs, Communication, Languages 14.Literature, Science 15.Art 16.Social Relationships 17.Equipment, Technology 18.Economy 19.Justice, Ethics

20.Religion, The Supernatural.

Dornseiff's system was later adopted by Dietmar Najock for creating a Latin vocabulary of The Eclogues by Vergil, arranged according to conceptual categories (Najock, 2004). Najock had first considered the use of the system developed by Hallig and von Wartburg, but he had decided to use Dornseiff's system instead, because it offered a finer analysis (Kytzler, 2005).

2.3.1.2.3 Louw and Nida’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains

Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida published their Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains in 1988. As is evident from the title, this thesaurus differs from the other thesauri dealt with here in that it is bilingual. Nida was a renowned linguist and semanticist by background and published widely on various topics, such as componential analysis (e.g. Nida, 1975), translation (e.g. Nida, 1969), and morphology (e.g. Nida, 1949), whereas Louw’s main interest lay in the study of New Testament Greek (e.g. Louw, 1973, 1982). The authors targeted the work primarily at translators of the New Testament into various languages, but they anticipated that it might also be of interest to biblical scholars, pastors, and theological students, as well as to linguists and lexicographers (Louw & Nida, 1988, p. iv).

The Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament contains the entire vocabulary of the third edition of The Greek New Testament (Aland, Black, Martini, Metzger, & Wikgren 1975). The lexicon is arranged in a hierarchy which consists of 93 top level categories. Lexical items related to objects and entities are grouped in categories 1–12, lexical items related to events are grouped in categories 13–57, and lexical items related to abstracts and relationals are grouped in categories 58–91. (Louw & Nida, 1988, p. vi) The following lists show the first eight categories of each group (for the complete hierarchy, see University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language, n.d.-c):

1. Geographical Objects and Features 2. Natural Substances

4. Animals

5. Foods and Condiments 6. Artefacts

7. Constructions

8. Body, Body Parts, and Body Products

13. Be, Become, Exist, Happen 14. Physical Events and States 15. Linear Movement

16. Non-Linear Movement

17. Stances and Events Related to Stances 18. Attachment

19. Physical Impact

20. Violence, Harm, Destroy, Kill

58. Nature, Class, Example 59. Quantity

60. Number 61. Sequence

62. Arrange, Organise

63. Whole, Unite, Part, Divide 64. Comparison

Category number 92, "Discourse Referentials", consists of pronominal and deictic expressions. The final category "Names of Persons and Places", number 93, is somewhat different from categories in the other semantic ontologies mentioned here, in that it contains proper names. (Louw & Nida, 1988, p. vi) All in all, 22 top level categories contain only one level, whereas 70 top level categories expand into a second level. Only the top level category "Time" expands into three levels, so for this reason I have included this category system among shallow hierarchies rather than among deep hierarchies. The total size of the category set is 587.