Dictionary of Irish Verbs soon to be published on Pota Focal:
After evaluation by an independent panel and confirmation of the decision by COGG’s Board, the project Foclóir Briathra Gaeilge was awarded funding by COGG. The funding will be used to add a new section to the websitewww.potafocal.com: Foclóir Briathra Gaeilge, a new dictionary of Irish verbs.
The dictionary will be based on academic research which has been conducted since 2004 by Dr Arndt Wigger and his team at the universities of Bonn and Wuppertal in Germany, financed by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The researchers have analysed Irish verbs in a large corpus of texts collected from native Irish speakers and from literary works, and have created a valency dictionary: a database which documents in detail the meanings and usage patterns of Irish verbs: which nouns and prepositions are used along with them, what their semantic roles are, and other useful information.
This database will now be published online as a special section on the Pota Focal website, one of the most popular Irish language reference websites on the Internet. The content will be presented in a way that is easy to understand and useful to fluent speakers and learners alike. There will be explanatory notes and English translations to explain the meanings and usage patterns of Irish verbs and there will be many example sentences. This new resource will highlight the variety of functions that Irish verbs have in natural speech and will provide guidance to learners of the language.
Valency dictionaries are usually intended for specialists in linguistics, it will be presented to the general public this time. Foclóir Briathra Gaeilge will be available on Pota Focal by summer 2016 and will be freely accessible to all. As part of the project the dictionary will also be released for download under an open-source licence to ensure that other language researchers are able to benefit from it.